ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, December 23, 1996 TAG: 9612240057
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
TO ITS staunchest advocates, tenure for college professors stands as a bulwark against assaults on academic freedom and the predations of mendacious administrators. To its severest critics, tenure is an obsolete institution that harbors incompetent and indolent faculty, and blocks sagacious managers from undertaking a thorough restructuring that higher education desperately needs and the professoriate stoutly resists.
To us, the truth lies somewhere in between.
McCarthyism may be dead, but threats to academic freedom aren't. The danger these days may come less from self-styled superpatriots of the McCarthy mold than from arbiters of political correctness within the academy, but it is a danger nonetheless. For dissenting profs, tenure provides a measure of protection not only from the p.c. police but also from the occasional administrator of the Genghis Khan personnel-management persuasion.
But the system is not perfect. It can protect nonproductive faculty members from appropriate accountability. Their numbers may not be great, but they are enough to be noticeable.
Fortunately, Virginia's balanced approach to tenure reform seems to address the genuine problems without sacrificing the benefits. That approach, mandated by the General Assembly and guided by the State Council of Higher Education, requires colleges and universities to develop post-tenure review processes for evaluating senior faculty. Weak performers are given a certain amount of time to come up to standard; if they don't, they can be dismissed, tenured or no. Details vary from campus to campus.
At Old Dominion University in Norfolk, where the system has been in place the longest (three years), nobody has been fired for failing post-tenure review. But Provost Jo Ann Gora says it has led six to 12 professors to leave ODU or retire.
We wouldn't expect many to get the axe in any case. The procedure for winning tenure is itself arduous, and screens out many whose teaching or research do not come up to standard. But post-review tenure, if well-designed, can shore up (or get rid of) the weakest, help good professors get better - and do so without jettisoning a system that upholds principles of free inquiry that are vital to teaching and learning.
LENGTH: Short : 45 linesby CNB