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To: Faculty and Administration PMYR committees
From: John Kingston
Re: Visit from Wendy Roworth
Date: 10 November 1998
I. Wendy Roworth held two meetings with us, one with the
faculty subcommittee for policy and liaison and the
administration committee and the other a public meeting
attended by faculty. The discussion at both meetings is
summarized here.
II. Present at the faculty-administration meeting were: Boyer,
Cunningham, Fletcher, Gordon, Hallock, Herrington, Jahoda,
Kingston, Laurie, Malkin, Pearson, Spencer, Washington,
Woodcock.
III. Roworth is Professor of Art History and Women's Studies at
the University of Rhode Island. She is also one of the
authors of the AAUP's recent report on post-tenure review.
IV. The committee meeting.
A. The history and content of the AAUP report.
1. In 1983, the AAUP put out a report which stated
that post-tenure review would provide scant
benefit, incur unacceptable costs, and threaten
academic freedom. The report also stated that
post-tenure review should never to grounds for
dismissal or other sanctions against faculty
members.
2. The current report arose from a recognition that
this stance was too strong and needed to be
updated to respond to current events and climate.
It was also stimulated by:
a. Recent attacks on tenure (the AAUP has
compiled a large number of documents that can
be used to defend tenure itself),
b. Evidence that business models were being
inappropriately applied to universities and
colleges,
c. Alarm at AAHE reports and activities,
d. Lack of understanding of tenure:
(1) Of the benefits it provides to the
universities and the public,
(2) By faculty, some of whom think tenure is
job security or an absolute protection
from dismissal.
e. Erosion of tenure through the replacement of
tenure-track lines by temporary and part-time
appointments,
f. Legislative mandates aimed at getting rid of
deadwood or coping with the elimination of
mandatory retirement.
3. Preparing the report began by considering two
questions:
a. What are the possible benefits in post-tenure
review? The principal answer may be that
post-tenure review is a means of preserving
tenure.
b. What are the possible dangers? The dangers
appear to be greatest at campuses without
collective bargaining agreements.
4. Issues.
a. Accountability. Who's in charge of the
process? Demands come from administrations,
boards, or legislatures, who are frustrated
with faculty's apparent unwillingness to
change.
b. Retirement is no longer mandatory at a
particular age. This is apparently not a
problem, except perhaps at some small,
private, elite institutions.
c. Is it worth the effort PTR requires just to
find the small number of deadwood? Isn't
dealing with these people already the
responsibility of administrators and their
peers, and don't the means exist already for
doing so?
d. Some faculty are eager to use PTR as a means
of getting rid of a hated colleague.
e. Isn't it the case that no one has ever been
forced to give up a tenured position? How
would PTR change that?
f. The words "summative" and "formative" may not
have the black-white meanings they first
appear to have.
(1) "Summative" appears to refer to
retrospective reviews, which may lead to
discipline or sanctions, while
"formative" appears to refer to
prospective reviews that may lead to
faculty development.
(2) However, if a faculty member sets goals
for development in the form of a plan
and, despite conscientious efforts,
fails to meet them, then that failure
could be used as grounds for negative
evaluation.
B. The relevance of being from URI.
1. URI has had post-tenure review for 26 years, since
their first collective bargaining contract.
2. Faculty are reviewed annually before tenure,
biennially as associate professors, and
quadrennially as full professors.
3. The review consists of a cumulative written
evaluation of the faculty member's activity by
peers, chair, and dean. The review considers the
relationship of the faculty member's activity to
the department's, college's, and university's
goals. The faculty member has the right to
respond.
4. The criterion of a successful review is
"conscientious discharge of duties," not the
criteria for promotion.
5. Promotion and merit reviews are separate.
6. Questions (and some answers):
a. What kind of meaningful feedback does one
get? Apparently very little.
b. What are the benefits?
(1) Faculty find it useful to review what
they've done over the past four years.
(2) Peers get a good sense of what their
colleagues have been doing, and they
develop a sense of mutual
responsibility.
(3) The cumulative nature of the reviews
provides a history that can be used
effectively to defend a faculty member,
as well as to establish that there is a
genuine deficiency.
c. Are there any consequences? Only feedback
from the chair and dean. Problems are dealt
with informally. No plans nor mandates for
change.
d. Are there any resources for faculty
development tied to the review? Apparently
not.
e. Have any cases gone very far toward
establishing that a faculty member has failed
to perform assigned duties or is incompetent?
No.
f. In a nutshell, there are neither carrots nor
sticks in the URI review.
C. General discussion (this is just a list of the issues
raised).
1. There's a mismatch in the AAUP statement between
the quality of the argument about why one doesn't
need PTR and that spelling out why faculties
nonetheless have to consider it.
2. Do institutions generally have a hard or an easy
time meshing PTR with existing methods of
evaluation? Is PTR a radical or an incremental
change to existing methods? Does PTR make it
easier for administrators to override performance
criteria set by departments or faculty?
3. Goal setting or plans may only be appropriate when
remediation is needed. Otherwise, they may chill
academic freedom by enforcing particular methods
of teaching, lines of research, or avenues of
outreach. Furthermore, failing to come through on
a plan can be used against the faculty member,
even when he or she is not responsible for the
failure.
4. How much of the resources set aside for PTR is
used for remediation? Shouldn't resources instead
be devoted to productive purposes, e.g. rewarding
productive faculty, investments that benefit the
entire community, e.g. the library, etc.?
Although there are often other resources for
faculty development, those set aside for
remediation are ordinarily paltry.
5. [I break here from my practice of not identifying
a source, because it's important to know which
"side" the following came from.] What can be
achieved with PTR? A dean's answer:
a. Distinguish the disaffected from the dead and
re-engage the former.
b. The way to do so is to redefine their
responsibilities so that they may be
successful enough in carrying them out to be
eligible for merit again.
c. Deficiencies identified in terms of "failure
to perform assigned duties" language.
Specific suggestions should be made by chair
and dean about how to remedy a deficiency.
d. Shift burden to the individual to show they
meet performance criteria and off chair's
shoulders.
e. For faculty who are still performing at the
level they were when promoted (probably a
substantial majority), a perfunctory review
is enough.
f. Question: Don't existing mechanisms of
evaluation provide a means of doing all this?
V. The public meeting (there's some redundancy with the notes
above).
A. What features should define PTR?
1. Preserve academic freedom, by limiting PTR to
evaluating individuals' performance.
2. Neither a subterfuge for program review nor a
fishing expedition.
3. Not retenuring.
4. Burden of proof stays with the institution. And
the starting assumption should be that a faculty
member does meet his or her responsibilities.
5. Written performance criteria.
6. Basic criterion is "conscientious discharge of
duties," not standards for promotion.
7. PTR needs to define what counts as "effectiveness"
or "productivity," i.e. it needs to define its
goals. It must specify with equal explicitness
what remediation amounts to. And it must provide
the resources needed to achieve effectiveness,
productivity, or remediation.
8. By describing someone as "deficient" in a
particular area, does PTR make it easier to take
the next step and declare them "incompetent" or
guilty of misconduct? PTR must draw a bright line
between deficient and incompetent or guilty of
misconduct.
9. Deficiency should be distinguished with equal care
from a faculty member's failure to perform some
duty because the institution has failed to provide
the necessary resources.
10. Finally, deficiency should be distinguished from
pursuing research or hewing to performance
criteria different from one's colleagues or at
odds with the department's goals. Need to balance
an emphasis on collegiality with one on individual
freedom.
B. Changes in responsibilities as a result of PTR:
1. Institution needs to devote resources to helping
faculty change their professional direction.
2. Differentiated responsibilities could create a
two-tiered faculty, ultimately a tenured, research
faculty and a non-tenure-track teaching faculty.
3. Why should taking on more teaching be seen as a
punishment or admission of failure? Don't we want
to reward excellent teaching?
4. If the number of tenured faculty continues to
drop, why bother with an expensive review of the
few that are left?
C. Appropriateness.
1. Is PTR an inappropriate extension of a corporate
or business model to an institution it's
inappropriate for? Do universities work in a way
that their employees' activity can be assessed in
this way? Is PTR part of the same effort to
criticize public employees that has led to teacher
testing?
2. May the elaborate PTR procedures implemented in
some places soon collapse under their own weight?
(Even at URI, deans complain of not having enough
time to go over the fairly minimal reviews done
there.)
3. Should PTR policies therefore be built with sunset
clauses, or with explicit criteria and a time
table for deciding whether they're working?
Should we expect to renegotiate PTR in each
contract and even negotiate its elimination?
D. Questions.
1. How can PTR be prevented from becoming a means of
getting rid of faculty to save or reallocate
resources?
2. How can PTR be prevented from binding individual
evaluations too tightly to program planning?
3. What role will evaluations of teaching play in
PTR?
E. What can we accomplish?
1. Catalog all the ways we're already reviewed.
2. Try only to do the minimum now, because:
a. There's too little time to work out a more
elaborate policy, and
b. We need to keep control over the criteria for
evaluation.
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