Frustrated Faculty Struggle to Defend Tenure Before It’s Too Late

The stakes were high, and Monica Black knew it.

The way she saw it, a threat to tenure was looming at the University of Tennessee’s flagship campus here. So Black, an associate professor of history, left behind the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains and set out on a road trip to take a stand.

The six-hour trek to Memphis, where the system’s board was holding its spring meeting, gave Black time to craft her message. She was nervous but felt galvanized by the sense of urgency she shared with her colleagues back on campus. Black would be the sole faculty voice that a key group of trustees would hear the next day before the full board voted on a controversial post-tenure review policy.

The policy, its advocates say, is meant to make it easier to reward professors who meet high performance standards and to create plans for improvement for those who don’t. It’s not an attack on tenure, they say, but instead a move to improve it — and by doing so, preserve it.

But Black and other professors view the policy differently. They see it as a stealth move to chip away at tenure, part of a steady campaign taking place throughout higher education that, if it continues, might just eventually kill tenure.

In her moment before the trustees, Black cast tenure as an essential protection, a tenet of democracy, the foundation of academic freedom. It’s what allows professors to teach, write, or do research that challenges the status quo without fearing reprisal.

Policies like the one they were considering, she told the trustees, would make professors like her feel less protected.

By the end of her appeal, Black felt resigned. It seemed clear to her that the tide had already turned, here and across the country. “I don’t think my philosophical argument carried a lot of water that day,” she says now.

Philosophical or otherwise, the argument that tenure is the essential protection faculty members need to do their jobs is one that an increasing number of professors have felt compelled to make — and almost always to less-than-receptive audiences. In an era where skepticism about higher education runs high and anti-intellectualism thrives in the political discourse, the concept of tenure fuels perceptions that professors are a protected class isolated from the rigors of the real world.

Critics of tenure assert that it’s an antiquated protection, one that can mask, even enable, flagging faculty productivity and that, by default, hinders institutional advancement. Tight budgets make matters worse. Tenure limits flexibility in personnel expenses by locking in the full-time positions that institutions have increasingly cast off to instead hire adjunct faculty who are paid far less than their tenured counterparts.

“There’s a pretty entrenched dislike for academics even in the best of times,” Black says, “and it seems even worse now.”

Professors in Tennessee have seen that contempt play out close to home. Knoxville faculty still remember when, three years ago, the system president presented a cost-cutting plan that called for enacting a “de-tenure process.” Joseph A. DiPietro quickly walked back the phrasing, but the damage was done. It was a move that, in hindsight, served as a harbinger of the climate to come. A year later, in 2016, lawmakers cut the funding for the Office of Diversity and Inclusion on the Knoxville campus.

Since then, battles have continued, over an effort to outsource the facilities operations of the system’s campuses, a proposal to sharply downsize the Board of Trustees and strip it of faculty and student representation, and bills that would have made humanities courses optional for students or required professors to post their syllabi and required readings online.

“There’s just greater micromanaging by the board and legislators,” said Bruce MacLennan, an associate professor of computer science who has been at Knoxville for 31 years. “This is a pattern we’ve seen over many years.”

And it’s not just in Tennessee. In recent years, lawmakers or college governing boards have altered professors’ expectations of what tenure means at public institutions in places like Wisconsin, Arkansas, and Kentucky. And top administrators at many colleges have supported tougher post-tenure review polices, like the one approved in late March in Tennessee, that faculty worry will begin to weaken tenure’s protections. Tenure is already something that most of the professoriate can’t count on; only about 30 percent of professors are employed with tenure or are on track to earn it.

The Tennessee policy, unforeseen by faculty, baffled professors from the outset — largely because the system’s current post-tenure review policy, strengthened after two years of discussion and triggered by poor annual evaluations, was only four months old. It had yet to be added to the faculty handbook. The proposal also angered them because it included a single sentence that initially gave the board the power to direct the administration to conduct a review of a tenured professor at any time. And it was buried in a document nearly 50 pages long.

“For a change of this significance, there should have been some warning,” MacLennan said.

The proposed policy sparked a turbulent chain of events here, including a hastily called town-hall meeting for faculty to plot out a plan to fight back, a rally that drew about 100 people, and a faculty survey that laid bare the opposition — 77 percent of the faculty who responded said they were against it.

Some faculty members, like Susan Riechert, wrote sharply worded letters to the editor that ran in the local newspaper. In a shifting higher-education landscape that has threatened to extinguish many prominent markers of academic life, standing up for tenure and academic freedom was important, Riechert said.

When Riechert came to Knoxville as an assistant professor in 1973, she studied spiders in the desert to determine how animals can successfully adapt to the environment. She then moved on to evolutionary game theory, another area of study that opened her up to questioning. Riechert once did a radio interview about her work and was instructed beforehand “not to say the ‘e’ word,” she said. She continues to do research about evolution and also climate change.

“People outside of the university environment wouldn’t understand the value of what I’m working on,” Riechert said. “We have to be protected. We can’t have industry and society telling us what to work on and what is valuable and what isn’t.”

As long as tenure is firmly in place, Riechert doesn’t have to worry about such outside influences, or even internal ones.

“I’m concerned — not for myself, because I’m very senior — but for the future of the university and our integrity,” said Riechert, who plans to retire soon. “I worry about our stature in the world. What’s happening here isn’t going to help.”

Yet administrators believe it will. They see the price of tenure as setting high performance standards and then enforcing them regularly. In the Tennessee system, post-tenure review will now occur every six years. The details of how the policy will work will be left to individual campuses to shape, subject to the approval of the board and system president. Most public institutions have post-tenure review, although how frequently faculty undergo it and how it works varies.

The rationale for the Tennessee policy is not, the president said specifically, about limiting academic freedom. Instead, he said, it was to “rejuvenate underperforming faculty” and “reward faculty who are hitting the ball out of the park.” Like other periodic post-tenure review policies, he said, it would set the stage for the removal of professors who are performing unsatisfactorily.

“There is some frustration among some faculty members who feel like they have colleagues who are getting by in the process, even with post-tenure review,” DiPietro said. “It provides me with another tool to make sure we’re setting the bar at the right level.”

Tenure also has a PR problem. It’s easy for lawmakers to cast aspersions on it, especially when they hear about people like the professor from California State University at Fresno who criticized Barbara Bush, the former first lady, shortly after her death — and invoked her status as a tenured professor as a shield that would protect her from repercussions by her employer.

“You don’t flaunt tenure publicly like that. That’s not what it’s about,” said Michael Harris, an associate professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University. “There’s plenty of examples where these protections are real, but that doesn’t mean you have a blank check.”

Many lawmakers and board members see tenure as a “job for life” guarantee and openly disparage its protections. At a meeting of the Tennessee Senate’s education committee, one legislator told new nominees for the board that faculty shouldn’t be an automatic roadblock to cutting programs to make way for new ones — a task he said the nominees should be willing to take on.

“As a legislator, I would expect y’all to look at the programs that the universities offer and see if they’re really needed and really attended, and not just because somebody has tenure and doing it, and have the guts to say, ‘We’re going to cut that program out. We’re going to reallocate those resources somewhere else,’” said Sen. Todd Gardenhire, a Republican and second vice chairman of the committee, at an April meeting.

What tenure often boils down to for lawmakers, boards, and top administrators is an unwanted constraint. Tenure makes it difficult for those officials to cut programs they think are underperforming or whose budgets they want to reallocate elsewhere. At the same time, tenure helps prevent the termination of programs or people for political or personal reasons. For faculty, that constraint is a welcome one.

Pointing out the nuances beyond that, though, is difficult. When explaining it to students, Harris likens tenure for professors to the lifelong protection that federal judges have to ensure that they can make decisions rooted in law and not be influenced by outside factors. Yet tenure doesn’t equal a job for life; faculty members can be fired for cause, and they know it. “I don’t think the average person outside of higher ed gets it,” Harris says.

At Knoxville, faculty members are convinced of that. And trustees and lawmakers, they say, are in that number.

“We’ll be swimming upstream until we can explain to the public what tenure is about and how it makes education better,” said Misty Anderson, a professor of English and the incoming chair of the Faculty Senate. “It’s not because it’s a job for life.”

Vicky B. Gregg, chair of the governing board’s academic-affairs and student-success committee, acknowledged that trustees from business backgrounds can find tenure a difficult concept to understand, as she once did.

“One of the things that I learned pretty quickly after being exposed is that the academic world is different than the business world,” said Gregg, a former chief executive of BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee.

She also learned that talks about tenure are apt to get sticky because faculty know that tenure is often misunderstood. “My sense is as soon as we talk about tenure it’s immediately a defensive posture on the part of some faculty,” Gregg said. She voted in favor of the policy.

Gregg said that during the six years she has served on the board there has been an “ongoing dialogue” about how faculty are reviewed. Periodic post-tenure review is rooted in a desire to get a clearer picture of how well faculty do their jobs and to “reward the people who are truly high-performing,” she said.

Raja J. Jubran, vice chairman of the board, has earned a reputation with some faculty for being a number-crunching trustee who tries to mesh common practices from his business background with the operations of academe. Jubran, chief executive of a general contracting and engineering company, “has a figure in his mind — that’s quite clear I think — of how many people should be exiting the institution each year,” said Black, who served as the 2017-18 president of Knoxville’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “To him, it’s not possible that an institution the size of the University of Tennessee can have this many people performing at a high level.”

Jubran confirmed his disbelief. “I don’t buy that,” he said. “There are many institutions that are great and doing a great job, but it doesn’t mean 100 percent of their employees are ‘above expectations.’”

His skepticism stems from annual evaluations at Tennessee where, he says, “very few, if any” professors receive poor reviews. The new post-tenure review policy will help the university confirm whether or not “every faculty member that we have is performing at a much higher rate than expected,” Jubran said, and make it easier to increase the pay of the professors whose review reflects that they are.

Jubran said that in approving the policy, the board sought to balance academic freedom with its fiduciary responsibility to students, parents, and taxpayers. “There are many people who think you should do away with tenure, and we did not want to do that,” he said.

Faculty — who Jubran called the system’s “most valuable asset” — need to show professional growth and productivity throughout their careers because earning tenure “is not a fait accompli,” he said. “I just want to make sure that our post-tenure review ensures sustained professional accountability.”

No matter how frequently the board says it wants to protect academic freedom, Jubran said, some faculty will always be suspicious. “I think the majority of the faculty believes us.”

Black and many of her colleagues, however, don’t readily speak Jubran’s language. That was evident when Black, while speaking before the trustee committee, realized that her best chance of connecting with him may have been to produce data that proves the university should support its faculty and their privilege of tenure or risk harming its reputation.

“That’s not the kind of thing that, in my mind, is data-driven,” Black said.

In an era of increased accountability for faculty members at Tennessee, they are divided about how to respond to the new policy. Even before its passage, DiPietro tapped a faculty trustee to make a case for supporting it. In an open letter to university system faculty members, Terrance G. Cooper, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the UT Health Science Center, acknowledged a prominent trend in academe.

“We live in a ‘show me’ environment of increasing accountability for everyone — it is an inescapable reality,” Cooper wrote. “That reality and the consequences of ignoring it generated the proposed review policy.”

He then made a pitch for pragmatism, saying that the best-case scenario at this point is faculty and administrators working together to put the policy into effect.

“I think a better way to look at the post-tenure reviews is to call them achievement and accountability reports,” Cooper said in an interview. “The vast majority of faculty have a lot to be proud of. This is an opportunity, in my view, to share those accomplishments.”

But moving forward won’t be easy. DiPietro’s decision last month to fire Knoxville’s chancellor, Beverly Davenport, in a scathing fashion is a factor that has particularly angered faculty. The Faculty Senate passed a resolution to censure DiPietro in response.

Ten days after the board’s late-March vote to approve the tenure policy, the Faculty Senate held its regularly scheduled monthly meeting in the same hall where professors had gathered in disbelief and anger weeks earlier.

Davenport told faculty at that meeting that she didn’t know what to say about the vote’s outcome. Before the trustees approved the policy, she had not spoken publicly against it or its effects on tenure at the university, either real or perceived. In an interview a few weeks after the meeting, Davenport spoke more freely.

“Any kind of evaluation, any kind of review, people on campus want to know what is the relationship between that evaluation and tenure,” Davenport said.

Faculty are rated by their peers when they send out papers for peer review, and students pass judgment on their teaching skills, she said. At Knoxville, department heads and deans weigh in at least annually on professors’ work.

“Faculty understandably feel as if they’re constantly being evaluated,” Davenport said. “From a faculty point of view, it’s like, what do you mean we’re not evaluated? It’s hard to explain to people who don’t do this work.”

Davenport, at the time, was optimistic about the policy’s rollout at Knoxville, mainly because chancellors are slated to be involved in tweaking it to fit their campuses. The board has set a November deadline.

Conrad Plaut, a professor of mathematics, says the best thing to do is mitigate the damage. Faculty members, who already sit on tenure and promotion committees and gather documents for annual reviews, say that periodic post-tenure review will be an unnecessary addition to their workload — whether they are being evaluated or are evaluating others. “We need to shape it in a way that minimizes the amount of effort for us,” Plaut said.

At the faculty senate meeting, Jon Shefner, professor of sociology and chair of the department, pushed his colleagues to think about a back-up plan if efforts to craft the details of the policy collaboratively don’t work out.

“Part of this has to continue to be recognized as an attack on faculty,” Shefner said at the meeting. “I think we have to keep our eyes open on how we stick a stick in the spokes.”

At the rally held a few days before the vote, this kind of fighting spirit was evident. At the rally’s outset, a woman led the group in a chant: Listen up! Stop the attack! Higher ed is fighting back!

Indeed, higher ed is fighting back. But for now, many professors worry that the battles are growing harder and that their prospects for victory are increasingly slipping away.

Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.