Lots of People Want to End Tenure. This University Wants to Start It.

At a time when tenure is under attack, one university is rushing to embrace it.

The Florida Institute of Technology, a private research university, plans to put a tenure system in place this fall for the first time in its 60-year history.

Florida Tech’s move demonstrates an abiding reality about tenure: that, despite the critiques, it remains an important competitive factor for colleges seeking to draw top talent. The institution is introducing tenure explicitly to bolster its faculty, and to elevate its standing in national rankings.

Specifically, T. Dwayne McCay, the president, and the Board of Trustees want Florida Tech to vault into the top 100 in U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings. In 2018, it was listed at 151. To accomplish that leap, the university must, among other things, build up its research, McCay says, and that requires hiring, and retaining, professors who can help it do that.

While Florida Tech is proud of the faculty it has, “we couldn’t ignore any longer that if we wanted to be competitive in this research world, we had to offer what high-achieving faculty wanted,” says Monica H. Baloga, senior vice president for academic affairs and provost.

What faculty want is tenure. Since its founding in 1958, Florida Tech has offered its professors renewable contracts of up to five years. While contracts have kept many faculty loyal (Baloga has been at the university since 1996), “we were losing some of our really good faculty to competitive offers” from institutions with tenure, she says.

The lack of tenure also dissuades many job candidates. Florida Tech is hiring for several faculty positions this year, and the hiring committee was considering two prominent candidates for jobs. Those candidates opted not to accept and, Baloga says, “very clearly came back and said their decision came down to the fact that we didn’t offer tenure.”

‘Stuck in That Mode’

Tenure was not a primary concern when Florida Tech was founded in Melbourne, Fla., at the dawn of the space age. Located about 25 miles from Cape Canaveral, a center of the U.S. space program, the institution was initially intended to be “a school for missile men,” Baloga says, offering advanced degrees to scientists and engineers from NASA. Past administrators and boards at the college have tended to be “more business-minded,” she adds. “Tenure wasn’t something that was necessarily recognizable to them.”

The move toward tenure began when the university started to grapple with a problem that many institutions with tenure also face. Like many colleges, Florida Tech had assistant, associate, and full professors, and their contract renewals, like most tenure processes, were evaluated on a mix of teaching, research, and service. Professors who were research powerhouses but less engaged in the classroom, or those more focused on teaching and less on the lab, had limited possibilities for promotion. “Some of our best faculty, in terms of good teachers, were stuck in that mode of being an associate professor forever,” says Marc Baarmand, a professor of physics and space sciences and past president of the Faculty Senate.

When McCay became president in 2016, after coming to the institution as provost in 2003, he asked the Faculty Senate to re-examine the contract system. He hoped that the faculty could redesign it to create more-equitable paths to promotion for professors.

The faculty embraced the challenge, but discussions about the contracts proved complex and raised issues that it seemed might be better answered with a tenure system. So the committee came up with a rudimentary proposal for tenure alongside the revamped contracts. To Baarmand’s surprise, McCay agreed on tenure, and eventually the board got behind it, too.

Offering tenure fit in with administrators’ plans to elevate the institution’s status, and past arguments against it seemed to carry less force than they once had. As at many institutions without tenure, the contracts at Florida Tech end up being routinely renewed for nearly all 300 professors. Only eight full-time faculty members have not had their contracts renewed over the past decade, McCay says. Nevertheless, he adds, renewal time creates “great angst — even among the high performers, which surprises me.”

The contract system served Florida Tech for decades, McCay says, but if it’s more or less equivalent to a tenure system, “why don’t we have a true tenure system?”

‘No Grandfathering’

The details of how tenure will be put in place at Florida Tech are still being worked out by faculty members, and the plan will be subject to final approval by the Board of Trustees in October. But one thing is for sure, says Baloga, the provost: “Tenure has to evolve.”

Post-tenure review, for example, will be part of Florida Tech’s approach from the outset. Like other universities that have adopted those reviews over time, administrators want to make sure there is a way to ensure that faculty remain productive. It was a key condition of the president’s, and the board’s, approval. “That’s been a sore point with regard to many of our discussions” with professors, McCay says. “Faculty are eager to have a tenure system. They’re not so eager to have a post-tenure review system.”

The idea of post-tenure review has been the subject of “major philosophical discussions on campus,” says Darrel L. Sandall, an associate professor of business and a former senate president. But the faculty has worked toward creating a proposed system that is developmental, not punitive. Tenured professors would continue to have annual performance reviews, as they have under contracts. If concerns are raised about some aspect of performance during a review, it may trigger the creation of an improvement plan. If the professor has trouble improving by his or her next annual evaluation, that could bring on a formal post-tenure review. “If you’re not performing well, it should not be a surprise,” Sandall says.

Perhaps the biggest challenge bundled with introducing tenure is how to do so. If approved, incoming hires would go through a tenure process similar to any other university’s, but what about the existing faculty? Committees would examine the work of current professors who want to apply for tenure — full professors first, then associate professors — on the traditional rubric of teaching, research, and service. It could take as long as three years for all eligible faculty members to be assessed. “There will be no grandfathering of anyone,” Baloga says. Faculty members who want to focus on teaching or research could remain on the contract system, with improved opportunities for promotion.

The board was skeptical of tenure when it was first proposed, says Kenneth P. Revay, a board member, but arguments about its potential to improve recruiting, retention, and the university’s standing won them over.

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.