The University of Tennessee’s Board of Trustees has triggered suspicion among faculty members by calling for tenure policies to be reconsidered as part of a cost-cutting plan.
The system’s administration on Monday retracted from its summary of the plan language that had especially aroused faculty opposition—a reference to the potential “enacting of a de-tenure process.”
The “de-tenure” reference had helped fan faculty outrage over the plan on Twitter and elsewhere. In a blog post about the plan, Chad Black, an associate professor of early Latin American history at the Knoxville campus, asked: “What in the world is a ‘de-tenure process,’ and what place does tenure, a bulwark of academic freedom and security for the risks of academic training and employment, have in a conversation on cutting costs and increasing revenues?”
Joseph A. DiPietro, the system’s president, last week assured his Twitter followers, “I fully believe in the concept of tenure.” A revised version of the university’s news release about the plan said the original one’s reference to de-tenuring had been “inadvertent and incorrect.”
The revised summary still calls, however, for administrators and the system’s Faculty Council—a panel distinct from the campuses’ faculty senates—to conduct a comprehensive review of the university’s tenure and post-tenure-review processes. Moreover, in presenting the cost-cutting plan to the board at its meeting last Thursday, President DiPietro argued that the tenure-process review should “look at a policy around termination based on unsatisfactory performance” because the current policy “is not very effective.”
Such talk is not sitting well with faculty leaders, who argue that the current tenure-review process might already afford faculty members too few protections, or that consideration of changes in tenure policies should be divorced from any discussion of how the system can save money.
In an interview on Monday, Mary McAlpin, president of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said the university’s current post-tenure-review process already “gives too much power to administrators to remove someone’s tenure.”
Ms. McAlpin called any suggestion that current tenure policy is too lax “a shocking statement” because the policy already lets a campus chancellor terminate a tenured faculty member “for adequate cause” even if the faculty committee reviewing the faculty member’s case recommends otherwise.
Ms. McAlpin, a professor of French at the flagship campus, also argued that the system’s plan does not provide the faculty enough of a voice in any revision of tenure. Rather than giving the faculty senates any formal say in tenure-policy revisions, the plan calls for system administrators to consult the Faculty Council, a small, purely advisory body that is less well known to the faculty and automatically includes, along with the leaders of the faculty senates, any faculty member who sits on the Board of Trustees.
In an email she called the process “top-down” and said the Faculty Council’s involvement “seems to be window dressing.”
At last week’s board meeting, President DiPietro described his plan to cut costs and increase revenue as needed to close a projected budget gap of $377-million over 10 years. He argued that the system needs to abandon a business model that relies on tuition increases to make up for flat or declining state appropriations.
“The only way to preclude tuition increases is to fix it ourselves,” he said, adding that his plan “is about maintaining quality and moving ahead” and that the system “will be a different organization in the next four to five years.”
In addition to the proposed review of tenure policies, the plan calls for considering saving costs through steps such as early-retirement programs and curbs on student tuition waivers and discounts. Among the measures it proposes considering to increase revenue are increased enrollments of out-of-state students and new fees for public-outreach efforts. It calls for campuses to develop plans to realign and consolidate programs.
In an email to The Chronicle, Gina Stafford, a system spokeswoman, said that “we are currently at a very preliminary stage in those efforts” and that President DiPietro “will be reaching out to faculty leaders and administrators with every UT campus and institute to determine how to proceed with this study.”
Ms. Stafford said that the earlier news release’s reference to enacting “a de-tenure process” had been inserted in error and that President DiPietro had never used that term.
Mr. Black, the Latin American history professor at the Knoxville campus, called the university’s retraction of the term “de-tenure” a “small victory” in a follow-up post on Monday evening. But he said it “strains credulity” that a university system’s news release “would include such a toxic and alarming term as ‘de-tenure’ by mistake.” He posited that the people who signed off on the release were transcribing the intent of the university’s proposal.
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
