Wayne State’s Move to Strip 5 Professors of Tenure Sparks Unease About a Broader Threat

As Wayne State University takes the highly unusual step of trying to strip tenure from five medical-school professors who its president says are “abusing the tenure system,” some faculty members on the campus say they’re concerned that more tenure threats may not be far behind.

M. Roy Wilson, who has been the university’s president since 2013, drew attention on Wednesday after a Detroit News article quoted him as saying that the five professors in question are “not doing anything” and that “the bar is not that high.” Hearings for one of them took place on Wednesday and Thursday.

Beyond those five, a handful of other professors have been flagged for a lack of productivity and the possible revocation of their tenure, Dr. Wilson told The Chronicle.

Many of the faculty members on that list are in the medical school. But Charles J. Parrish, a professor of political science and president of Wayne State’s faculty union, said he knows of at least two who are not — one in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and one in the College of Education.

Dr. Wilson, who has held faculty and administrative roles at several universities and was formerly chancellor of the University of Colorado at Denver, said he isn’t “somebody who came here from outside of academia and did not understand tenure.”

The protection is important, he said, “but I do think that one can abuse tenure and take it for granted.”

Most professors on the campus are hard-working and productive, Dr. Wilson said. But particularly in the medical school, he said, the small number who aren’t doing their jobs well haven’t faced any consequences. “This has been tolerated for so long that it’s become part of the culture among a segment of the faculty,” he said. The president’s academic background is in medical research, and much of his work has focused on glaucoma and blindness in West Africa and the Caribbean.

Medical-school professors go through the same tenure process as other faculty members, though the standards they must meet vary. Many of them are on the research educator or research tracks, where activities such as publishing regularly and bringing in grants are essential.

The five professors in question are in research-centric roles, officials said, and most had no publications in the past five years.

Wayne State has tried to strip professors of tenure just twice in the past, and neither attempt was successful.

Dr. Wilson believes his actions will, in fact, help stave off further attacks on tenure by politicians and others. “Because tenure is such an unusual thing, people who don’t understand it already have suspicions about it,” he said. “Then when they see stories of blatant abuses, like what I’m talking about, it really puts the whole tenure system under further risk.”

But for some Wayne State professors, Dr. Wilson’s actions have raised alarm. Still fresh on their minds is a furor that took place in 2012, during the last contract negotiations between the faculty union and the administration — which was led by a different president at the time, Allan D. Gilmour. Administrators tried to include language in the contract that faculty leaders asserted would have given officials the ability to fire tenured professors quickly and without faculty input.

The union and the administration eventually hammered out a compromise, including a process focused on faculty members who had fallen behind their colleagues. So there is already a system in place for dealing with unproductive professors, said Mr. Parrish, who testified last week in support of the first faculty member to go through hearings.

“If this is carried through, if it’s that easy to get rid of people,” he said, “Wayne State may become a pariah of a university.”

‘Very Little Oversight’

Some of the problems at Wayne State are specific to the School of Medicine. Faculty members said the school has been plagued by weak leadership and inattentiveness to festering financial issues for years.

When professors were underperforming, “there was very little oversight, as far as I can tell, from many of the chairs and prior deans,” said Louis J. Romano, a professor of biochemistry and president of the Academic Senate.

Before he came to the university, Dr. Wilson said, administrators had already been working to identify unproductive medical-school professors. Officials announced last year that up to three dozen of them could lose their jobs.

Some of them worked out an agreement to try to improve. Others ended up retiring. A handful, including the five going through hearings now, remain in limbo.

Dr. Wilson described those five cases as “egregious examples of total abuse.” He said one of them involved a faculty member who rarely comes to campus, and when he does, he’ll have lunch, talk to a few colleagues, and head home.

An earlier case of abuse involved a medical-school dean who never came back from a sabbatical and took a job at another university while Wayne State continued to pay him full time, Dr. Wilson said.

The potential to abuse tenure extends beyond the medical school, he said, though there are some important differences.

The medical school has a lot of faculty members and few students, he said, while in most other institutional areas, the reverse is true. That gives professors more flexibility in terms of duties; if a faculty member isn’t producing much research, the department chair can have the person teach more. So it’s more difficult for a scholar to get away with doing nothing, he said.

Two years ago, the university announced that the medical school was facing a $29 million deficit. But Dr. Wilson stressed that he isn’t trying to fire the five faculty members because of budget constraints. “In reality,” he said, “it’s all about accountability.”

Mr. Parrish doesn’t buy that. “It has everything to do with budget issues,” he said.

The faculty member who went through last week’s hearings has had an active career in terms of research, Mr. Parrish said, but “the research he’s doing is not what they think of as productive, because it doesn’t look like it’ll lead to grants.”

Mr. Parrish said he’s been in meetings where medical-school professors have been told that they’re expected to obtain 40 percent of their salary in grants. A Wayne State spokesman said that figure isn’t a school standard and that, during the recent review, no professor has been told to meet particular funding expectations.

Dr. Wilson said he mentioned 40 percent while explaining that, at many research institutions, medical-school faculty members bring in enough grants to cover more than half of their salaries. When he became president at Wayne State, he said, the medical school’s faculty members were at an average of 10 percent.

There’s a difference between doing no research and doing a small amount of research, Mr. Romano said. If faculty members in the medical school aren’t doing any, he said, that would make them candidates for losing tenure. He doesn’t know the specifics of the cases, but he said he assumes Dr. Wilson is making a fair judgment.

Still, Jennifer Sheridan Moss, an associate professor of classics, said she believes administrators haven’t given the five professors in question enough of a chance to improve.

Per the faculty contract, the process for dealing with unproductive faculty members starts during annual salary discussions, which serve as a sort of performance review, Ms. Sheridan Moss said. If someone seems to be underperforming, a peer committee is created within the department to review the situation. If the committee decides there are clear deficiencies, several mentors will be assigned to help raise the professor’s performance.

When Ms. Sheridan Moss held a leadership role in the union, there were consistent complaints that departments in the medical school were not properly going through that process, she said — and she’s heard from colleagues that the five professors weren’t given notice that their work was subpar. “If the administration was to prevail in a couple of cases in the medical school, in a process that goes outside of the contract,” she said, “then nobody’s job is safe anymore.”

Matt Lockwood, a spokesman for Wayne State, said the annual salary process — which is initiated by faculty members — is unrelated to dismissal proceedings.

Officials met with more than 30 medical-school faculty members identified as unproductive, Mr. Lockwood said, and many appreciated the opportunity to do better. The five professors who face the loss of tenure, he said, were “highly resistant.”

‘Faculty Expectations’ Form

The outcomes of the medical-school professors’ hearings “are going to be very important in terms of what Wayne State’s going to be like in the future,” Dr. Wilson said. “What we’re doing is making a statement that if you work here, there’s an expectation of a certain level of performance.”

The panel that heard the first professor’s case will make a decision within the next two months, Mr. Parrish said.

To avoid similar situations down the road, Dr. Wilson would like to strengthen Wayne State’s posttenure review system. “There are policies that many universities have that offer constant review mechanisms that are designed to keep posttenure faculty engaged,” he said. “We are finding it difficult to do that,” he added, noting the constraints of the collective-bargaining process.

A few weeks ago, administrators sent around a “faculty expectations” form in response to complaints from some professors that officials weren’t being clear about performance standards. Dr. Wilson said union leaders discouraged faculty members from filling out the form. Mr. Parrish said the use of the forms had not been negotiated with the union.

Given the trend of cutbacks Ms. Sheridan Moss sees on the campus, she’s worried about what the administration’s actions could suggest. In her department, the number of tenured or tenure-track professors has declined substantially in the past decade, she said.

A handful of professors might have abused the tenure system at times, Mr. Parrish said. “But you don’t take a few examples of people who have taken advantage of being tenured and are not doing a job that is up to the level you might like, and then change the whole system.”

That’s not the administration’s goal at all, Dr. Wilson said. “We don’t want to make it so that it’s easy to just get rid of people,” he said.

The university isn’t making unreasonable demands of professors, he added. “We’re talking about a fairly low bar here — that faculty just have to do something of what they’re being paid to do.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.