If you’re a mid-career professor about to undergo your first post-tenure review, you’re probably wondering what to expect.
The first thing you need to know is that it’s not nearly as stressful as a tenure review, says Greg Lisby, an associate professor of communications at Georgia State University.
“In some ways it’s a lot like going up for tenure, which is a royal pain,” Mr. Lisby says. “But on the other hand, post-tenure review doesn’t require anywhere near the amount of documentation that going up for tenure does. It’s mainly just a matter of pulling together your annual reports and your CV. Plus the stakes are lower. For tenure, you’re sitting there thinking, ‘Will I have a job?’ For this there’s not that kind of a threat hanging over your head -- at least not at my university,” he says.
At Georgia State, tenured professors must undergo a broad performance evaluation once every five years. That puts the university among the majority of public institutions that have adopted a “periodic” review system, so called because it mandates that all tenured faculty members regularly submit to post-tenure reviews. A minority of institutions use a “triggered” system of post-tenure review, in which only those faculty members who receive one or more negative annual reviews are subject to a more intensive post-tenure evaluation.
Many professors see the periodic system as more developmental and positive than the triggered system because there’s no stigma attached in the former. Since every professor is reviewed, there’s no fear of being singled out. But the fact is, very few professors have received negative evaluations in either type of system.
Still, the vast majority of tenured professors at public universities have to go through some form of post-tenure review. Their assessment of the experience varies widely, from those who view it as helpful to those who deem it a waste of time. Most of those interviewed for this article are at institutions that have periodic reviews.
Ronald Story, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, had his first periodic review last year. “I think this was healthy,” says Mr. Story, who is also president of the faculty union, “because otherwise you go kind of from day to day and week to week. You know you work hard, but you don’t pay much attention, and your long-term goals and projects kind of get put off because there’s always too much to do.” Preparing for post-tenure review, he adds, compelled him to think long and hard about how he wanted to spend the next 10 years of his career. For his next project he plans to do a comparative study of French and American nuclear policy.
It’s a kind of an existential experience, an opportunity to contemplate where you are in your career and where you’re going, says one associate professor of Spanish at a Midwestern university, who asked to remain anonymous. “These reviews are signposts in a way that tell me here’s where I am, here’s where I’m going, and here’s what my peers think of me.”
Some senior professors say the process has brought them validation and appreciation. Christine Gallant, a professor of English at Georgia State, says that in the past, her long record of service was frequently overlooked in her annual evaluations because so much of the service she performed was outside her department and her college. But this year, when she went through post-tenure review for the first time, she was able to show her department chairman and her dean the long list of service activities she performs and be recognized for it.
For those who are preparing to seek promotion to full professor, post-tenure review may serve a more practical purpose. “I wanted to know if I was on the right track for promotion, and I got confirmation of that in my review,” says Ben Oviatt, a newly promoted professor of management at Georgia State University who went through post-tenure review last year. “So, if nothing else, it relieved some anxiety and made me feel more confident when I went up for promotion this year.”
At universities where faculty-development grants are available, post-tenure review can be a way to support new projects that could revive a professor’s professional interests and spirits, says Janice K. Haaken, a professor of psychology at Portland State University who had her post-tenure review last year. Along with her post-tenure review materials, she submitted a written request for a campus grant to study and analyze the practices of domestic-violence shelters in Berlin, London, and New York. She received $3,000 for the Berlin leg of her project. “I think it’s really nice that the university can support the projects of senior faculty members,” she says.
Charles Caramello, chairman of the English department at the University of Maryland at College Park, says he’s come to view his university’s periodic reviews (every five years) of tenured faculty members as a useful planning exercise. “From my point of view it’s a way of looking forward to what the faculty member intends to do over the next five years and how I as chair can enable that,” he says.
Despite these benefits, post-tenure review continues to have its detractors:
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“It was a joke,” says a sociology professor at a Western university, who went through post-tenure review last year. “I received absolutely no feedback.”
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“The only good part of the review was that it only takes place every five years,” says a professor of management at another Western university.
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“My post-tenure review had no impact on my career, was not useful or helpful to me, and simply involved extra paperwork,” says a professor of pharmacy at a Midwestern university.
Such complaints are especially common among professors who are performing above the curve. “It’s typical of evaluations that we don’t really have any good way to do a very rich feedback when people are doing a good job already,” says Ann Withorn, a social-policy professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. “I mean, it’s one of the tough things that happens — the best professors, like the best students, get the least feedback.”
For others it’s a painful experience.
“I found it demoralizing,” says one English professor at a Southern university, who asked not to be identified. Although she received a satisfactory rating, she learned in a letter from her department chairman that half of her colleagues had rated her teaching as unsatisfactory, even though she had recently created two popular online courses. As a result she’s decided to retire early.
“It’s ironic that I would retire at a point where I feel more enthusiastic about my field than I’ve felt in years,” she says, but “I think the worst qualities of my department came out in this. For me it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I just said, enough of departmental politics. I’m out of here.”
Some critics say post-tenure review may have increased professors’ productivity, but it’s done little to improve the quality of their work. “It may have increased the number of publications that a faculty member is churning out to clog the literature because they want to get two publications out instead of one because only one will trigger post-tenure review, but quality is always difficult to assess,” says Gary Rosenberg, an associate professor of geology at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.
Steven C. Wiest says he was discouraged from taking risks and doing more cutting-edge research. “They wanted me to do more papers, but no administrator actually read any of my papers,” says Mr. Wiest, a horticulture professor who was fired from Kansas State University two years ago after he received a negative post-tenure review and then failed to successfully complete his performance-improvement plan. “Administrators don’t want science; they want what they call productivity.”
How effective a post-tenure review will be really depends on who’s administering it, says Elizabeth Ervin, vice provost for academic personnel at the University of Arizona. “Faculty tend to pick up attitudes from their leadership. If the department head is conscientious and looks for all of the positive benefits, then the faculty tend to take it more seriously and also derive more benefit,” she says.
On the other hand, a department head’s bad attitude could cancel out any potential benefits of the process. A political-science professor at an Eastern university, who asked to remain anonymous, says her department head’s negative view of post-tenure review rubbed off on others in her department. “It was just one more drain on his time,” she says. “He wasn’t aiming at a developmental perspective. He was just aiming to get us through this process, which he saw as futile but mandatory. So it was seen as more trouble than it was worth, just another paperwork process. We were just going through the motions.”