4 responses to “How is post-tenure review working at your (public) university?”

1. a bit off topic

   August 31, 2026 at 8:30 am

   Sorry, this may be a bit off topic, but if done well, I would really welcome some equivalent of a post-tenure review in the UK. I know some senior staff who have basically stopped producing research whatsoever. I know many senior staff who have produced less research in the past 5 years than people on the job market.

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   1. Structural realism

      September 1, 2026 at 5:14 am

      I would note that there are a lot of structural reasons why senior staff might produce less research than people on the job market. First, senior staff — at least the responsible ones — have to take on a lot of time-intensive administrative tasks which simply can’t be done by junior staff (mostly because it detracts from their career advancement). Head of Department is a huge, thankless, but necessary, task. Serving on a university’s tenure committee is also very important, especially if a department wants to be well-informed about the evaluation criteria when putting its own tenure cases forward. When I was on my university’s tenure committee (I know the UK doesn’t have ‘tenure’ like the US, but we have committees which still make the ‘up-or-out’ decision and promotion to Professor), I had to read over *3,000 pages* of documentation every year. And there are a lot of other ad-hoc committees which come up which require participation. Those years of COVID-19? They required a subcommittee to decide what to do; you might have hated the decisions your university took, but those decisions involved people trying to figure out the right response in an uncertain world with a lot of pressure and the worry that, if they made the wrong judgement, people could die as a result.

      Second, while I know that some people go through graduate school with caring responsibilities — and I have the utmost respect for them, because I don’t know how they manage — it’s statistically more likely that senior staff will have to care for an elderly parent or children. If bad luck strikes and disabilities get folded in, that’s an enormous multiplier effect. In addition, health issues become more likely as staff get older, and a cancer diagnosis for a person or their partner also makes a big difference.

      Third, life also can get in the way. While I knew one person who got divorced while in graduate school, most of the people who do will wait until their 40s or 50s for that to happen. While some people might throw themselves into their work when that happens, others won’t.

      Fourth, in the UK and other European countries, there’s inequity created by research grants. If you’re lucky getting out of graduate school, you get a couple of years of research leave. That productivity easily materialises into the Matthew effect, and more research leave in the future, which leads to the perception of skewed productivity among senior staff — especially when you realise that the senior staff on big research grants aren’t going to be doing the heavy lifting of admin or teaching.

      And, finally, there are those of us who, after reading thousands of papers, don’t want to contribute to the game of grinding out yet another salami-sliced article built around the Least Publishable Unit with four other co-authors all of whom belong to a publishing cabal in order to get their numbers up. Especially given all the above, on a university contract officially predicated on a 35-hour work week. We now realise that life’s too short and important, especially having played that game when we were younger.

      I think the correct lesson to draw from work like C. Thi Nguyen’s on value capture is to fight back against a culture which requires people on the job market to churn out papers at the rate of L. Ron Hubbard — not to try to push that evaluative metric upwards. Yes, there’s some dead wood at the top, but here’s my prediction about what widespread post-tenure review will really do… it will give universities the ability to fire expensive staff for metric-based reasons that have little to do with their real value as educators or researchers. That will create a university environment with the current precariat at the start (all the adjuncts and postdocs) and a new precariat class at the middle and top-end. I don’t want to work in a university run like Enron, where the bottom 10-15% are fired every year.

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2. jason Yackee

   August 31, 2026 at 10:03 am

   The Wisconsin legislature made UW system implement post-tenure (5-year) reviews several years ago. The statutory requirements were fed into the System bureaucracy, which produced policies that campuses (like UW-Madison) then translated into their own policies, and which were then put in final form at the departmental level. You can imagine that such a process results in a rather mushy regime.

   There is some variation across departments in how it is implemented on the ground. The basic idea is that professors have to be adjudged as (translating a bit) “meeting” or “not meeting” expectations. Some units have a third category (“exceeding expectations”) and at least one (the Business School) actually has four possible outcomes. As you can expect, most units seem to define “expectations” rather vaguely, giving review committees and deans a lot of discretion in determining whether they are met. The university does not provide any real benefits or rewards from being ranked as meeting or exceeding expectations, though the Business School seems to give lower teaching loads to those meeting its highest ranking. The regime primarily works on a negative-incentive system. If you are ranked as “not meeting expectations” (a ranking which you can appeal all the way to the Provost) you must undergo a presumably embarrassing discussion with your dean and come up with a “remediation plan” that if not successfully implemented can lead to dismissal.

   The review committees are made up of faculty in the reviewee’s department, which recommend an outcome to the dean, with his decision reviewed by the Provost (who would be very unlikely to second-guess the dean). The review process typically consists of looking at teaching evals, lists of publications (without reading them), and lists of committee service. The Business School claims to want outside letters for faculty who are gunning for the very highest ranking, but the use of letters is not required and I don’t think any departments regularly ask for them during the review process.

   I believe that most departments view the review process as largely pro forma, and that departments are generally very unlikely to embarrass a colleague by calling them out as not meeting expectations. On the other hand, I have anecdotal evidence of an under-performer retiring in order to avoid a review, and I have first-hand experience (from outside of my own department) of a dean reversing two department decisions that faculty members met expectations, in which the records of the professors involved were indeed quite problematic as to both teaching and research.

   My university does not seem to publish statistics on the review process outcomes, and the legislature’s attention span has since drifted elsewhere, so my impressions are rather speculative. But while my personal sense is that the review process rarely leads to negative consequences for most faculty (and is a relatively painless process to go through), it does not seem entirely toothless. Presumably on rare occasions it creates an incentive for faculty who should retire to retire, and/or it offers a “come to Jesus” moment for faculty who may still have the energy to up their game in response to a remediation exercise. I think that the review process is likely to have the most teeth in a large unit, like a typical Arts and Sciences school, in which the dean is not likely to have close personal relationships with most of the faculty being reviewed. This provides a bit of neutral distance and permits greater freedom of action. In smaller, single-department schools, like most law schools, the social pressures to avoid calling out a faculty member as “not meeting expectations” will usually be quite high, both for the review committee and the dean.

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3. V. Alan White

   August 31, 2026 at 9:16 pm

   I can corroborate Jason’s remarks about the UW System’s implementation of post-tenure review. In part because I was a participant in the Republican-driven 2015 Regents overhaul of tenure (as graciously reported here by Brian) with appointments stocked by the Walker administration. Over my and a few others protests, tenure and post-tenure reviews were revised to make it easier to eliminate faculty and even departments by measures of so-called efficiency. I also know of colleagues who retired because of post-tenure reviews though I was productive enough to endure two before my retirement with even high ratings. The Republican attacks against so-called “liberal” education continues until we get people in office that appreciate what true liberal arts education is about.

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