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How is post-tenure review working at your (public) university?

Brian Leiter

Post-tenure review started proliferating more than a quarter-century ago, but has picked up speed in recent years. It might be useful to hear about people’s experiences. You can post anonymously, but you must use a valid email address, and it must be your university email address if you are going to name the university or college. Has the process been fair/reasonable? Or has it become influenced by politics, either departmental or societal? Has anyone been terminated or forced to retire based on post-tenure review? Was that decision defensible? Has anyone undergone remediation measures, successfully or unsuccessfully, because of post-tenure review?

If your academic field is not philosophy, please note what field you are working in.

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

  1. a bit off topic

    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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  2. jason Yackee

    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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