[What follows is a copy of a long letter to the regents detailing how irresponsibly they decided to request a "post-tenure review" policy from ISU. No regent has responded in any way. When the president of the regents, Owen Newlin, addressed the faculty senate 9 March 99, he did not comment on this letter or its contents. When the regents behave poorly the faculty shouldn't just silently go along. Bryan Cain]

20 February 1999

To: The Iowa Board of Regents

From: Bryan Cain, ISU Mathematics Department

At your 3 December 1998 meeting you formally requested that by December 1999 ISU "develop procedures for the evaluation of tenured faculty." I ask that you withdraw that request. Here are some reasons you should.

The request does not make much literal sense. Are the regents unaware that ISU already has procedures for the review of all faculty? Or are you requesting that the methods used be changed? Or do you just want to know what methods we use?

The penultimate paragraph of the Executive Summary (ISU A-8) [ed: which accompanied the motion] contains the false claim that ISU was currently discussing its reviewing policies. In fact, that long discussion had already ended. During that process General Faculty voted down a policy similar to what you now seem to request. I do not recall the Senate ever asking that the Faculty vote on a matter which wasn't a change in the Senate's constitution or bylaws. So this was an extraordinary event. Your tardy request asked those who had finished their work to redo it. Irritating. Better had you waited a decent interval (three years?) before raising the issue again.

This motion was apparently written in part to save R. Barak's [ed: who works in the regent's office] face. He had erroneously informed the president of the faculty senate that the regents had asked two years ago that ISU develop a policy for doing additional reviewing of tenured faculty. Just after the public learned he had erred, he wrote the recommendation you passed, which creates what he had falsely reported already existed.

The motion was hastily passed--6 working days after it was written. It is dated the Monday of the Thanksgiving break, and was voted on the 4th class day after the vacation. I don't think anyone at ISU who might have criticized it (e.g. the hundreds of faculty who voted "no" last spring) even knew of its existence, let alone that it was the docketed for 3 December. Acting that way may meet some official standard for public notice, but surely it fails the spirit of openness. Faculty have long and aggravated experience with policies that are hatched over or during vacation periods.

The draft minutes (the approved ones still don't seem to be in the ISU library [ed: they are now and are identical to the draft]) report that on this issue you heard only from high level administrators, Jischke and Madison. How could that have been imagined to be representative? Jischke has publicly described himself as your employee. He thus may be so eager to please you, that he understates or does not even mention the cons of your proposals. Whom did Madison represent? Probably the committee she chaired which wanted such a policy. Did either of the speakers pass on a single reason for the review proposal's defeat last spring? None are [sic] in the draft minutes.

The merits of the proposal were not weighed. Just review the draft minutes. One finds no talk of what it would cost or how it works at the other regents schools or whether it makes management sense--the TQM people are NOT on your side. You passed it without even knowing what reviewing is already done at ISU. The faculty senate is running a survey to try to determine what reviewing systems are used by which departments. Since the senate has not yet found out, it is certain that the ISU administration doesn't know. And you don't either.

Is there any reason at all to enlarge the system of reviews? "Such a policy is highly desirable in order to ensure the public's confidence in the integrity of academic tenure," wrote the board's office. That at least sounds good. But there plainly isn't any new-policy-justifying special need to reassure the public that tenure is good policy. Yes, there are some critics. There always will be. They do not have a broad following and simply telling them about all the reviewing of tenured faculty that already goes on should satisfy most of them. But--recall the preceding paragraph--you don't even know what reviewing is being done. If you ever do need to defend tenure, you will find that information helpful.

Additional reviews will be expensive. As you would have it, the faculty will pay with its time and, in some cases, its collegiality. There are less expensive ways "to ensure the public's confidence in the integrity of academic tenure." One of them would have been for the Board to send the Des Moines Register a four sentence letter answering its ISU slandering 7 May 97 headline. (To understand this issue fully, obtain from Barak and Newlin the complaints they received about regent inaction on this matter. Review also what they did about those complaints.) To build the faculty's confidence that you want to "ensure the public's confidence...," you must respond to such slurs. Your silence looked like an effort to generate more cynicism about tenure and more support for additional reviews. In short, it looked partisan.

If letters to the editor are any guide, there is no special need to reassure the public about tenure. ISU just fired a tenured full professor. That should reassure some. The public certainly deserves an unvarnished discussion of how tenure functions whenever they ask for it, but they aren't asking and there isn't any evidence that the current system is malfunctioning. "Ensuring public confidence" is at this time a false reason to recommend an expensive policy change. Have you at least counted how many review policy documents will have to be written if ISU adopts one? One for all ISU, one for each college, one for each department and interdisciplinary program. You know the numbers I don't, is that more than 80? How many pages will that take and how many person-hours for all those committees? How many pages of drafts and revisions? Then the approvals by the deans and provost. Do you have a serious reason for this? And for the in perpetuity annual expenditure of faculty time?

One of the campus post-tenure review supporters who has had considerable personal interaction with regents, says that three of them have said that they were lobbied by conservative politicians to impose this change in how the faculty is reviewed. Regents are often viewed as a firewall between the universities and state politics. To vote simply as lobbied by legislators is to act like a conduit, not a firewall. Those who were lobbied may defend themselves against the charge that their votes were just partisan politics by giving serious reasons for their votes. But there are no serious reasons given in the minutes that I have seen, only the inadequate one dismissed above, and, as you read above, this issue was not considered on its merits. Are you sure that thoughtless partisan politics isn't a big part of this?

What you have requested, Martin Jischke has declared will happen. We are told that a policy will be written whether or not the faculty helps with it. President Jischke should avoid such ultimatums. Especially when a majority of the faculty see the policy as a disimprovement and the main argument in its support was based not on improvement but fear: If we don't do this to ourselves someone out there somewhere will do it to us...and worse.

Those who believed in this threat were right. Martin Jischke has now cast himself in the role of the "someone." If you do not withdraw your request, you and he will be deciding the details of a policy some time later this year. You may at that time also have a document from the faculty to consult, but, if so, it will be one from a faculty that already considered this issue carefully and at length, rejected it, is tired of it, and has caved in under an ultimatum. Is that what you want? Withdraw your request, rein in Martin Jischke, and revisit this issue in a few years after you have investigated whether reviews of this kind (which are already widely done at ISU) are actually worthwhile. If you can't show that they are, drop this project.

Bryan E. Cain

Mathematics

Iowa State University

Ames, Iowa 50011 USA

Phone (515) 294-8151 (with answering machine)

Fax (515) 294-5454 (Please write "for Cain" on it.)