04-24-1997

Your committee has, I'm sure, received tons of e-mail on this subject. But I'd like to explain a bit further the position I took at Tuesday's forum.

We--your committee, the faculty at large, all of us--need to distinguish between post-tenure review in itself and the array of possible sanctions, up to and including dismissal, which may be invoked for faculty misconduct of one sort or another.

My department, English, has employed post-tenure review for many years. I've served on our review committee, and I recently chaired a committee which studied review in our department and recommended some significant changes in the way we conduct review. We produced a 20-odd page report on the subject, a copy of which I'd be happy to send you. Our recommendations are now being considered by the English faculty. They provide for continued, and in some respects enhanced, post-tenure review. For me, and I think I may say for my colleagues, post-tenure review in itself holds no terrors.

But that is because post-tenure review in English has never--I would put that in caps, NEVER--carried, as a possible consequence, the loss of tenure. At the forum you remarked that faculty misconduct, such as academic dishonesty, which currently constitutes grounds for dismissal might be revealed in a review, and that therefore reviews, even now, can eventuate in loss of tenure. That's of course true, but I think it rather muddies the issue. The issue is not whether faculty should be dismissed for misconduct discovered during a review which then leads to appropriate judicial procedures, but whether they should be dismissed for performing to a lower standard than their colleagues: for not meeting, as I guess the phrase is, "institutional expectations."

No doubt every department has a few members whose work is in some respect or other disappointing: they've published comparatively little, or they lag behind the times in course content or pedagogy. There's no question of misconduct in such cases, and they may even be hard workers in their way. When we in English review such people we counsel, or urge, them to change. If they don't change, we have a range of appropriate sanctions: they don't get raises, or they get tiny raises, or they get reassigned to lower-level courses. If they're not Full Professors, they of course don't get promoted. These are possible and appropriate outcomes of post-tenure review in English. But we do not consider it appropriate, and I would never consider it appropriate, to threaten them with dismissal merely for performance that we considered disappointing.

You've no doubt heard many times over the reasons why tenure should not be revoked merely as a result of a performance review (as distinct from a finding, by appropriate judicial process, of misconduct). So I'll state my reasons as briefly as I can.

1. In the Humanities certainly, and probably elsewhere as well, standards of what constitutes "good" research and teaching are quite variable across the profession as a whole; they can change rapidly, and they can be disputed. Within a single department, however, they may happen to be unrepresentatively narrow. Thus a faculty member whose work would be judged favorably by colleagues elsewhere might happen to be reviewed unfavorably in her home department; she might be perceived as "eccentric" or "out of step" in her teaching or research. That's sad enough without the possible outcome of dismissal: Making dismissal a possible outcome in such a situation would be immoral.

2. The purpose of tenure, we need to remember, was not to grant faculty lifetime employment but to secure them in the exploration of ideas, to protect intellectual integrity from economic interests. If I know that pursuing in my work an unpopular or unfashionable line of thought or practising an unconventional pedagogy could lead to my being dismissed from my job, I have every incentive to stick with the safe and the customary, whatever that happens to be among my immediate colleagues at the moment. In short, I conform. This behavior would be so obviously at odds with the University's professed ambition of being the "best" that I'm amazed that a faculty committee could contemplate for one minute the idea of revoking tenure.

3. By long tradition, this practice of academic freedom has been construed to extend as well to matters political, whether inside or outside the University. The back pages of the _AAUP Bulletin_ are crammed with cases of faculty who found themselves under censure or threat of dismissal for having publicized opinions which offended some campus overlord or other; and I trust you'll admit that the same thing could possibly happen to a faculty member at ISU--if not under our present administration, then perhaps under some future one. This is what I meant when I asked, at the forum, how the proposed sanctions could be reconciled with faculty's First-Amendment rights. In fact, they can't.

Finally, I have to ask you to ponder whose interests are served by a system which allows the possibility of dismissal purely as a result of performance review. I don't for a moment doubt the sincerity of you and your colleagues on the committee, and I think that much of what you are trying to accomplish is valuable. But it has to be said that, objectively, there is only one group whose interests are served by this aspect of your proposal, and that is the University's administration. It gives them a new tool for reducing faculty budget and managing faculty (especially, of course, faculty who might be perceived as "troublesome"). To suppose that the tool would be used only benignly, i.e. only for some supposed faculty benefit, would be, at best, to indulge in a daydream; that is just not how corporate structures work.

Thanks for your attention.
Bill McCarthy