Post-tenure review - college teachers

Black Issues in Higher Education, Oct 16, 1997 by Gail Hagans Towns

Gets Mixed Critique

ATLANTA - The rules have changed and if you don't like it, you can go home.

That is exactly what several recently retired Georgia State University (GSU) professors did in response to a new state mandate that calls for rigorous faculty evaluations of even the most experienced of instructors.

Called for by Chancellor Stephen Portch and approved by the Board of Regents in 1995, officials say the post-tenure review requirement was not created to weed out weak instructors. Instead, it was created to help determine which faculty members needed additional training or special help. With the exception of GSU, most state institutions are just beginning to conduct the reviews, which are targeted at faculty who haven't had evaluations for at least five years,

The directive comes amid national controversy about tenure. Some university systems are considering moves similar to Portch's. At the same time, many individual colleges have increased their requirements for tenure or eliminated it altogether.

Experts on the issue say that many parents are dissatisfied with what their children are - or aren't - getting in college coursework. Employers have weighed in as well, complaining about the quality of recent graduates.

"Graduating a better student is the bottom line," says Dr. Ron Henry, the provost at GSU who introduced the idea on his campus several months before the regents' vote. "We are an urban research university and not only do we want to produce better research, but we have an outreach mission and a teaching mission as well.

"What we're saying with post-tenure review is that we don't want you to be good at just one thing," he continues. "You have a role to play in the overall mission of the university."

There are twenty-five documentable cases where tenured GSU professors chose to take retirement rather than endure the rigors of post-tenure review. Another 250 have successfully completed it or are currently undergoing the evaluation. And very few of them, according to Henry, have been identified as needing to polish their professional skills.

At historically Black Fort Valley State, the academic dean, Dr. Josephine D. Davis, is preparing about twenty faculty members for review. Items to be considered include the professors' sense and application of global issues, technology, multiculturalism, and other "focus areas" that are considered important to the university.

According to Davis, the post-tenure review represents a shift toward more accountability.

"In the past," she says, "we honed in on things like how many hours a professor spent in the office, what your credentials were, and what papers you published. Now, we want to look at what a professor is producing in terms of student results and their [ability to help] students to achieve.

"The point is to make sure that people who achieve tenure are still active and contributing," he adds. "If they've gotten stale through the years, post-tenure review is designed for professional development. And if they get a negative evaluation, they've got three years to come up to speed," says Don Wagner, a political science professor at the State University of West Georgia.