Faculty tenure is a guarantee of academic freedom and educational quality,
but does not exempt tenured faculty members from all further scrutiny, concludes
a report just issued by the UI Seminar on Tenure.
The 15-person committee, convened at the start of the 1995-96 academic year
by Sylvia Manning, vice president for academic affairs, surveyed the history
of tenure, long-standing and recent criticisms of tenure, and tenure practices
at the Chicago and Urbana-Champaign campuses.
The result of the group's deliberations is a 63-page report that stresses
the obligations as well as the protections conferred by the tenure system.
"An important task of the faculty and academic administrators is to
ensure that standards of academic excellence as well as professional conduct
are vigilantly and diligently met throughout the career of a faculty member
at this university," said the panel. To that end, the panel's recommendations
include the development of sanctions short of dismissal, and a provision
for focused appraisals of tenured faculty whose performance has fallen below
par and has not been remedied by other means.
Lawrence Poston, professor of English and associate dean of the College
of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UIC, who chaired the committee, said that
the insistence on corresponding professional obligations has been inherent
in the theory of academic tenure for more than 50 years.
"It is not the intention of the report to weaken in any way a system
that, by and large, has served higher education well," he said. "We
just weren't convinced that the UI is doing everything it might do to monitor
and correct poor performance -- though we also think that instances of poor
performance are relatively rare."
The report, he said, still preserves the necessary standard for dismissal
of tenured faculty. That standard declares that the burden of proof in such
proceedings lies on the university to show why a faculty member should not
be retained, rather than on the faculty member to show why he or she should
be kept on. The formal hearing of all such cases, said Poston, should be
by a panel of faculty peers.
Printed copies of the report will be sent to all UI tenured and tenure-track
faculty members in the near future. In the meantime the report can be found
online at http://p363b.pb.uiuc.edu/vpaa/tenure_seminar/.
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