As Iowa State prepares to welcome its 15th president, Steven Leath, some are wondering about something this president is lacking in comparison to his predecessors: tenure.

“We expected his offer to include full tenure — it always has in the past,” said Steven Freeman, president of the Faculty Senate.

Tenure has been around since the early 1900s as a way to protect a professor’s academic freedom.

“Academic freedom provides the latitude for professors to do stuff people don’t understand … but ultimately may build in to something,” said Michael Owen, past president of the Faculty Senate. “Without that academic freedom, which is protected by tenure, well, we’re kind of hamstrung.”

Freeman also stated that tenure allows professors the ability to work on their research and perform tasks without being “concerned about what is politically popular at the moment … about how any funding group is going to be looking at their research results.”

When outgoing ISU President Gregory Geoffroy received his contract on Feb. 27, 2001, it stated that, “With your appointment as President, you will be simultaneously granted tenure as a Professor in the Department of Chemistry.”

Leath was a tenured faculty member at the University of North Carolina, but there was no area of his contract that granted him tenure as Iowa State’s new president.

Leath said before coming to on-campus interviews for the position, each candidate was asked if they would accept the position, and from there they began basic negotiations.

“The [members of the Iowa Board of] Regents were not comfortable granting tenure at that point,” Leath said. “I think the reason for that was they wanted to be good stewards of the public’s money and they weren’t comfortable offering a permanent job to someone who had not shown up and worked one day for Iowa State University.”

Craig Lang, president of the Iowa Board of Regents, said Leath “did not ask for tenure as part of the ISU contract and felt he could and should prove his value on campus before any further discussion about tenure took place.”

Leath said that not being granted tenure was “unusual, but understandable in these current times.” Leath accepted the contract without tenure saying that he had “full confidence that I could do a good job for Iowa State, so this became a non-issue.”

Though it is unusual to have a non-tenured president, Freeman and Owen both said that students should in no way be concerned about this issue.

Leath plans to gain tenure as soon as possible while working for Iowa State. Achieving tenure is a long, rigorous process that involves both internal as well as external peer reviews.

“At Iowa State, our tenure process is based on quality and excellence and scholarship,” Freeman said. “So what we’re really looking for during that time period is that that faculty member has the right path, the right trajectory to continue to not only be an excellent contributor here on campus, but to whatever there discipline is.”

While deciding whether or not to grant tenure, fellow faculty members look at scholarly achievements such as research, publications and accomplishments while on staff.

“Scholarly achievement becomes difficult in a 100 percent administrative position,” Owen said, in explaining how granting tenure to a president may be different than granting tenure to a professor.

Owen said he thinks Leath will go through the tenure process soon and that, in his opinion, tenure will be granted.

“I think that basically … from my perspective, we would look at his achievements that he has accomplished and that would be the yardstick by which he would be measured,” Owen said.