ISU professors, Micheal Owen and Arnold Van Der Valk, have been attempting to ratify the Faculty Senate’s policies regarding post-tenure review since 2009. If all goes as planned, their changes will be revealed for a vote on Feb. 8 during a meeting of the senate.

Owen is the current Faculty Senate president, and he is also the associate chairman of the agronomy department. Van Der Valk currently serves as the past-president of the Faculty Senate and is a professor of ecology, evolution and organismal biology.

Post-tenure review, Van Der Valk said, is a required policy at most universities. Every seven or so years, a tenured professor will be brought under review so that his or her performance can be evaluated, and changes can be made accordingly. However, Iowa State’s policy did not sit well with Van Der Valk and Owen.

“One of the problems with the old policy was it took quite a while and substantial effort to conduct these reviews,” Van Der Valk said.

The reviews are conducted by a group of peers, and according to their verdict on the professor’s conduct over the past years, a plan is made to suggest how that professor could improve. However, Owen believes this process is not formative enough. Steps need to be taken to encourage professors to do good work instead of simply reviewing their process and not offering any constructive criticism as to their performance.

In 2009, Owen and Van Der Valk put together a task force whose job it was to investigate the current post-tenure review policy and suggest changes. Research was done on the policies of other universities around the country to see what options were being put into practice. One of the major changes being voted on is offering to suggest a pay raise to the budget department for tenured faculty members who are doing especially well. Another change suggested by Owen was to have struggling faculty members work up an improvement plan themselves to present before a jury of peers.

“We wanted a cross section of people who were involved in these changes,” Van Der Valk said about the task force.

He also stated it was comparatively easy to get people involved in this task force because it is a direct concern for most faculty.

It’s not all good news, though. Van Der Valk said their ratifications to the policy make it clear that poor performance or negligence of duties could lead to an “unacceptable performance of duties” review by a jury of peers. One reason this kind of investigation might also be initiated is failure to provide an improvement plan as explained earlier. These two policies used to be separate, but they could be joined soon, if only by a thin connection.

“This is slightly controversial,” Van Der Valk said. “It raises the possibility for a punitive outcome.”

So far reaction to the policy has been hard to judge. It has only recently been released to the public and many people have not had time to look at it in detail yet. While Van Der Valk would like to have the matter voted on as soon as possible, he said that a vote date of Feb. 8 is unlikely, and the matter will probably be voted on later in the semester.