A proposal for revising ISU’s current system for promotion and tenure is about to come before the Faculty Senate. The most dramatic parts of the proposal involve (1) changing the criteria for faculty evaluations and (2) implementing a system to evaluate tenured faculty beyond those already in place. The members of the philosophy department and the religious studies program wish to express our strong opposition to these proposals.

A. Criteria for Faculty Evaluation

Under the current system, to be promoted, faculty must prove excellence in at least one of the following: (a) teaching; (b) research, scholarship or artistic activities; or (c) extension or professional practice. Some academic units, like our own, set more stringent quality standards than the university requires. The proposal before the Faculty Senate would replace the demand for excellence with performance requirements tailored for individual faculty members.

We are committed to excellence. We believe the university should be as well.

We also believe that professors need the freedom to grow, to discover new areas of strength and to achieve excellence in those areas. The life of the mind is not always predictable. Setting narrow “position responsibilities” can only inhibit faculty from growing in new or unexpected directions.

B. Post-tenure reviews

Tenure should not be a guarantee of employment or a refuge for the lazy or incompetent. And at Iowa State, it isn’t. The faculty handbook states that tenured faculty can be dismissed for incompetence, neglect of duty, professional dishonesty, serious misconduct or because the university is financially strapped.

Tenured faculty should be continually evaluated. And at Iowa State, they are. Besides being evaluated when they are up for promotion, the faculty handbook requires annual evaluations for all faculty members. These evaluations become part of a professor’s permanent file and are available to university administrators. So the issue is not whether there ought to be post-tenure reviews. The issue is whether Iowa State should adopt another post-tenure review system over and above the system already in place.

The proposed review system requires departments to set up committees to “comprehensively” evaluate tenured faculty members every five years. After two unsatisfactory reviews, the tenured professor could be dismissed. This “two strikes you’re out” policy will significantly hurt this university in a number of ways.

1. The purpose of tenure is to protect academic freedom. Today, the scientist studying the effects of growth hormones on the meat supply or the Marxist economist who deplores the corporatization of the university can honestly pursue their research without risk of losing their jobs. The proposed “two strikes you’re out” tenure policy profoundly erodes academic freedom at Iowa State.

Some will see this claim as melodramatic or paranoid. After all, McCarthyism is dead. Perhaps they’re right: The crass, straightforward attempts to silence unpopular opinions in academia are forever gone. Perhaps. But a close look at the new policy raises troubling possibilities. Today, tenured faculty are evaluated annually and can be fired for specific reasons: negligence, incompetence, moral turpitude or financial exigency. The new policy adds a very nebulous offense to the list: Tenured professors can be fired if they don’t live up to their “position responsibilities.” And nothing in the new proposals prevents administrators from imposing capricious or restrictive “position responsibilities” on tenured faculty.

This will give administrators the “flexibility” to fire tenured faculty whose research is not in tune with the university’s political or corporate agenda. It is also likely to have a chilling effect on speech. Few professors will be willing to staunchly and vociferously protest the decisions of those politicians or administrators who could have their “position responsibilities” redrawn. Optimists might believe that politicians and administrators will forever protect the academic freedoms of faculty, but it is a wise principle not to trust your freedoms to the goodwill of those in power.

The proposed policy erodes tenure and academic freedom in other ways as well. Methodological debates rage in many academic disciplines about what counts as the “right” questions to ask, methods to use and kinds of answers to give. These disagreements are especially pronounced in the humanities, but they also occur in the sciences. Occasionally, assistant professors get turned down for tenure because they don’t do the “right” kind of research.

The “two strikes you’re out” policy will leave tenured professors at the mercy of shifting methodological commitments within a department. Someone whose research is outside the mainstream could be dismissed with the charge, “That’s not real science,” or history, or sociology, or philosophy, etc. This is worrying because academic departments are sometimes torn apart by political or methodological bickering. Arming the factions in such debates with the power to revoke tenure is a serious error for any community that values academic freedom.

2. This policy will increase administrative bloat. Each year, departments will have to “comprehensively” evaluate (on average) one-fifth of their tenured faculty. In a large department like English or economics, that’s about 10 reviews per year. For each evaluation, the target faculty member must gather “Multiple sources of information — both qualitative and quantitative in nature,” including “faculty constructed portfolios for each area of work, surveys of consumers of services or work, peer review and input.” Then a departmental committee must examine this material and make a reasoned, well-informed judgement. Burdening tenured faculty with considerably more administrative duties will undermine the central missions of the university: teaching, research, outreach.

3. This policy will make it more difficult for ISU to attract new faculty. Prospective hires will interpret this policy (rightly in our view) as an attempt to roll back tenure. Other things being equal, they will prefer to work at a college or university that is committed to tenure.

4. Most professors at Iowa State are very good at their jobs. This policy will make their jobs more difficult. It will reduce their job security, increase their administrative workloads and make it harder to attract excellent colleagues. Many will view it as an unacceptable diminution of academic freedom. We cannot make ISU a stronger institution by weakening the morale of its faculty.

Conclusion

The Faculty Senate Committee’s proposal is a disaster. It will erode academic freedom, contribute to administrative bloat, weaken morale and make it difficult to attract excellent faculty.

Some people will undoubtedly see this letter as a knee-jerk reaction from faculty wishing to hold onto current benefits. This is not true. We do not believe that tenure should be a haven for incompetents. That is why we support annual reviews for all faculty. That is why we support the principle that tenured faculty can be fired at ISU with cause and due process.

As a university community, we value evidence and reasoned argument. That is why we find it disappointing that nowhere in the Faculty Senate Committee’s proposal is any evidence cited that the current promotion and tenure system is broken. Even if we grant that the current system is flawed (as any system will be), absolutely no evidence has been given that the proposed system will be any better. In fact, we believe the proposed system will weaken ISU in the long run. But we are perfectly prepared to be moved by evidence on these questions. It is disturbing that on such an important issue, the high standards of evidence and argument faculty must meet in order to get tenure have apparently been neglected in the development of this particular policy.

Philosophy Department

Religious Studies Program