The governing board overseeing Florida’s public universities on Wednesday approved a post-tenure-review process that allows for poorly performing professors to be fired.
Florida Professors can now be fired post-tenure for poor performance
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This is obviously for political reasons, and it's awful. On the other hand, it is undeniably true that tenure has been abused by many deadwood who have been barely productive for years. There probably does need to be some post-tenure productivity review, although certainly not something likely to be politicized like this.
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Setting aside the politics of Florida for a moment: tenured faculty members who exhibit poor performance for a lengthy period of time should be subject to dismissal. Tenure should protect faculty members from being fired for reasons tied to academic freedom and free expression and the kind of research that they do and the research findings that they generate, but it should not protect faculty members who are not adequately engaged in research and teaching over a long period of time.
Teaching a class or doing research on a controversial subject? You should be protected by tenure. Make controversial public statements in a personal capacity? You should be protected by tenure. Conducting research that generates controversial findings? You should be protected by tenure. But stop showing up to teach your classes a high proportion of the time over, say, a five year period? You should be subject to review and dismissal. Stop doing any research at all at a research university? You should either be assigned a higher teaching load or, if your teaching performance is poor as well, you should be subject to review and dismissal. All of this should be done with appropriate due process protections, including a faculty review panel to evaluate whether the poor performance rises to a level warranting dismissal. But tenure should not protect poor performance over a lenghty time period.
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What's scary is the power it gives to specific individuals -- chairs, deans, provosts. Individual tyrants, dictators can destroy lives, careers for entirely corrupt, academically false reasons.
Correct. This will not fire people that DeSantis doesn't like. This will fire people who chairs, deans and/or provosts don't like and it is very difficult to hold these people accountable.
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What's scary is the power it gives to specific individuals -- chairs, deans, provosts. Individual tyrants, dictators can destroy lives, careers for entirely corrupt, academically false reasons.
Under the current rule there is no means to exercise oversight (accountability) over these people.
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Agreed. This review is called "promotion to full."
This is obviously for political reasons, and it's awful. On the other hand, it is undeniably true that tenure has been abused by many deadwood who have been barely productive for years. There probably does need to be some post-tenure productivity review, although certainly not something likely to be politicized like this.
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Setting aside the politics of Florida for a moment: tenured faculty members who exhibit poor performance for a lengthy period of time should be subject to dismissal. Tenure should protect faculty members from being fired for reasons tied to academic freedom and free expression and the kind of research that they do and the research findings that they generate, but it should not protect faculty members who are not adequately engaged in research and teaching over a long period of time.
Teaching a class or doing research on a controversial subject? You should be protected by tenure. Make controversial public statements in a personal capacity? You should be protected by tenure. Conducting research that generates controversial findings? You should be protected by tenure. But stop showing up to teach your classes a high proportion of the time over, say, a five year period? You should be subject to review and dismissal. Stop doing any research at all at a research university? You should either be assigned a higher teaching load or, if your teaching performance is poor as well, you should be subject to review and dismissal. All of this should be done with appropriate due process protections, including a faculty review panel to evaluate whether the poor performance rises to a level warranting dismissal. But tenure should not protect poor performance over a lenghty time period.I've never seen a tenured prof stop showing up. I've seen a few old guys stop trying to publish. By old I'm talking maybe 70+. At that age I'm willing to let them slide for a few years. We lose so much money during grad school that a few extra years at the end of career are sometimes needed to fully fund retirement. Please have a heart for these ancient bros, people. You'll be in that situation yourself one day--if you're lucky.
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Adama here. The key is separating out one broad issue (i.e., should poor-performing faculty be subject to dismissal?) from another broad issue (i.e., should faculty--regardless of performance--but subject to dismissal based on their political positions, the kind of research that they do, or the subject matter of the courses that they teach?). I come down strongly on the side of yes to the first question and no to the second. There absolutely MUST be strong due process protections in place to prevent faculty members from being dismissed for political reasons. One way of doing that is to have a process that spells out clearly what performance criteria are being evaluated and that requires a supermajority of a faculty panel to dismiss a tenured faculty member.
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What you suggest is simply bending to the knee to bureaucrats. It gives the administrative bureaucracy much more power (and creates more meaningless paperwork). Your comment also completely neglects a few things - tenure allows one to work more slowly on projects, avoiding the rat race of publish as much as you can, as fast as you can. Back in the day you could develop a single project over many, many years, to the benefit of everyone. And the vast majority of folks at research universities do not become 'deadwood.' They still do research, but on a different time scale and with better sense of balance and meaning. Post-tenure review dismal sounds reasonable in the abstract but not so much if you have knowledge of how universities, administrators, and researchers typically operate.
Setting aside the politics of Florida for a moment: tenured faculty members who exhibit poor performance for a lengthy period of time should be subject to dismissal. Tenure should protect faculty members from being fired for reasons tied to academic freedom and free expression and the kind of research that they do and the research findings that they generate, but it should not protect faculty members who are not adequately engaged in research and teaching over a long period of time.
Teaching a class or doing research on a controversial subject? You should be protected by tenure. Make controversial public statements in a personal capacity? You should be protected by tenure. Conducting research that generates controversial findings? You should be protected by tenure. But stop showing up to teach your classes a high proportion of the time over, say, a five year period? You should be subject to review and dismissal. Stop doing any research at all at a research university? You should either be assigned a higher teaching load or, if your teaching performance is poor as well, you should be subject to review and dismissal. All of this should be done with appropriate due process protections, including a faculty review panel to evaluate whether the poor performance rises to a level warranting dismissal. But tenure should not protect poor performance over a lenghty time period. -
I agree we should be more lenient with the older folks as long as they’re at least trying. But between social security and 401k and robbing future generations, there’s no reason they can’t retire at 70. Not that we should force them to, I’m just saying they’ve more than recouped their early career losses by then.
Setting aside the politics of Florida for a moment: tenured faculty members who exhibit poor performance for a lengthy period of time should be subject to dismissal. Tenure should protect faculty members from being fired for reasons tied to academic freedom and free expression and the kind of research that they do and the research findings that they generate, but it should not protect faculty members who are not adequately engaged in research and teaching over a long period of time.
Teaching a class or doing research on a controversial subject? You should be protected by tenure. Make controversial public statements in a personal capacity? You should be protected by tenure. Conducting research that generates controversial findings? You should be protected by tenure. But stop showing up to teach your classes a high proportion of the time over, say, a five year period? You should be subject to review and dismissal. Stop doing any research at all at a research university? You should either be assigned a higher teaching load or, if your teaching performance is poor as well, you should be subject to review and dismissal. All of this should be done with appropriate due process protections, including a faculty review panel to evaluate whether the poor performance rises to a level warranting dismissal. But tenure should not protect poor performance over a lenghty time period.I've never seen a tenured prof stop showing up. I've seen a few old guys stop trying to publish. By old I'm talking maybe 70+. At that age I'm willing to let them slide for a few years. We lose so much money during grad school that a few extra years at the end of career are sometimes needed to fully fund retirement. Please have a heart for these ancient bros, people. You'll be in that situation yourself one day--if you're lucky.
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Kim Jong Un is developing nukes and ICBMs, let’s just make sure they follow proper safety protocol and wear helmets and reflective vests and promise to warn us before launching.
Adama here. The key is separating out one broad issue (i.e., should poor-performing faculty be subject to dismissal?) from another broad issue (i.e., should faculty--regardless of performance--but subject to dismissal based on their political positions, the kind of research that they do, or the subject matter of the courses that they teach?). I come down strongly on the side of yes to the first question and no to the second. There absolutely MUST be strong due process protections in place to prevent faculty members from being dismissed for political reasons. One way of doing that is to have a process that spells out clearly what performance criteria are being evaluated and that requires a supermajority of a faculty panel to dismiss a tenured faculty member.