Proposed rules could lead to under performing tenure faculty dismissal

Ball State has won awards for its effort to make a
Ball State has won awards for its effort to make a

A new proposal to tighten tenure faculty performance review could lead to the termination of long-term faculty who don’t do their job.

Under the proposal, if a tenured faculty member receives two consecutive years, or three years in a five-year period, of unsatisfactory performance on their annual reviews, they will enter into an remediation period. Each department determines what is considered unsatisfactory.

In the remediation period, the faculty member’s peers will develop a plan to get them back on track. If by the following year they are not performing well, they will be classified as chronically unsatisfactory.

The university’s Judicial Committee will then make a recommendation to the Provost’s office on whether or not to terminate them. There is an appeal process for every level of the performance review.

“It’s kind of like a three strikes you’re out thing,” said Terry King, provost and vice president for academic affairs.

Currently, if a faculty member is unsatisfactory in their performance, they will not be eligible for an increase in their salary. The new policy targets underperforming faculty.

Ball State is behind its peers with faculty evaluation.

At Indiana University campuses and Purdue University, a similar process is already in place to review tenured faculty’s performance and to make salary or termination decisions, King said in a presentation he gave to the University Senate in October.

King said the instances where termination would be necessary are incredibly rare. The need for this policy comes from inside the departments and competing with other universities, he added.

“When I talk with department chairs [and junior faculty], they have been asking for something like this for some time,” King said. “I’m convinced everybody wants [to do their job]. They were all good at some point in time."

At the last University Senate meeting, King’s primer on the new policy was met with mixed feelings.

The potential to limit tenure for faculty is a primary concern because it has been an established principle at Ball State, said Michele Chiuini, representative from the department of architecture. He is in favor of performance reviews, but said it should be approached delicately because of the possibility of terminating tenure.

He is also concerned about the possibility that the new policy won't take into account a person’s situation.

“Let’s make a scenario where you have a tenured professor who becomes completely unproductive,” Chiuini said. “So that shows it was a bad choice to tenure that person, or something has happened to the life of that person like a medical issue or something else that has caused them to become unsatisfactory.”

On the other hand, some colleges perform post-tenure reviews, which gauges all faculty after they've become tenured regardless of past performance, but King said it isn't practical.

“That’s a lot of work and I don’t want to go down that road,” King said. “Post-tenure review is incredibly hard to implement, because every year you are on a committee or being reviewed. Our faculty does a lot of really good stuff, so we don’t want to be wasting their time concluding that they do good stuff.”

Some states mandate post-tenure review. Indiana does not.

“We hear inklings of it here and there, but I’d rather be ahead of the game,” King said. “I’d rather not have the legislators, or anyone else, tell us what to do.”

Part of the issue with this topic is the spreading of incorrect information, said Michael Hanley, chair of faculty council and the representative from the department of journalism.

“It’s not really tenure review, and that’s part of the issue,” he said. “It’s an annual review that looks at tenured faculty performance to see how they are performing in their departments. It’s some way to continually monitor their performance after they are tenured. I think people are making this larger than it is.”

This review process starts from the bottom of the university and then goes to the top, the opposite of what some people think, Hanley said.

“It’s not the university sees that you’ve done something wrong and you should be thrown out,” he said. “The university doesn’t want to lose faculty, and the faculty don’t want to lose faculty. It’s just wanting everyone to do their job, and if they aren’t, then it affects students and that’s what matters.”

The policy is being reviewed and revised in the Salary and Benefits Committee of Ball State. The new rules could be to the floors of the larger university governing bodies as early as December or January.

“Everybody is going to get a chance to give input on this,” Hanley said.

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