 | What Strategy Should We Now Adopt to Protect Academic Freedom? |  | ACADME Today Article |
Date: May 17, 1996
Section: Personal & Professional
Page: A21
By Denise K. Magner
Minneapolis -- Tenure is on the table at the University of Minnesota, although a lot of people here would prefer that it weren't.
The university has struggled through weeks of acrimonious debate over revising its tenure code. Some professors have accused the administration of using "hired guns" -- lawyers and management consultants-- to railroad the faculty. Trust has dissolved to a point where many professors simply don't believe the administration's assurances that tenure will be protected.
"They say, 'We have no intention to damage tenure,'" says Thomas Walsh, a physics professor. "But look at the proposals and the practical implications. Their statements are not meaningful."
No one has proposed abolishing tenure at Minnesota. But professors say the tenure code would be seriously weakened by some of the ideas being circulated: allowing the university to lay off tenured professors if their departments are abolished; specifying that tenure guarantees only part of a professor's compensation; and evaluating the performance of tenured professors.
Faculty resistance, however, does not mean the issue is going to disappear. Minnesota's Board of Regents requested the tenure review in the first place, and it wants to see a revised policy in place by this fall. The regents are being pressed by members o f the Legislature, who believe that in an era of fiscal constraints, the university should be able to lay off tenured professors, especially in its financially troubled Academic Health Center. Earlier this year, lawmakers took the unusual step of making a special, $8.6-million appropriation for the health center contingent on changes in the tenure code.
Administrators here have taken up the governing board's charge, but they, too, are nervous. They fear that the university's reputation has suffered badly from the alarmist tone of e-mail messages that have crisscrossed the country, warning that tenure is under attack in Minnesota. Already, the faculties of Rutgers University and the University of California at Berkeley have passed resolutions condemning any attempt to "undermine" tenure here.
With a suspicious faculty on one side and a skeptical public on the other, Nils Hasselmo, the university's president, says he sees only one way to proceed: "Protect tenure, but be sure we make it an instrument that we can defend, with procedures that demo nstrate we are not protecting incompetence, we are not protecting slovenly behavior. That's the only way that I think we can build credibility."
By the time the university finishes revising its tenure code, Mr. Hasselmo believes it will be a much stronger policy. What professors here want to know is, Whose hand will it strengthen?
Minnesota is one of the most prominent institutions to overhaul its tenure code lately, but it is far from alone. The debate is taking place on many campuses, where administrators, regents, lawmakers, and the news media are raising questions about the tra dition of lifetime employment.
No tradition is more revered by professors. Tenure is essential to academic freedom, which is itself essential to the free flow of ideas that makes a university great, they say. Critics may deride tenure as mere job security, but, professors say, security is, in fact, an important element. Academic freedom, they say, isn't much good if one's salary or job security can be taken away.
Any attempt to tinker with tenure is thus bound to run into opposition. But things have become especially rough here.
In mid-March, faculty members at a campus forum on proposed changes in the tenure code demanded to see specifics. A week later, they were given a list of 13 proposed changes. Critics say that some of the items were faculty ideas, but that most came from a dministrators. It didn't help that the language of the 13 items was drawn up by a group of law professors and lawyers, now known as the "Gang of Four."
Angered by the proposals, the Faculty Senate last month voted overwhelmingly to dismantle an ad hoc panel that had been working on revising the code. Critics say it was dominated by administration allies.
Now some members of the senate are crafting their own version of tenure-code revisions that are to go to the full senate and on to the regents, possibly by June.
"There's anger about the way this was done," says Mr. Walsh, the physics professor. "The entire process of generating proposals was very devious. Nobody's been straight with the faculty about it."
John S. Adams, a professor of geography who was in charge of the disbanded panel, disagrees. "We tried since last December to alert the faculty to the issues that the review of the tenure code was focused on," but the first few faculty forums drew fewer t han a dozen participants each, and interest grew only gradually, he says.
Last month's senate vote was the faculty's attempt to take control of a debate that it felt left out of, says Daniel A. Feeney, a professor of veterinary medicine, who has now become the point man on the tenure review. He says he views the package of 13 p roposals as a "worst-case scenario" put forward for the faculty to pick apart. One measure, for example, would have allowed the provost of the Academic Health Center to reject a faculty member's bid for tenure, if the provost determined that the center did not need to hire someone in the candidate's specialty. (Currently, the only criterion for deciding tenure cases is the candidates' qualifications.)
"The tactical error was to let the senate look at the worst- case scenario," Mr. Feeney says. "People went ballistic."
It is not just the tenure review that has been under fire. The debate has been muddied by the financial troubles of the university's large health center, which includes a hospital and seven schools. Many of the most controversial proposals -- such as one clarifying that tenure guarantees only the base salary of a faculty member, not any extra income such as from a clinical practice -- were included to deal with the center's unique financial problems. Due to heavy competition from health-maintenance organizations, the clinical revenues from patient care that go directly to professors and to the medical school have declined. The medical school was relying on those revenues to help pay the base salaries of its faculty members. The dr op in clinical income has strained its ability to afford all of the clinical professors whom it had tenured when times were good. Critics on the faculty have interpreted the tenure- code revision as an attempt to cut salaries -- first in the medical schoo l and eventually, they fear, in the rest of the university.
A project to "re-engineer" the health center has complicated matters further. Professors have been troubled by a decision by the then-provost, William R. Brody, to bring in a corporate-management consultant. (Mr. Brody is leaving in August to become presi dent of the Johns Hopkins University.)
Critics say Mr. Brody "poisoned the waters" by making public comments that blamed the troubles of the health center on tenure. He alarmed many here when he unveiled a new organizational structure for the health center that, professors say, would dismantle all departments and schools and, in their place, establish interdisciplinary academic "focus groups."
The fears of faculty members are hardly surprising, says Fred L. Morrison, a professor of law. He was a member of the "Gang of Four," but largely escaped the wrath of other faculty members because he is known as the "godfather" of the current tenure code.
"What faculty members have heard and faced over the last five years here," he says, "is two years of salary freezes, a declining level of financial support, a lot of negative publicity about scandals in the health center, and the appearance of a provost w ho wants to abolish all the structures in a third of the university and run things like a business on a top-down basis. Then to be told we need department-based tenure, so if we decide to cut back on something, we can lay you off -- well, I can see why pe ople are concerned."
The issue of "department-based tenure" was not even among the 13 proposals put before the faculty in March. Faculty leaders say it faced certain death. But the idea is still percolating, partly because it appeals to some regents.
Campus policy now provides that a professor's tenure is held at the university level, not just within his or her department. The distinction is critical, because department- based tenure would allow Minnesota to lay off tenured professors if it closed a p rogram. As it is, they must be reassigned.
Administrators from President Hasselmo to Frank B. Cerra, the new provost of the health center, say they have no intention of laying off tenured professors. Mr. Cerra, the former dean of the medical school, adds that he has no intention of dismantling all of the departments and schools in the health center. He says professors have made some false assumptions.
Where administrators stand on department-based tenure varies. In a letter to a regent in November, Mr. Hasselmo listed it as one of the ideas that should be explored. He now says he opposes the concept.
Mr. Brody favors it. Like almost every other medical school in the country, he says, Minnesota's is looking at the tenure code because of financial problems involving clinical-faculty members. He says he never proposed that the tenure code be changed for the entire university. But, he argues, the faculty leadership opposes any attempt to have different tenure policies for different parts of the university.
"I think tenure has gotten blown out of proportion," he says, "because of an overreaction of some of the faculty who've decided they don't want to see any change."
Mr. Hasselmo, who is retiring from the presidency in a year, says: "We've had much reasoned debate. We've also had lots of unreasoned debate."
Faculty anger also has been focused on Jean B. Keffeler, the regent who first proposed a review of the tenure code a year ago. She says abolishing tenure is not on her agenda. What is, she says, is an open discussion of tenure and academic freedom. Frankl y, she says, she hasn't heard it yet.
Whenever the university closes a program, she says, it has to reassign the faculty members, a procedure that minimizes the cost saving. She and other board members would like to see a serious discussion of department-based tenure, and they will take up th e issue if the faculty doesn't, she says.
"On the face of it, that idea makes sense to me -- underscore 'on the face of it,'" she says. But in the revisions that the Faculty Senate is mulling, she says, "nowhere is that issue engaged."
In fact, the senate's policy revisions will include neither that issue nor some of the other proposals that professors felt were intended to place more authority in the hands of administrators. The senate's version is expected to include some form of post -tenure review, an idea that has been controversial on many campuses but seems widely accepted here.
Ms. Keffeler notes that 87 per cent of the university's faculty members are either tenured or on the tenure track. She says tenure is only one piece of the broader question of how to increase the university's flexibility to manage itself. "But the tenure code cannot be held harmless," she says.
"It's so ironic that in an environment where we're totally invested in the pursuit of ideas, this one is so sacrosanct. Ultimately, the unwillingness of higher education to talk about tenure, and its implications for institutional renewal, with a public t hat is highly skeptical, will weaken higher education."
Copyright (c) 1996 by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc.
http://chronicle.com
Title: Minnesota Professors Irate Over Plans They Say Threaten Tenure
Published: 96/05/17