Dear Rep. Sunseri and committee members:
The University of Oregon opposes HB 2072, which would eliminate tenure at Oregon's public colleges and universities. This bill is unnecessary, damages the ability to recruit good faculty and requires more bureaucracy on all OUS campuses.
Universities provide Oregon with outstanding faculty who have demonstrated their ability as teachers and scholars. We are already losing excellent faculty to other institutions, which pay higher salaries and provide more support staff to faculty than does the UO. In fact, average faculty salaries at the UO are only 85 percent of the average at comparable institutions. We will not be able to fill these positions or any other future positions with qualified faculty if we are unable to offer tenure. The UO and other OUS institutions operate in a national faculty market in which tenure is a professional norm.
The university has an extensive system of ongoing faculty evaluation. This includes post-tenure review, student course evaluations (mandatory for every course), merit-equity reviews, self-evaluations provided by faculty to their department or program heads for review each year, reviews by outside accreditation agencies, and so on. In fact, post-tenure review is scheduled for discussion at the February meeting of the Oregon University System Board, where current processes will be strengthened and improved.
The bill also involves additional costs to the system. When fully implemented, the bill would require that new contracts be negotiated with each faculty member every three years. At the UO alone, 631 faculty positions would be affected, although not all would be covered immediately. This means that over 200 individual contracts would have to be negotiated every year, adding a significant cost burden in terms of staff time.
Elimination of tenure would be devastating to the quality of public higher education in Oregon. Even a serious attempt to eliminate tenure in OUS institutions would cause serious damage. For these reasons, we ask you to oppose HB 2072.
Sincerely,
John Moseley
Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
University of Oregon