Senators,
Despite one year of committee work, the University Senate will be presented on Wednesday by a rejection of the vast majority of the principles reflected in the post tenure review policies that the committees drew up.
In their place, a document will be offered by the Senate President, assertedly working alone, presenting his own ideas. This memorandum analyzes the vast changes that he wants to work in the proposals created by two committees of faculty members.
Before proceeding to the meat of the memo, I have some preliminary, procedural comments.
WHO SHOULD CHAIR THE DEBATE ON WEDNESDAY I request that Professor Hurwit abide by standard parliamentary procedures and "stand aside" from his duties as chair during the debate on post-tenure review policy. His own revisions are the controversial reason that a real debate seems likely (or at least necessary). An advocate for his own, personally written procedures cannot be a fair presiding officer. Parliamentary rules everywhere recognize the importance of impartiality in the chair. This is not a comment on the person, but on the position.
We should abide by these rules. I hope that Professor Hurwit will see the wisdom in doing so voluntarily. Even to ask Senators "Is it OK for me to preside" puts people in the position of seeming to disagree for ad hominem reasons. Senators should not be put through that. Professor Hurwit should himself do the right thing, simply because it is the right thing.
MY INABILITY TO PARTICIPATE Although my protests a year ago led to the creation of the Senate Committee that worked during the fall, I cannot be at the Senate meeting. Unfortunately, I will be on a plane headed for Europe while you are debating the post-tenure review proposals, where I will speak to a different parliament, that of a country in the former Soviet Union. I hope to return to find that our academic freedoms and our processes of collegial, committee-centered work have been upheld by your votes. In the following memo, I have done my best to understand all the changes. I may have made some minor errors but if so, that cannot vitiate the rest of my critique.
SENATE ACTION VS. ADMINISTRATIVE ACTION Some believe that if the Senate does not act, the Administration will impose its own procedures. This is easily handled by having the Senate adopt the report of the Conference committee, and leaving it to the Administration to decide whether it is so dissatisfied with our faculty work that it wishes to override our judgment. There is certainly no reason for us to do something with which we cannot in good conscience agree.
A PROCEDURAL SOLUTION Given the time pressure that is being imposed on us as a faculty, I hope that you do the one thing that respects the committee process and that gives us a chance to proceed deliberately as a faculty: adopt one of the recommendations of the two faculty committees and leave those who would make major changes in those recommendations the task of individually justifying each change, in separate votes - either at the same meeting or a subsequent one.
HOW THIS MEMO IS ORGANIZED In the following memorandum, I have analyzed in some detail the changes that Prof. Hurwit wants to make to the work of the Senate committees. In presenting them this memorandum seeks to group the many changes according to seven categories, some more important than others. The items will not be taken up in order, working through the redraft. I urge you, however, to take the time to read about the problems. After the vote on Wednesday it will be too late to discover that our tenure has been dramatically weakened.
To have tenure is not just to have a job. It is to have protections in one's job, because of the benefits that bestowing academic freedom on faculty members brings to the University and to society. Tenure is not "ended" only when a system is changed to make it easy to fire professors. It is also ended as a meaningful protection that can be relied upon when the salary and working conditions can be changes for punitive reasons -- that is, because of perceived "deficiencies" -- without any longer providing the procedural protections that surround "real" tenure. The loss of the traditional procedural protections means the loss of real tenure.
Prof. Hurwit's sentence purports to be required by the changes in the state system's new regulations and Internal Management Directives that were adopted without (in the instance of salary decreases) prior public discussion. But the regulations and IMDs do NOT require the kind of provision that Prof. Hurwit has drafted.
The regulations state that a "purpose" of post-tenure reviews is to "clearly link remuneration (i.e., increases, stasis, or decreases) to faculty performance." The Internal Management Directive 4.002 is said to require that salary adjustment decisions reflect the results of performance reviews.
Prof. Hurwit has not provided the exact text ot the OAR and IMD as part of his proposal. But it is clear from the paraphrase provided that the OAR and IMD do NOT require that the protections of for-cause proceedings need to be set aside and ignored in accomplishing the linkage and reflection required. Yet those protections are not required in his redraft of the work of our committees.
Any faculty body that fails to insist -- in the post-tenure review policy that it adopts AS A FACULTY -- on full academic due process protections for a decrease in a professor's salary has simply given away its academic freedom.
The full panoply of for-cause hearing requirements are there for a reason. Their purpose is to assure that actions that SANCTION or DISADVANTAGE a professor with tenure must be done only after the University carries a burden of proof, carried in accordance with formal procedures that protect the faculty members rights. Post tenure review does not afford academic due process by itself.
To write a linkage (in the "Use of Reviews" section) between post-tenure review and decreases in salary (as Prof. Hurwit has done) without ALSO requiring that decreases take place only with the due process protections for academic freedom is profoundly discouraging for this University's faculty governance process.
When word gets out in the American academic world about what Oregon will have done in this regard to erode tenure, the likelihood seems slim that this University can attract world-class scholars with its less-than-adequate salaries, simply by pointing to Oregon's beautiful mountains. It will no longer be able to point to academic freedom as among Oregon's attributes.
I am fully aware that those who want to remove the protections of for-cause proceedings will call my warnings extremist or unjustified. But labels do not provide answers.
Salary decreases can be included, to comply with the OAR and IMD, but they should simply be REFERENCED as something that can occur if the Administration, upon receipt of a thoroughly negative post-tenure review, chooses to take the professor into for-cause sanctions. Any such provision should ALSO state that the conclusions of the post-tenure review committees and administrators cannot themselves be introduced into any such proceedings. In such proceedings, the facts must be separately proved, with the burden of proof on the University.
Anything less will leave academic freedom at Oregon merely a term, and not the reality that ENDproved, with the burden of proof on the University. Anything less will leave academic freedom at Oregon merely a term, and not the reality that other major research universities enjoy.
1. Under Procedure, section A should say that "the faculties" of each unit, department, or program should establish procedures. This is fundamental as an aspect of faculty governance.2. In the same paragraph, the last two sentences should be deleted. I think it is reasonable for the Dean to "review the procedures for compliance" (possible alternative language I would offer), but the current role of the dean in "establishment" or "approval" is not in accord with our traditions.
3. In the first paragraph of section B of Procedure, to say that the third-year review "shall be managed by the department or program head" is not only a dramatic change from faculty governance, but unprecedented in this University. Similarly, to say that it is the "responsibility of the appropriate Dean" to ensure excellence and fairness contradicts traditional faculty governance in personnel matters.
4. Procedure, old section C (new section D) eliminates the conduct of reviews by a committee of faculty members, replacing it with the department or program head. Turning the university into a business management center is not what we should be doing.
5. In Procedure, old section C (new section D), in the second paragraph of that section, the insertion of the new words "if applicable" before "peer review committee" is yet another example of planned decline in faculty governance and instead exhalting of administrative governance.
6. The deletion of the paragraph, "Review by Peers" is another example of managerialism. We must retain faculty review.
7. Under "Filing or (and) Consultation," the deletion of the role of the peer review committee is yet another example of this. In the next paragraph, the reference to review conducted by the department or program head should be dropped. Our committees considered all those possibilities, and chose faculty review, not administrative review. All the other changes are to the same effect.
1. The change of "a process of consultation" from a mutual process to one that is done by a department head, one-way in format, presenting to the professor a letter with "the results of the consultation," is yet another top-down aspect. All this should be left out.2. Under purpose of consultation, the consultation is now in the hands of the administration, not equally with the faculty member. This top-down approach is harmful.
3. Paragraph 7, Mediation Process, has been change in subtle but significant ways. Where previously, the peer committee and the individual professor had the option of bring in a mediator where they could not agree, Jeff Hurwit would have this fit within a specified process called a "grievance" or resolution of "complaints." Many professors will be reluctant to enter into a process that, however much the term "informal" is written in, here or there, characterizes them as a person who is "complaining" or "aggrieved." This shoehorning of a professor's concerns with a peer report into a structure containing such words and terms simply makes it less likely that a professor will seek to protect himself or herself. The University, as well as the professor, will suffer from this "proceduralization" of a difference of understanding or opinion.
4. Another significant change takes place in paragraph 2. under "The Sixth-Year Major Review." Here the faculty member is told NOT to submit her or his self-evaluation to one's colleagues (that is, a peer committee), but to submit it to the "department or program head." Thus one is "reporting to superiors" rather than discussing one's work with one's peers -- another implementation of a managerial and top-down philosophy in the post-tenure review process.
5. Paragraph 6, Notification, encapsulates the dramatic shifts that Jeff Hurwit has written into his post-tenure review proposal, as compared to the committees' work. Whereas the committees had envisioned a process characterized by the maximum degree of collaborative work between a professor and her/his colleagues for the sixth-year review, in which only cases of clear dereliction of duty would eventually move toward a more confrontational atmosphere (through informal discussions, followed by mediation, followed by eventual resort to other means such as for-cause sanctions), the Hurwit draft moves quickly to "documentation" of "deficiencies" at the earliest possible moment.
That is, once a report has been written "on" a faculty member, it
is IMMEDIATELY given also to the Department head, the Dean, and the Provost.
The faculty member must then "sign the report" or proceed otherwise. There is no longer any chance for the faculty member to convince the committee that it has made mistakes and to have those mistakes corrected BEFORE the report enters into the filing system and minds of "higher-ups." Once the committee has spoken, the reputation of the faculty member begins its downward spiral in the minds of others. Lord Healey once said, "A lie is half way around the world while the truth is still pulling its boots on."
The same can be said of career-damaging mistakes, in a system in which
a faculty member has no chance to correct error or change opinions before
the Dean and Provost have a copy of a post-tenure review containing such
mistakes.
1. Paragraph 5 deletes the word "peer" from "peer committee" and
changes it to "review committee." This is consistent with all the other
changes. Instead of being reviewed by one's peers, one is to be reviewed
by a more distant institution.
2. Under "The Sixth-Year Major Review," Jeff wants to eliminate the idea of a peer review by one's colleagues from the administrative unit, putting in its place "the elected Post-Tenure Review Committee of her or his school or college." This is excessive top-down specification of how peer committees should be set up, and at one level in the University heirarchy they should operate. It appears that the reason must be to prevent one's nearby colleagues from evaluating one's work, and to have a more distant body do so. In that sense, then, it continues the trend toward management of individual faculty members by persons at a distance, rather than collegial work on faculty performance by one's nearer colleagues.
1. The deletion of our entire first paragraph under section B of Procedure is a profound rejection of the judgment of two faculty committees, who had good reasons to decide that the "faculty" of each unit should decide how their peer committees should be chosen. To have "a small peer committee" appointed by the Dean as the preferred method (in the new paragraph drawn up by Jeff) contradicts faculty choice.2. In section A, the requirement for annual submissions of a C.v. each spring is completely new, and another burden.
In the list of bulleted items for the self-study in a third-year
review, we had good reasons to mandate peer teaching evaluations, not merely
student evaluations. All faculty members on both committees agreed. To
modify that now with the term "when applicable" is yet another step away
from peer faculty responsibility for the quality of our teaching, placing
the emphasis on student evaluations.
John Bonine
P.S. This is important. I have stayed up late at night preparing this, because of its importance. I hope you will yourselves take command of this issue and not let the result be one that we will all live to regret.