GUEST COLUMN: Tenure and Academic Values

The recent complaints I have read and heard about the University's tenure process deserve a response. While I responded to several statements and questions from students at the English department forum a few weeks ago, it is important that all students understand the values that determine the outcome of this process in a research university. The more excellent the university, the higher the standard -- both in quantity and in quality -- for the work its faculty members do. Penn is among the best research universities in the world, and true excellence in research must be regarded as the sine qua non for promotion to a tenured position in its faculty. Only the faculty can judge excellence in research. Those at the forefront of their fields are best able to assess the quality of contributions to their subjects. Moreover, the faculty of a research university are required to train graduate students as well as to teach undergraduates. There are many undergraduate teachers in the world who do scholarly work of sufficient quantity and quality to make their undergraduate teaching superb, but who do not meet the scholarly standard required for graduate teaching at the highest level. In an institution like Penn, the faculty occasionally may support the promotion to tenure of a merely acceptable undergraduate teacher because he or she is a stellar teacher of graduate students, which is an important value in a research university. Service, frequently service to the University itself, is secondary in tenure decisions. We do want to encourage faculty to commit themselves to the institution and to serve in its governance structures and other activities, but in the tenure decision we are most concerned with their contributions to the basic functions of teaching and research. Many members of the university and scholarly community participate in the measurement of quality that leads to the decision to promote or not promote a faculty members to tenure. The voices of all of these people -- students, faculty, external referees and administrators -- are "heard" in the decision-making process. The department puts the file together, gathering reviews of the candidate's teaching activity from undergraduate and graduate students, collecting the published and unpublished research work, and seeking the opinions of leading scholars in the field from other universities-- American and foreign. The department then reviews and assesses this material and makes its own judgment. The next level of review is the school's personnel committee, which reviews the file in depth and makes a recommendation to the dean. The dean then does his or her own review and sends the case forward to the provost, who consults with a committee of senior academic administrators before making a decision. Promotion to tenure requires final action by the Board of Trustees. The case can be stopped by a negative decision at the departmental, school, or provostial level. Only in rare cases will a negative decision be reviewed at a higher level. The outcome of this multi-layered process is determined by a balancing of the performance in all areas. Students and faculty often say that the tenure process must or can be unfair because it is confidential. In fact, there are many checks in the process that make the process as fair as a human judgment can be. And confidentiality makes it better rather than worse. First, confidentiality permits the contributors to speak frankly, which is a necessary condition of good judgments. Assessments hampered by the fear of reprisal (for students and close colleagues) or of enmity, revenge and badgering (for external reviewers and colleagues in other departments or schools) are not likely to be good assessments. Second, confidentiality protects the candidate. Think of how you would feel if your performance in your courses -- minutely analyzed and frankly judged as it would be in a tenure file -- were to be discussed publicly in class or in the DP. Most of the time the many voices heard in tenure files sing a harmonious chorus that makes the decision relatively easy -- positive or negative. Sometimes, however, the voices are discordant, and the departments, personnel committees and administrators have to weigh and balance them to judge the case. Given the weightiness of the decision for the University, which must plan on having a tenured faculty member remain in its service for 25 to 35 years, the process should err on the side of caution. Having said that, I want to acknowledge how incomprehensible it must seem to students when the University refuses to grant tenure to a superb teacher and mentor. We who make such decisions do not do so lightly or happily. We are making a difficult judgment of the whole, complicated record of the faculty member's performance and promise for the future. For the tenure decision is about the future, not the past.