Post-Tenure Review: An Alarming Case
Why U. of Florida Professors Decry ‘Chaotic’ Post-Tenure Review That Failed Nearly a Fifth of Those Evaluated
The striking results from the first round of Florida’s controversial state-mandated post-tenure reviews have confirmed the fears of many faculty advocates at its flagship campus, who criticized what they saw as a rushed and unfair process and top-down evaluation criteria. In interviews with The Chronicle, several scholars at peer institutions faulted the metrics as narrow and inflexible.
At the University of Florida, more than a quarter of faculty members who were identified for review either didn’t measure up, resigned, or retired.
The process, which took place this spring, initially identified 262 tenured faculty members to undergo post-tenure review, though 226 were ultimately evaluated. Of those who were formally reviewed, 17 percent didn’t pass muster: Five received the lowest possible ranking, “unsatisfactory,” and were issued a “notice of termination,” according to a July 1 memo obtained by The Chronicle through a public-records request. Thirty-four were classified as “does not meet expectations” and will be placed on a one-year performance-improvement plan. Ninety-eight were rated as “meets expectations” and 89 as “exceeds expectations.” Another 31 professors weren’t reviewed because they “either retired, entered retirement agreements, or resigned during the review period,” while five faculty members will be reviewed later because of a concurrent performance review or medical issue.
J. Scott Angle, Florida’s provost, said in a June meeting with the Faculty Senate that, for the “unsatisfactory” category, his decisions were fairly clear-cut. “Those that were defined as unsatisfactory really were not good teachers, they were not good researchers, and they weren’t doing any service. I found them to be quite easy and quite obvious,” Angle said. “The other categories were harder to define, and that’s where we really had to dig into the cases for each one.”(Angle, who was appointed as provost in January by former university president Ben Sasse, will step down from that post on September 6 to make way for Joseph Glover, who previously held the job for 15 years and is returning to Gainesville after a monthlong stint as provost at the University of Arizona.)
Individual faculty members receive a performance rating from their college’s dean, and the provost ultimately accepts, rejects, or modifies it, according to the university’s policy. (The new policy is the result of a bill passed by Republican legislators in 2022 that requires tenured professors to be evaluated every five years. A corresponding move by the board that governs Florida’s public universities allows for faculty members who receive the lowest of four possible rankings to be fired and gives a university’s president the final say on those decisions.)
The review, according to university-wide criteria, is based on each professor’s research, teaching, service, “history of professional conduct and performance of academic responsibilities,” and any noncompliance with state laws and university regulations, unapproved absences from teaching, or “substantiated” student complaints, among other factors.
In addition, each department or unit has a set of specific research criteria to account for differences in productivity standards across disciplines. But it’s not clear who decided on those criteria. Though a university spokesperson said that the provost’s office “sought to work with” colleges, departments, and tenured faculty members to develop the criteria, results from a survey of members of the United Faculty of Florida’s campus bargaining unit indicate that professors may not have had a say in how productivity in their fields is defined.
In that survey, 40.6 percent of respondents said that tenured faculty members in their unit were not given the opportunity to provide formal feedback to the provost about each draft of the research criteria. A similar share, 43.7 percent, indicated that they hadn’t seen their department’s final criteria. Among them were faculty members who were being reviewed.
“We submitted the packet without knowing what the criteria were,” said Meera Sitharam, a professor of computer science who was selected for post-tenure review. Sitharam, who is also the president of the union chapter, provided The Chronicle with the survey results and the research criteria for each of the bargaining unit’s 14 departments.
What’s more, Sitharam said, faculty members weren’t sure how the criteria would be applied. Of respondents whose units had announced final research criteria at the time they took the survey, nearly 40 percent said they were unsure whether a professor who had “avoided overall unsatisfactory ratings” in their past five annual reviews would receive a “meets expectations” rating in this year’s post-tenure review system. A similar number said that a professor in the same situation would not “meet expectations” based on the criteria.
In open-ended responses to the survey, scholars criticized the post-tenure review process as “chaotic,” “unduly rushed,” and “rendering the notion of tenure at UF as essentially meaningless.” Angle, in his remarks to the Faculty Senate, acknowledged the process was “rushed” this year due to the timing of the legislation, but said that “overall, it probably was reasonably effective.” A university spokesperson declined to comment on the survey results.
Comparing Criteria
Several survey respondents said their unit’s research criteria placed unrealistic expectations on productivity. “I feel absolutely cheated of the opportunity to conduct long-term research projects in this push for quantifiable results on a five-year basis,” one wrote. Another said the standards “seem disconnected from reality: They expect top-10 level productivity from low-ranked departments with few resources.”
The Chronicle examined the research criteria for the highest-enrolling department in each of the five biggest colleges in the UFF-UF bargaining unit and asked department chairs at Florida’s peer institutions to weigh in on whether the productivity metrics comported with what they’d expect from tenured scholars in their own departments. (The fifth-largest college in Florida’s bargaining unit is the College of Journalism and Communication, which has a single college-wide set of criteria. Several leaders of journalism and communications units at Florida’s peer institutions declined comment or did not respond to emails from The Chronicle.)
Psychology
For example, Florida’s psychology department classifies a professor as “does not meet expectations” — and will place them on a performance-improvement plan — if, in the past five years, they produced fewer than 12 peer-reviewed articles or similar scholarly works and showed “minimal effort to garner extramural support” and “inconsistent or lack of evidence of professional impact.” Those who produced seven or fewer articles, displayed “substantial and chronic deficiencies or failure to meet expectations in research, scholarship, or creative works” and little or no effort to “follow previous advice” are deemed “unsatisfactory” and subject to termination. The document also notes that “reviews are to be conducted holistically such that higher achievement on one criterion may be evaluated to account for lower achievement on another criterion.”
But it’s not clear from the document if, or how, those criteria are being weighted, said Duane T. Wegener, chair of the psychology department at Ohio State University. While Wegener’s department conducts post-tenure reviews every three years, evaluating similar aspects of a faculty member’s performance, it does not use strict publication counts to do so. “Not every peer-reviewed research article is created equal,” Wegener said. “Some of them might be short and might only have one or two studies, others might have six or 10 or many more studies that are necessary to make a particular point, or maybe even to reach the threshold for publication in that particular outlet.” For that reason, he added, “it’s really hard to say, ‘Just give me a number.’”
In a system that privileges article counts, Wegener said, scholars may break their research into what he called “least-publishable units.” The logic, he said, might be: “Why do a big paper that has a whole lot of data, that is making a deep and strong case for a particular point, if you’re only going to be evaluated as doing a reasonable job if you carve that up into many small pieces and try to get as many papers out of it as you can?”
Computer Science
To earn a “meets expectations” ranking in Florida’s department of computer and information science and Engineering, faculty members must have published between five and 16 peer-reviewed articles, brought in at least $800,000 in external contracts and grants, and have graduated two or three doctoral students as the committee chair in a five-year span.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison also conducts post-tenure review every five years, Stephen J. Wright, chair of its department of computer sciences, told The Chronicle via email. “But we do not have such detailed and inflexible metrics. I believe these are counterproductive.” Wright noted that Florida’s policies did not distinguish based on “the quality and influence or the article or the quality of the publication venue,” which he said “just encourages junk publishing.” It’s also much harder to get grants in theoretical computer science, Wright said, than it is in fields like databases or networking. (Wright said he spoke only for himself and not for Wisconsin.)
Finance
In its criteria, Florida’s Warrington College of Business does draw a distinction among publication venues, using a scoring system that assigns faculty members point values for different forms of research. A publication in a “peer-reviewed general-purpose journal” that’s “deemed top-tier in any business academic discipline,” for instance, is worth three points, while publishing in a top-tier journal “within a narrow sub-specialty” earns two points. A paper published in another venue, or a working paper submitted to either category of top-tier journal, nets one point. In the department of finance, insurance and real estate, faculty members who “meet expectations” should have three or more points in those categories in the past five years and demonstrate “evidence of some professional impact.”
At the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, things are done differently, said Paolo Pasquariello, chair of the finance area. There, Pasquariello said in an email to The Chronicle, “promotion, tenure, and evaluation decisions are not based on mechanistic criteria and point-scoring of individual faculty activities; rather, these decisions are based on a holistic assessment of individual faculty’s abilities, internal and external contributions to teaching, service, and the intellectual environment of the school and the areas."
Kinesiology
To meet expectations in Florida’s department of applied physiology and kinesiology, faculty members must publish between 11 and 29 peer-reviewed research articles and net a minimum of $10,000 in grants or external financial support.
Kim C. Graber, head of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s department of health and kinesiology, said in an email to The Chronicle that she found those requirements “concerning.” Accumulating grants and publications, she wrote, “is important, but it’s only one indicator of excellence. Some faculty may publish at a lower rate because their studies require greater time or more effort, yet they may ultimately have higher impact.” Florida’s rubric, she added, contains “an over-emphasis on quantity and a curious disregard for quality.” Nor does it address factors like the relative speed and ease of publication in some disciplines compared to others, or whether a single-authored publication should be scored higher than one with multiple contributors.
‘A Success’
Several legal cases challenging Florida’s post-tenure review policy are pending, including one lawsuit that seeks to declare it unconstitutional and another that contests the ban on neutral arbitration, a process that allows a third party to weigh in on a dispute between the university and faculty member.
While the university declined to make Angle or other administrators available for an interview, Angle said in a statement that the first year of the post-tenure review system had been “a success.”
“Critics have claimed post-tenure review effectively eliminates tenure at UF. Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said. “By ensuring that tenure provides the critical tangible benefits the system intends, we help arm it against attacks that it is an unfair and unneeded ‘job for life’ and should be eliminated.”
Still, the rate of unfavorable post-tenure review results was strikingly high at the flagship relative to other institutions in the state system. The proportions of faculty members in the “does not meet expectations” and “unsatisfactory” categories were notably lower in five of the State University System of Florida’s other institutions, according to data published by The Independent Florida Alligator. At the University of Central Florida, which had the next-highest proportion of professors in those categories, that figure was 11.1 percent. All professors reviewed at Florida State University either met or exceeded expectations.
Among the 39 faculty members in the “does not meet expectations” and “unsatisfactory” categories this year at the state flagship, about 60 percent were associate professors and 40 percent were full professors.
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