Last week, I mentioned an Inside Higher Ed piece by Bates College history professor David Scobey. Scobey focused on the self-defeating tendency of faculties to evade making themselves accountable for student learning. "Many humanities faculty respond like King Canute, taking arms against the tide," Scobey wrote; "We sabotage efforts to systematically evaluate how well we are educating students via the time-honored faculty practices of filibustering critique, committee inertia, or sheer disengagement. ... Yet (especially in a time of scarcity and crisis) it is a fair challenge to the academy that we be accountable for the vast resources and autonomy to which we lay claim--that we offer a compelling argument about our value to the larger society. Precisely because others have their own reductionist agendas of how to measure success in higher education, we need to offer our own vision of means and ends. The most self-damaging response we can make is to build a defensive bulwark of guild privileges around ourselves."

Those were wise words. And they can be applied to much more than student learning assessment. They could also, for example, be applied to post-tenure review.

Consider the manner in which the University of Maryland faculty just nixed a proposed post-tenure review system--raising eyebrows and real questions about its commitment to professional integrity:

Who reviews the performance of tenured faculty members? Can such reviews have teeth without interfering with the principles of tenure?

Those issues are central to discussions of post-tenure review, a process that exists in some form at many colleges and can be controversial. The University of Maryland at College Park found that out this month when the faculty considered a proposal that would have required annual reviews of tenured faculty performance, and would have allowed sanctions, including pay cuts for some professors who receive three consecutive years of negative reviews. The faculty overwhelmingly rejected the plan, seeing it as unnecessary, unfair and a diminishment of tenure.

The leading public advocates for the plan were not administrators, but students. The leaders of both the undergraduate and graduate student governments both came out strongly for the plan, saying that students are more likely to have problems with tenured than non-tenured professors. But students were not the key voting constituency here, so it's back to the drawing board for Maryland.

[...]

B. Robert Kreiser, associate secretary of the AAUP, said that the major problem with the Maryland proposal was that it shifted the burden of proof to tenured professors. In cases of "severe sanctions," he said -- and the AAUP considers a pay cut such a sanction -- a university administration should have the burden of demonstrating the need for some action. Setting up the system so that faculty members can challenge a decision, while giving them some rights, does not reflect the concept of job security that should be associated with tenure.

"Placing the burden on the professor undermines tenure," he said.

Privately, some faculty members said that the strong opposition to the proposal was in part due to its consideration during the economic downturn. Maryland professors are facing furloughs, salary freezes, and numerous cuts in campus programs, these professors noted, and that environment is not a good one in which to talk about a system that would add faculty duties (serving on the committees in each department) and potentially cut some professors' pay.

Student leaders have been critical of the faculty vote.

Jonathan Sachs, president of the undergraduate student government, said that in general, he appreciates the quality of teaching at Maryland. But he said that he has noticed that those without tenure "tend to be really good," while "a small percentage" of tenured professors "neglect their classrooms." Sachs said he saw the faculty vote against the review plan as "arrogance," and said that they should be "accountable" for their performance.

Anupama K. Kothari, a Ph.D. student in business and president of the Graduate Student Government, said she too was bothered by the vote. She said that when the graduate student organization hears complaints from students about problems with professors who ignore their work, take people off projects for now reason, or "abuse" them, "it is almost always about a tenured professor."

She said that graduate students feel that those without tenure are supportive, "but once they get tenure. ..."

Many graduate students were "shocked to see faculty shoot down" the proposal, Kothari said. She characterized the reviews proposed as "mild," and said that the professors' vote "made many of us suspicious of them." She added: "If you are doing a good job, why are you so scared of being reviewed?"

The resistance to post-tenure review is not just a resistance, then, to accountability--but also a tacit confession on the part of the entire professoriate that existing mechanisms for faculty assessment and review are already ripe for abuse. In exchange for tenure, they put up with a few moments of vulnerability to it--but they don't want any more than they already have. This is one reason why, at many schools that do have post-tenure review, it is a meaningless rubber-stamp exercise.

Still, as I think about it, and I think about these things a lot, I conclude that if faculty want to continue to have the unique and marvelous prerogatives of tenure, self-governance, and the individual and unit-level autonomy they accord, they have to do post-tenure review, and they have to do it right. That will mean cleaning up their acts in more ways than one.

For more on post-tenure review--what it is, what it ought to be, and how it has managed not to work at school after school, see Anne Neal's 2008 essay in the AAUP magazine Academe.