The Boston University Board of Trustees’ Committee on Academic Affairs adopted in mid-October a minor amendment allowing specialized professionals to join review boards that nominate professors for tenure.
To award tenure a promotion that provides job security and freedom to create curricula without administrative interference a larger pool of investigators can now look at professors, including professionals within their fields of study.
The new amendment gives the provost and the chair of the Faculty Council the ability to temporarily add professionals to 15-member faculty committees that review professors for tenure. Professors must be considered for the promotion within six years of coming to BU.
However, no changes to the policy regarding tenure evaluation and voting procedures have occurred, Provost Dennis Berkey said in an email.
‘There has been no change to the actual policy in the Faculty Handbook,’ he said. ‘There will be additional members added to the [university] committee composed entirely of faculty to ensure that there are members with expertise relevant to each of the candidates.’
The Faculty Council and the Office of the Provost annually creates a 15-member University Promotion and Tenure committee to recommend that the president and the provost consider a faculty member for tenure. The president and provost then decide if they will bring the candidate’s name before the Board of Trustees, which makes the final vote on the matter.
Faculty Council Chair Herbert Voigt said the committee, which oversees 40 to 50 cases a year, works with a smaller committee of faculty members from within the eligible professor’s college called Appointments, Promotion and Tenure committees. The size of these APT committees varies among the different colleges, he added.
Berkey said the two tiers of committees provide a balanced view, though they may not always understand the intricacies of every candidate’s specialized field of study.
‘An advantage of these committees is that they provide a unit-wide perspective. A disadvantage is that they frequently lack specialized knowledge specific to the candidates,’ he said in a memorandum sent to the faculty of the Charles River Campus and obtained by The Daily Free Press. ‘There are more departments in [the College of Arts and Sciences] than there are seats on its APT Committee, for example, and many more departments campus-wide than can be represented among any 15 members of the UPT Committee.’
While the provost and the Faculty Council chair may now appoint consultants to the UPT, the APT will remain unchanged, Voigt said.
‘The change is that for specific instances, the provost may bring in experts,’ he said. ‘Currently Dennis [Berkey] has appointed all of them. However, he has said that in the future I will be a part of the decision process.’
Voigt, who served on the UPT for two years, said he did not consider this amendment a major change because ‘everything that can be done now could have been done before. It’s just that now the ability to do so is official.’
CAS Dean Jeffrey Henderson said the amendment is effective immediately, but the change is not yet included in the current edition of the faculty handbook.
Berkey said President emeritus John Silber proposed the change while he was chancellor and the Trustees’ Committee on Academic Affairs ‘discussed and shaped’ the official wording.
Voigt said he does not object to the change, but said he feels ‘that this is not something that needed to go to the Trustees.’
Berkey called the amendment an ‘important change in the way we implement policy, but not an actual change in policy.’
Former Faculty Council Chair William Skocpol would not comment on whether he personally approves of the changes but said he will ‘look into the process that brought about this procedure’s change.’
‘The letter is an accurate statement of the position that had to be taken at the particular moment when this was passed by the Board of Trustees in the waning days of the Silber administration,’ Skocpol said.
According to Skocpol, Silber eliminated the tenure process for the Medical Campus in the 1970s when ‘a very large group of medical people were coming up for tenure.’
A number of medical schools do not offer tenure to their faculty because of the ‘economic security of the profession,’ Skocpol said.
School of Social Work Dean Wilma Peebles-Wilkins said tenure is very important for recruiting faculty.
‘We take it very, very seriously,’ she said. ‘If we didn’t have tenure, we wouldn’t have the powerful and competitive faculty that we do. Tenure is a form of protection and allows us to attract professors of a higher level.’
Economics Department Associate Chairman Michael Manove, who has already received tenure, called the tenure process ‘hopelessly bureaucratic’ despite the changes.
‘There are hundreds of man-hours spent on the process,’ Manove said. ‘I don’t think this is a step toward eliminating any of the bureaucracy. I fear it will only add to it. The department should be the primary review for tenure. Changes need to be made. The process needs to be simplified.’
According to Voigt, candidates who go through the tenure process have full access to the UPT and APT reports and know who sits on the committees. However, all of the members’ testimonies are anonymous.
Manove said the extensive and anonymous nature of the process allows administrators to tamper with information.
‘A lot of the bureaucracy is used to cover the asses of the administrators,’ Manove said. ‘The department administrators are often asked to lie.’