Notes from the AFC breakfast with the Regents
Friday, April 28, 2006
MU 222 Mojave Room
7:30 a.m.

Present:

Robert Bulla, Wanda Howell, Robert Mitchell, Ed Hermes, Marsha Yowell, Mark Denke, Fred Boice, J.C. Mutchler, Dennis DeConcini, Ernest Calderon, Joel Sideman, Stephanie Jacobson, Cathy McGonigle, Darby Shaw, Susan Mattson, Christine Palacios, Gary Stuart, George Davis, Marcus Ford, Richard Morris, John Brock, and Duane Roen

Wanda Howell

We are here today to get to know our Regents better, and to work with our faculty representatives from all campuses, share our differences and our commonalities, and to discuss the issues of concern across all the campuses.  We want to thank our Regents who took the time to join us today.  The main subject of our meeting is to discuss Post Tenure Review, and when we received the Board data, we decided that we might also like to address some comments expressed by the Regents at their February meeting. 

1) This is about getting faculty to the point of assessment, which essentially begins with the faculty application process, and that is a group of high quality individuals from which to choose.

2) Next is the annual review process, there is preparation each year up to the sixth year and then the in-depth tenure review occurs.  The statistics we have reviewed show that 1/3 of the faculty drop out before there is a tenure decision.  We need to see what issues are behind that such as diversity, or other things that create that situation.  Then 15-17% of the faculty do not receive tenure, of those that stay.  Therefore, about 56% end up with tenure.   It is a rigorous odyssey to achieve tenure; therefore, it is the finest group of faculty that do stay.  How do we then judge and rate some few of these people "unsatisfactory" once they have achieved tenure?

I feel that we probably do encourage these individuals to step aside, to retire early, and the department head is the one who judge best who is not as productive as they once were among the faculty.   

It is in our best interest to identify these people in our own peer reviews.  They could be given differential workload reviews and perhaps be moved to do more teaching than scholarship, over the life of their careers.  It is not realistic to expect highest achievement in all three areas (teaching, research, service) at all phases of an academic career.  We should consider offering, and making some opportunities for new and different duties as one reaches the mid-point and later years.  We are different in our abilities, so I would ask what is realistic for us to expect from faculty over their career.  I would like to begin by asking Regent Boice to say more about what expected outcomes of post tenure review he is interested in seeing.

Fred Boice (Regent)

I am the business guy here, so I will say this--the team is only as fast as the slowest guy on the team!  So, how do we improve that team--by getting better each year and cutting the bottom half of the team?  How do people move from performing to unsatisfactory ratings, to being low on the totem pole?  I do not know what happens then in academia, but on a team in business or the Olympics, we would simply move up the bar to identify our weakest players and then cut them.

Now you could say that we do not need tenure at all--because some faculty thinks, whew, I have tenure, now I have a job for life.  I personally think that when a faculty member becomes tenured they have a duty to accept more responsibility to move ahead--to be an example to other faculty, and we would like all faculty to be in that category, but it is not possible.  There are the 2 or 3 or 5% unsatisfactory faculty to deal with--so, I feel that the way to evaluate faculty properly is to upgrade the faculty overall.  The post tenure review process is not worth the effort, some say, but we need it in place to upgrade the faculty.

Wanda Howell

Our emphasis should not be on trying to get rid of the riff-raff.  We need to improve and place a greater emphasis on faculty development.  The system is not set up that way currently.  At other institutions nationally that use post tenure review, their data show the same results down to the numbers that our data show (University of Colorado) and it supports that the emphasis should be placed on developing the faculty we have.  There are, I feel, faculty who need development in certain areas.  It should be more about their strengths and weaknesses, and an attempt to shift their workloads to their areas of strength. 

Christine Palacios (Regent)   

From a conceptual standpoint, we hire good people, there is no bell curve here, and there is less than 3-4% that need to have post tenure review--but if we do have post tenure review in place, that keeps us working on development so to speak, and that is what we want.  The standards of my job for instance assume that I will be better at what I do over my career.  Why lower the standards?

Wanda Howell

We should not lower our standards.  We as faculty progress over our career and become better at some things too.  But the areas of corporation performance are not the same as university teaching and scholarship performance.  We live or die by these three things: teaching, research and scholarly publication, and service.  We may just need to change our emphasis from one of these areas at some point in our career, and there is no system in place to accommodate that switch readily. 

Marsha Yowell

I am in my second career--I did one career then switched to another.  With a career at the university, if the shift is away from research to service or teaching, there is the problem there--it is difficult to shift away from research as you may not be considered as valuable as when you did research and publishing at previous times in your career.  We must seek to grow stronger over our career at the university, in our strongest areas, while still maintaining our ability to do scholarly research as a member of our faculty.    

Marcus Ford  

It is not that way with Supreme Court judges.  They are appointed for life and they are an example of very productive people.  They continue to write law, opinions, remain active throughout their career.

We need to add more stability for our faculty; we need informal mechanism rather than formal mechanisms; we need to make it more desirable to be at the university because the brightest faculty enjoy their work, and there is not a "huge problem" with unsatisfactory performers among the faculty.  That is usually a sign that the department chair or dean is not doing their job in evaluating their faculty. 

Gary Stuart (Regent)

My view is that we want to have the post tenure review process in place.  You the members of the Arizona Faculties Council need to figure out what process you want to have.  How to grade performances, what objectives, and abilities you want to measure over time.  These things, of course, change over time but the process should be faculty driven.  You should have discussion and discourse over what is a good program to put in place.  There is a political advantage you have in doing so.  We the Regents seldom get a chance to determine where the state's dollar resources are applied.  The legislature does that job.  The Regents are not interested in whether one or five percent of the faculty are terminated, that is not the goal.  In a law firm, as Ernest can verify, there are 850 thousand ways to un-partner a partner from a law firm.  So, you need develop the appropriate mechanisms to be able to un-tenure a faculty member at the university.

Susan Mattson

As a faculty member our mission is to contribute to the mission of our department, our college, and the university.  The ways that we describe and measure our contribution is different in each field.  Over a twenty-five year career trajectory there are many changes that occur.  An individual faculty has to respond to the changing needs of their department and respond to what is needed at the current time by the university and its students.  I acknowledge that there needs to be a broader spectrum of grades between excellent, satisfactory, and unsatisfactory ratings.  You should identify at the department level who is in need of a performance improvement plan--in many areas this is triggered by the second unsatisfactory annual review.  You are informed at the time when that happens, and then I suppose you could drag it out before the final review occurred, perhaps even gain enough time to plan to retire. 

It is a lengthy process for everyone involved but what we really need is to refine the annual evaluation process and identify those faculty who are in need of improvement.  We should work on this to happen at all three universities, and if the results are still lower performance, then we should encourage those faculty to depart.

Duane Roen 

We currently have the requirement at the university, of having updated bylaws on our web site, along with updated performance standards.  We are expected to do all our evaluations using these current performance standards and our bylaws.  We need to talk more about how they are to be applied to our new and junior faculty, and we could improve in this area.  We also need to make sure that this measurement is valid and accurate over time.  We need to verify the outcomes of our evaluation processes. 

Fred Boice (Regent)

These decisions are not unique to the university.  You would have buy-in from the Regents on this type of evaluation.  We too are moving away from the legislature doing mostly budget for us--we are moving from the agency structure, to the real world of resource finding ourselves. 

It simply would be in everyone's best interest to have the best people around you, in either corporate or faculty institutions, because people sometimes suffer burnouts, and crises, that change the path of their performance over a career.  You need to have a process in place to identify and measure real objectives for faculty performance, not the subjective type of peer evaluation that we are all enamored with.

You need a broader spectrum of grades for this complex structure of evaluation.  The Regents want to buy in with you, to make sure you have the tools in place to do this.  The rules are changing--this is not the same world it was ten years ago.  I myself pledge to work with you--and I hope you are able to get the human resources representatives at each university involved with this from the start of your discussions.

Robert Mitchell    

We have a process, and now we need to remind people that they must keep developing; at UA it is true that our data reflects a spike in retirements at the point post tenure review was implemented.  The problem really resides with the department head.  If they are not willing to do their job, or cannot do their job properly in evaluating their faculty, then using a written process in place will not solve the problems.  There are too many hurdles to jump over here if you consider that we usually recruit new department chairs that are high in people skills, collegiality, and versed in the benchmarks of their specialty or their field--yet their management skills are low. 

John Brock  

We should do PTR like we do multivariate analysis.  Where the spikes occur, we need to look at all the factors occurring simultaneously--such as were there attractive retirement packages being offered at that time. 

Richard Morris

We are not runners running a race.  Administrators should not be judged by faculty performance standards nor faculty judged as administrators.  Like an Olympic team, we are a composite.  We may train differently, perform differently, but we are all aspiring to things that will benefit the whole team.  It is the greater dynamic that affects the whole.

Assistant professors are usually prohibited from doing service and their teaching loads are lighter so that they can develop their research.  I think we need to use the Olympic team as our model of faculty performance--and we already have the best team in place.

Fred Boice (Regent)

There is a process in place, and evaluation is a difficult process.  It is not like selling stock where you can measure how you perform by the large amount of stock you manage to sell.  That is simple.  Teaching on the other hand is complex work, and it is hard to evaluate the end result by measuring student competencies.  The Regents cannot evaluate faculty performance, so, the faculty need to create the better system.  What we need is a faculty retirement plan that says--we will not kick you out but here are few ideas of how you could perform better--a better package.  Give us a process that will make for better universities.

Ed Hermes (Student Regent)

My view from the perspective of being an ASU student is that students are paying more for books and tuition, and they are expecting more as a direct result.  It is hard to quantify what is a good professor--because sometimes who you think is a good professor is let go by the university.  I speak from personal experience here.  We need a system that does not let go of professors who the students feel are doing a great job.

Ernest Calderon (Regent)  

Even if you develop excellent measures for teaching performance, we still cannot reward you with the pay you deserve.  That is part of the problem, part ours, part yours--how to get the pay you deserve.  And faculty have been taught to have an insular perspective, while the Regents represent a finite source of funding.  So, you need to help us help you by trying to be actively engaged in the pursuit of funding. 

You invest your career to educate your students, so you are the ones who can come up with the best plan for evaluating faculty.  The Regents will defer to you all on choices of standards for your scholarship.  Know that the Regents do not have the resources to properly reward you, but the legislature does and the students can speak to your performance with their letters and their phone calls.  We need to elect people to the legislature who are sensitive to the needs of the university, our faculty, and our students, and we can perhaps change the minds of some legislators that are already there. 

Wanda Howell

I agree that our faculty have not traditionally been into funding issues--grant dollars but not legislative lobbying. 

Marsha Yowell

I just wanted to comment that one of the merits of post tenure review process is that we all learn when we go through this process, the candidate being evaluated, the administrators and faculty committee members involved, and somehow we all are made better by our participation.  All of it is a valuable process.

Fred Boice (Regent)

I look forward to having more informal discussions like we have had today, as we work together on developing a faculty driven post tenure review process and annual evaluation processes that achieve what we both envision.

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