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UMW tenure issues considered at Senate meeting by Sarah R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff
John V. Walsh, professor of Physiology and co-chair of the UMass Worcester chapter of the AAUP, spoke to the senate about his group's concerns about the campus administration's efforts to define tenure. Presiding officer Frank Hugus read a statement from the Rules Committee to open the discussion. "We realize that medical schools are quite different from academic campuses, but we both have the same Board of Trustees and that tenure is an important system-wide issue for the Board of Trustees and the faculty of all institutions," the statement said. "We are now increasingly part of a system and important strategic issues on one campus cannot really be isolated from the other campuses. "The Rules Committee has attempted to have someone from the University of Because dealing with a turnover in leadership at the hospital prevented administrative representation, Chancellor Aaron Lazare's office provided an information sheet to the senate. The sheet says tenure is being examined for both financial and practical reasons. Financial reasons include changes in retirement laws that allow tenured faculty to draw their salaries until they choose to retire, no matter what their age; the need to expand the number of tenured and tenure-track research faculty without funding from the state; and changing economic conditions, which, the sheet notes have caused most medical schools to reexamine their tenure policies. Tenure has never been defined on the Worcester campus, and this has presented problems with trustee-mandated post-tenure review and at least two accrediting bodies, according to the sheet. "This ambiguity became problematic for clinical faculty after their employment state changed (clinical faculty are now employed by UMass Memorial Health Care)," the sheet from Lazare's office adds. "Such faculty needed assurance that tenure would still have meaning and the school needed to define this guarantee financially. This ambiguity was also problematic for recruiting research faculty for the new research building." The sheet says the goals of the new policy are to protect all faculty equally, achieve clarity, provide "a substantial economic guarantee for tenure...that would allow us to be competitive with other institutions," and "provide some flexibility for the institution." In his presentation, Walsh said part of the difficulty in assessing tenure at a medical school is the variety of faculty and their roles. The first two years of courses - science education - are taught by science practitioners, some tenured or tenure-track, some not, whose income comes from National Institute of Health grants, as well as University salary. The second two years, which he described as an apprenticeship, are taught by physicians, some of whom are "pure practitioners" [of medicine], some of whom are clinical scholars. The former are non-tenure-track and make their living mainly through patient care, he said. The latter spend a lot of time doing research and can be tenure-track. He expressed concern that the administration plans to have all faculty vote in the upcoming ballot about changes in tenure, including hospital faculty who are no longer University employees since the University gave up control of the hospital. Because many of the medical school and hospital faculty are not tenured or in the tenure track, Walsh suggested that many faculty outside the tenure system may not feel invested in protecting it. "So what is it about this proposal that is distressing us so much?" he said. "Basically what it says right now is the following: if for a period of three years, you are judged to be insufficiently productive by your department chair, and you're warned for each of those three years, in the fourth year, there'll be a set of salary reductions which will bring you down in the period of three subsequent years to 75 percent of your salary. Over that seven year period, there will also be no cost-of-living or merit increases, so we estimate that over that period of time, you could lose half your salary." Unproductive years need not be consecutive to accumulate toward the three-year total, he added. "There is not a single precedent for a schedule of salary reductions like this in all of U.S. academia," he said. "I come here because I think any shrewd administrator would use this precedent if they get it through at the medical school to weaken tenure throughout the whole University system. Maybe not, [but] it's the way I read it." Rules Committee chair Roland Chilton asked whether, in the proposed tenure document, "substantial contribution" of faculty required to avoid salary reductions had been defined. When Walsh said, "no," Chilton asked if teaching and unfunded research might then count as such a contribution. Walsh replied that they could but that other text in administration documents suggests that the expansion of the new research facility, expected to house 100 researchers, would not be funded by state dollars and said that this implies that an operational definition of "substantial contribution" would be "funded research." Walsh conceded, however, that some faculty might be allowed to pursue unfunded work. "But that would be entirely at the discretion of the department chairs and administration," he said. "You've no longer earned tenure and, with it, the right to do the kind of research you want to do." "But that is what really makes it an attack on tenure," Chilton said. "Does the introduction of the new research building represent a change in the mission or function of the University?" asked Lee Edwards, dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts. Walsh said it did. |
he Faculty Senate heard a presentation at its Nov. 1 meeting from the position of the American Association of University Professors' (AAUP) chapter on the Worcester campus about proposed changes in UMass Worcester's tenure policy.