Education
Florida’s Public-University Board Approves Firing Poorly Performing Tenured Professors
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The governing board overseeing Florida’s public universities on Wednesday approved a post-tenure-review process that allows for poorly performing professors to be fired.
About 10 Florida professors and students urged the board during the meeting’s public-comment section not to approve the regulation. They argued that it would weaken tenure and drive talented scholars away from Florida. They also said that professors are already evaluated a considerable amount.
Wearing his academic regalia, Andrew Gothard, president of the statewide United Faculty of Florida, told board members they should vote against post-tenure review, not because it is a bad thing but because the regulation is “undercooked — it needs to stay in the oven for a little while longer to continue making improvements.”
Gothard said that if the rule were approved, Florida’s 12-campus university system would go from the most competitive in the country to the least, because the regulation would turn tenure into a five-year revolving contract.
Matthew Lata, a professor of music at Florida State University, told the board that approving the regulation would dampen recruitment. The first step faculty-search committees take is emailing and phoning prospective hires, Lata said. During those conversations, “more and more often, we are hearing, ‘Florida? Not Florida. Not now. Not yet,’ because they are looking at regulations” like this one, as well as bills passed and proposed by the Florida Legislature.
State U. System of Florida
Ray Rodrigues, chancellor of the State University System, countered those concerns. Every university in the system that grants tenure — 10 of the 12 — already has post-tenure review, he said, because the Florida Board of Regents, the governing board’s predecessor, approved such a regulation in the mid-1990s.
Rodrigues said a review of the meeting minutes from that period showed the concerns raised then are remarkably similar to the ones voiced now. Yet “we know that adopting post-tenure review did not stop people, highly talented faculty members, from coming to the state of Florida. And I can say that with conviction, because we just heard from … them who testified before us, all of them who have chosen to come to Florida, knowing that there was a post-tenure-review policy,” the chancellor said.
What the regulation would do, Rodrigues said, is make the post-tenure-review process uniform across campuses. “We didn’t make that decision overnight,” he said. “We didn’t make that decision unilaterally. It has taken us a year to get here.”
‘Deadweight Cost’
The regulation comes at a turbulent time for tenure, both nationally and in the Sunshine State. The employment protection has taken ample punches from conservatives in recent years. Texas lawmakers are considering a bill that, if enacted, would ban public institutions from granting tenure starting on September 1. Earlier this year, Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, said that “unproductive” tenured professors are the “most significant deadweight cost” at universities. He then proposed sweeping — and contentious — changes in the state’s higher-ed system. House Bill 999, pending legislation that includes many of DeSantis’s proposals, would permit the governing board to require that tenured professors go through post-tenure review “at any time for cause.”
Wednesday’s vote was set in motion by DeSantis and the Florida Legislature in 2022. They enacted a law allowing Florida’s Board of Governors to call for professors to undergo post-tenure review every five years.
Under the approved regulation, professors will be judged on that timeline on their research, teaching, and service, their “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.
A professor will ultimately be rated as “exceeds expectations,” “meets expectations,” “does not meet expectations,” or “unsatisfactory.” The rating will be made by the professor’s dean, and the university’s chief academic officer can then reject, accept, or change it.
For those rated as meeting or exceeding expectations, the dean will recommend to the provost “appropriate recognition and/or compensation.”
Those rated as “does not meet expectations” will be placed on a performance-improvement plan with a deadline that cannot exceed 12 months. Professors who fail to meet the requirements of their plan by the deadline will be fired, the regulation says.
The regulation also says that professors who are rated as “unsatisfactory” will be fired.
Under the plain language of the regulation, it seems that professors deemed unsatisfactory could be fired without being put on a performance-improvement plan first. That concern was raised by some professors in the months leading up to Wednesday’s meeting.
But at a November 2022 meeting, Timothy M. Cerio, a governing-board member, said that for a professor to be fired under the regulation, that person would first have to have been placed on a performance-improvement plan and then still not improved. When asked how to square Cerio’s comment with the written regulation, a spokesperson for the State University System told The Chronicle in an email that “the performance-improvement plan is indeed required, as Gov. Tim Cerio stated,” before someone is fired.
An earlier version of the regulation also explicitly referred to House Bill 7, a Florida law, also known as the “Stop WOKE Act,” that restricts how race-related topics can be taught on campus and that has been partly blocked in court. The earlier version said any violation of that law would be considered during post-tenure-review — a controversial provision to which many professors objected, fearing it would be used to get rid of scholars who taught or researched topics unpopular with lawmakers.
References to HB 7 were struck from the version approved on Wednesday.
Objections Remain
Other parts of the regulation that have generated concern remain.
While the revisions are “a great step,” Jennifer Proffitt, a professor of communication at Florida State, told the governing board on Wednesday, “weakening tenure in any form means weakening academic freedom.” The revised policy “still lacks the critical protections of due process and peer evaluation,” and is redundant, she said.
In written comments submitted to the system last fall, the University of South Florida’s Faculty Senate questioned how “substantiated student complaints” would play a role in evaluating professors’ performance: “Complaints about what? About too much homework? She’s a tough grader? That is another element of the process that could easily be abused.”
The University of Central Florida said in comments submitted last year that one year to improve performance is not enough if the issue is research: “For example, it can take longer than one year for submitted journal articles to be reviewed, or for grants to be proposed and funded.”
Heather Russell, vice provost for faculty leadership and success at Florida International University, wrote that the process described in the regulation “deviates from the normal evaluation process typically followed by most institutions.” Usually, post-tenure review entails review by only a department chair, a dean, or both, she wrote. But under the regulation, the provost, with “guidance and oversight from the university president,” is the ultimate evaluator.
“In short,” Russell wrote, “the proposed moves the evaluative process away from the actual environment in which the work is being conducted.”
The provost also makes the final call on what’s required in a professor’s performance-improvement plan. “Again, that is not the typical method where the direct supervisor (i.e., the chair) would make that decision,” Russell wrote. “This is because the chair has/should have more knowledge about the faculty member.”
At Wednesday’s meeting, Rodrigues noted that the system had received substantial input from provosts, faculty senates, and the public, and had made revisions. “This is a policy that has been well developed and will serve the institution[s], will serve the system, and I believe ultimately will serve our faculty and our students well.”
Two governing-board members — Nimna Gabadage, the sole student on the board, and Deanna Michael, chair of the Advisory Council of Faculty Senates — voted no. All other board members who were present voted yes.
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Emma Pettit
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