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Western Union |
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The Newsletter of the American Association of University Professors at WCSU |
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Volume 29, Issue 3 November/December 2003
Lives in the Balance:Peer Review in the Tenure and Promotion Process
By Martin Snyder, National AAUP director for Planning & Development (reprinted from his talk at WCSU November 4, 2003)
Before he joined the national AAUP staff, Martin Snyder spent 19 years as a classics professor, and a decade as a college administrator. He was President of Molloy College in Rockville Centre, New York.
First, just a word about the title for my remarks. The title, aptly chosen by your chapter president, begins with “lives,” and that is important. We cannot forget that, despite our emphasis on principles and adherence to standards, we are dealing with human beings—fallible, imperfect, creative, imaginative, extremely intelligent human beings—as candidates for promotion and tenure but also as peer reviewers. Principles and standards do not make decisions; real people do. We should never forget that those decisions affect real people and real lives. Peer review presumes community, and communities do not exist in the abstract.
The principle of peer review, while perhaps not wholeheartedly embraced by all those who would “reform” the professoriate and higher education, is nonetheless widely understood and accepted. As General Secretary Mary Burgan has defined it (Academe, September-October 2003), peer review is “the evaluation of intellectual and disciplinary expertise by those who are most competent to make such judgments”—judgments regarding initial appointment, reappointment, promotion, tenure and termination of appointment and, where relevant, post-tenure review. It is the AAUP’s position that the faculty has the competence, in Burgan’s words, “not only to judge the value of the work of their peers, but also to protect that expertise from outside or ‘lay’ interference. Without such judgments, knowledge and interpretation become prey to a variety of pressures—commercial, political, ideological.”
Even as peer review has safeguarded tenure and thereby academic freedom in American higher education, so too has tenure preserved peer review in faculty evaluation. It is this interconnection of tenure and peer review/peer review and tenure that has created the most complex personnel system in the American workplace. Peer review creates a self-policing, self-enforcing, self-supporting system that is both dependent upon and protective of tenure, without which freedom of expression and the free exchange of ideas would be hindered, if not rendered impossible.
If the principles of peer review have not changed, why are so many people unhappy with it these days? As General Secretary Burgan notes in her column in Academe (November-December 2003): “There are features of the system as it is now practiced, particularly as it affects tenure that justify discontent. The discontent is extremely vivid within the ranks of the junior faculty and thus casts a shadow over the future of the profession. While few new Ph.D.’s are willing to renounce tenure and the security it promises, many graduate students and assistant professors… fear that access to tenure positions have been closed out by an emphasis on hiring only the stars—filling in with adjuncts in the meantime. They worry that the research demands of a tenure track job might foreclose their interests in pursuits that are either too new, too old fashioned, too theoretical, or too applied to be acceptable within their disciplines. And the women among them have a conviction that taking a tenure job means holding off on starting a family. In short, the demands made by the current tenure system have become so excessive that many ordinarily bright and committed beginning academics wonder about the price they might have to pay to meet them.”
Of course, there have been and continue to be enormous financial pressures on universities. There are fewer tenured positions available and the competition for them is intense. But there has also been a gradual change in the culture of peer review, one that is not entirely healthy and one which may be inadvertently supporting attacks on tenure. Formerly, Burgan notes, “tenure could be gained by utility players who could write, teach, and run a curriculum committee…[c]anny department[s] hired…Assistant Professors with the intention of keeping them—believing that it could make shrewd judgments about whether a junior professor was energetic and intelligent enough to be useful throughout a whole career. If the book didn’t materialize, or flopped, such a candidate could do other things, like run the freshman program or teach the sophomore lecture classes or work with the undergraduate education majors. And so amidst the inevitable anxieties of being on probation, [one] had a sense that [the] department would be reasonable, and that the campus committees that reviewed its choices would be respectful of them.” (Academe, November-December 2003)
The problem with tenure now (and one might add for promotion decisions as well) is that the expectations are not always reasonable or appropriate. Nor are standards always fairly applied. Impossibly grandiose expectations encourage the notion that tenure (perhaps even promotion) is reserved only for “super-stars.” At a time when university presses can no longer afford to publish scholarly monographs, promotion and tenure committees at the department and university levels are routinely requiring extensive book publication (in addition to articles in peer reviewed journals). In the sciences, the expectation of lucrative research grants which provide an ample return on institutional facilities investment place young faculty members in a precarious position. Ironically, members of peer review committees, as they will sometimes candidly admit, often could not themselves meet the standards they impose on their younger colleagues. Where have the grandiose expectations come from? Largely from the model of the major research institutions. But most colleges and universities in the United States have missions very different from the large research institutions. Does it make sense to impose an inappropriate set of criteria imported from a very different sort of institution? Western Connecticut State University is not the University of Connecticut. It has a different mission—its own mission and a different student body. It standards for promotion and tenure need to be appropriate to its mission. That does not mean lower standards; it means different standards, appropriate standards.
If standards for promotion and tenure have not always been reasonable or appropriate, neither is their application always fair. Women, in particular, as well as members of racial and sexual minorities, have often been subject to prejudice in the peer review process. They are expected to prove themselves somehow more worthy than their colleagues—to do more, to do it better, and with much less support. In addition, they are often expected to meet a nebulous and treacherous criterion of collegiality—which the AAUP rejects as a separate criterion for promotion or tenure, but which the courts have been all too willing to recognize as valid. Is it any wonder that women and members of racial and sexual minorities are angry about the peer review system? Or that they question the utility of a tenure system to which they are denied entrance?
Are there any lessons we can draw from the current state of affairs? At least these:
1. Peer review is the best system we have for safeguarding the integrity of tenure and academic freedom. It is not perfect, but it is a lot better than the alternative—the inevitably less informed and often economically driven decision of the administration.
2. At the departmental level, members of peer review committees have a heavy responsibility to exercise their best, most thoughtful professional judgment not only about immediate needs but about the long-term health of their departments and disciplines; university level reviewers may disagree with their departmental colleagues, but they should do so with prudent and respectful recognition of the expertise and good judgment of those who made the initial recommendation. 3. Standards for promotion and tenure must be reasonable, appropriate and fairly applied. Inflated standards borrowed from an institution of different character and mission and capriciously or prejudicially applied seriously threaten the integrity of the faculty and its work.
4. Peer review is all about real people and real lives. To forget that simple fact is to jeopardize the very sense of community upon which peer review is founded. v
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