The Florida Board of Governors applauded the first cycle of post-tenure review for its productivity and success. According to the board’s Sept. 18 meeting, 91% of reviewed faculty met or exceeded expectations, and 9% of faculty did not meet expectations or were unsatisfactory.
“I think [post-tenure review] is critically important, and we cannot lose sight of the fact that it is a mechanism to award great performance,” said Timothy Cerio, a Florida Board of Governors board member during the meeting.
Tenure is an indefinite appointment to a position that is guaranteed and can only be revoked in exceptional circumstances. Gov. Ron DeSantis previously said unproductive faculty are a significant deadweight cost, and tenure should not be used to shield them from accountability.
DeSantis and former UF president Ben Sasse have both advocated for post-tenure review, believing it to be an effective and necessary assessment of professor performance.
Since its inception in 2022, post-tenure review has been a source of considerable debate and controversy. The process requires 20% of tenured professors across Florida to be evaluated every five years for an assessment of their job performance.
The first round of reviews at UF was finished in July. Thirty-four faculty were placed on a one-year performance improvement plan for being classified as “does not meet expectations,” and five were issued termination notices because their performance was deemed “unsatisfactory.”
During a May 2 Faculty Senate meeting, Zhengfei Guan, a UF associate professor of food and resource economics, said post-tenure review is a threat to academic freedom and will fundamentally change American institutions.
“I feel that this new system is stealing ownership of the university from faculty,” he said during the meeting.
Through the implementation of post-tenure review, the university terminated faculty members without offering severance packages and imposed new contracts without their consent, Guan
wrote in an email. He also expressed worries about reduced salaries and wrongful termination of professors.
L. Jeannine Brady, a professor at the UF College of Dentistry, said she recognizes the importance of a post-tenure review process but has concerns about its implementation. She said the university rushed to adopt specific metric-based criteria without considering faculty input and believes that the university failed to ensure the metrics aligned with existing tenure and promotion standards.
The new post-tenure review process also bypasses the Tenure and Promotion Committee review and the Academic Personnel Board, establishing a system separate from the one used for granting tenure and promotion, Brady said.
But former UF provost Scott Angle said the post-tenure review process was handled with adequate care and deliberation. He is an avid supporter of tenure and its protections, as it once saved his academic career, he wrote in an op-ed for The Tampa Bay Times.
In 1996, Angle was a professor of soil science and an associate dean at the University of Maryland. After voicing his disagreement with the university president on the issue of water quality to a reporter from The Washington Post, the reporter contacted the president, and Angle was subsequently fired.
However, because of tenure, the president was not successful in firing him, and he went on to serve nine more years at the university. Angle said his belief in the value of tenure drives his support for post-tenure review.
He said every department contributed to creating its own metrics for the post-tenure review process, with every set of criteria tailored to the specific area of study.
“But if having gone through this process once, it’s determined that it could be improved, then it should be,” Angle said.
Since tenure at UF is largely funded by tax dollars, Angle said public criticism intensifies when the university attempts to shield underperformers. He believes post-tenure review may be the only way to safeguard tenure from the backlash it’s received.
“I strongly believe that it’s a way of assuring that all faculty are pulling their weight,” Angle said. “I’m a strong believer in tenure, but tenure is not a license to continually be a poor performer. It’s not a license to do nothing.”
Contrary to what some professors believe, post-tenure review will only benefit professors by protecting tenure and ensuring satisfactory teaching, Angle added.
“If we abuse tenure, we’re gonna lose our academic freedom, and then it’s all gone,” he said. “So I see [post-tenure review] as protecting all the things that we want, not becoming the end to it.”
Contact Annie Wang at awang@alligator.org. Follow her on X @wynwg.
Annie Wang is a sophomore journalism student and the Fall 2024 University Administration Reporter. She previously wrote for the University Desk as a General Assignment reporter. In her spare time, she can be found reading and writing book reviews.
