Faculty ask Jacobs to reverse tenure policy

Although UT President Lloyd Jacobs has defended his decision to personally interview all candidates who are up for tenured positions at UT, when the issue was brought up at Tuesday’s Faculty Senate meeting, the senators continued to express their opposition.

FS passed a motion to recommend that Jacobs reverse his decision to interview tenure candidates, with only one senator who opposed.

Chairman of the Department of Medicine Rolland Skeel, who opposed the resolution, said it is not within the senate’s authority to ask Jacobs to change his mind.

“I don’t think we should tell him he shouldn’t do it,” Skeel said. “It’s probably not necessary in most circumstances for the president to interview tenure candidates, on the other hand, I think for him to be told by the Senate, ‘you shouldn’t do that’ is in a sense us stepping out of what our authority would be.”

Skeel said Jacobs has a right to conduct the interviews if he chooses to do so.

“Anybody and any group in the hierarchy of making the recommendations has a right and perhaps an obligation to do as full assessment as possible. Most time it’s going to come in form of written record, which is the dossier,” Skeel said. “The reason that the president has a particular obligation to be careful is that he’s making a recommendation that this person will be a permanent faculty member of UT. It is a financial decision for the university.”

Though Skeel opposed the choice to ask Jacobs to reverse his decision, the large majority of senators agreed that the personal interviews of tenure candidates should not happen.

Morris Jenkins, associate professor of criminal justice, said it would be counterproductive to make a decision on approving a candidate who is up for tenure in 15 minutes when there is six years of documented paperwork to base the decision on.

“To make a decision in 15 minutes that took six years for the faculty to do would be ludicrous, I think. I’m not saying that he doesn’t have the right. It’s there, but I think if the president wants to do something that’s productive for us as a faculty, he should be interviewing us the first, the second, the third, the fourth, and the fifth year,” Jenkins said.

Though Jenkins said Jacobs has the right to interview the candidates who are up for tenured promotion, Renee Heberle, associate professor of political science, said Jacobs decision is wrong whether he has the right to interview the candidates or not.

“I don’t care if he has the legal right. This is an academic institution and there are some norms that those who lead us should understand. Not because they are sacred cows of tradition, not because we’ve always done them, because it’s the right thing to do,” she said.

In a Nov. 11 article published in Inside Higher Ed titled “30-Minute Chat to Tenure,” Harvey Wolff, the president of the UT American Association of University Professors, said Jacobs’ decision to do the interviews is in violation of the union’s contract and should have been subject to negotiations.

John Barrett, chair of FS, said complaining about the decisions the administration makes is not going to improve anything, but some senators believe it is hard to be proactive rather than reactive when decisions are made by the administration without any input from the faculty.

“The president didn’t even come to the faculty leadership of the institution to announce that he’s making this major change. And the decision has already been made apparently,” said Andy Jorgensen, associate professor of chemistry. “How can we work effectively with the president who is not talking before making final firm decisions? It’s very frustrating. The frustration is coming about by decisions that are beyond us, yet they affect us in a very significant way.”

“It’s extraordinarily demoralizing when the president of the university doesn’t look at the process of people who get letters of tenure to his desk,” Heberle said. “What I would like to hear from the president is what purpose is served by this beyond the fairly raucous notion that he wants to get to know them in a 15 minute interview that he can’t get from the paperwork.”

Heberle said Jacobs interviewing the tenure candidates is an emergency issue.

“I think the Faculty Senate’s role, maybe by the leadership of the executive [committee], but maybe we can only do it in this general body, is to get out in front of this. Get out in front of this, and to have a representation coming from the faculty executive committee as to what we can do with this issue,” Heberle said. “Because what I see happening is a lot of discussion going on between Faculty Senate leadership and then nothing getting done in this body itself.”

Linda Rouillard, associate professor of French, noted how all the names of graduating seniors have to be forwarded to the Board of Trustees to de awarded their diplomas.

She asked, “Is President Jacobs going to interview all those students too, before any signatures are affixed to those diplomas?”