From the University of Maryland Student Government president:

After one of the longest meetings that I have attended, the Senate amended the Post-Tenure Review policy nearly 10 times before rejecting the final version. Faculty members of the Senate called this a direct “assault” on tenure and echoed each other on how terrible this proposal was.

The faculty members of the Senate should be absolutely ashamed of how this debate went. For whatever reason, the Senate limits their meetings to an hour and 45 minutes, which was extended to two hours 15 minutes at one point during the meeting. As soon as the clock hits 5:00 or in this case, 5:30 the Senate is automatically adjourned. Myself and the President of the Graduate Student Government (GSG) were next in line when one of the Senators motioned for a vote. This took place after hearing not a single other perspective to their endless barrage of hate for this proposal and after not hearing a single student speak on the value of this proposal.

The truth is that the student body, undergraduates and graduates, were united in support of the new Post-Tenure Review process. Professors, tenured or not, should be accountable to the taxpayers of Maryland and face consequences if they are grossly underperforming.

Some of the debate was also disgusting in suggesting that faculty are not “employees” but rather above the system because they are academics. When, in reality, they are accountable to the taxpayers of Maryland who sign their checks just as anyone who works for the University and is a member of the community would be.

Everyone seemed to get overly fixated on the salary-reduction aspect of the proposal, which only happens if a professor repeatedly fails, even after composing for them a development plan to avoid any reduction from happening.

Real objections, as in what this would mean to administer the process, like that of Professor Karol Soltan from BSOS were hushed by overly antagonistic and personal decrees of any idea of salary reduction even for “deadbeat” professors. Professors who would be in violation and subject to a salary reduction are professors that are an embarrassment to our University and our community and weigh departments down.

The faculty Senators should be ashamed of how they behaved yesterday and the Senate should amend their by-laws to allow for healthier debate and time divided equally among differing viewpoints.

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Update: Mr UD speaks, in response to a question a commenter on this thread asked:

We already have of course annual review of all faculty for merit increases. The proposal claimed that the new form of post-tenure review could be just blended in, but when you considered the actual detail of how it would be implemented, it began to look like we would need two committees doing very similar evaluations every year, or we would have to seriously compromise on the way both tasks are done.

The key point in any case is that we already have post-tenure review, every five years (a lot of reporting misses this rather crucial point). It is apparently not implemented in some (many? I don’t know) departments. But in mine, for example, it is implemented. And every five years one can do a far more serious and long term review. So for those departments like mine the proposed change would increase administrative cost, and lower the quality of the review.

Given the great variety of departments and other units that we have, that any large university has, it is very unlikely that one system will work well everywhere. Through the debate I became convinced that the system we have is not implemented across the board, because it is hard to implement in small departments (I am in a large one), so the solution is to allow a number of systems of post-tenure review, different ones for different units. It would have been very difficult to amend the proposal we were considering in the way that would incorporate what I think is the necessary diversity. So I voted against it.

K