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Three professors who were denied tenure last month have filed grievances with the University of Maine and the tenure review process has been halted.
A resolution passed at a Feb. 25 meeting of the Faculty Senate recommended that the process for approving tenure be temporarily suspended until the administration can demonstrate that the denials were fair. The process includes a review, which must be approved by the Provost’s Office, made by a peer committee, according to minutes of the Faculty Senate meeting.
Sue Sullivan, of the food science and human nutrition department, Sue Estler, of the education department, and one other employee have been denied tenure for the 2004-05 year according to minutes of the Feb. 25 meeting.
The resolution states that positive recommendations of the involved peer committees were unfairly overturned by the Provost’s Office, and worthy professors were denied tenure.
“[The Provost's Office's] unprecedented attempt to control the tenure and promotion process and the resulting erosion of shared governance represent an overreaching that is not acceptable to University of Maine faculty,” the resolution states, according to meeting minutes.
However, UMaine President Peter Hoff said the tenure decisions resulted from a difference of opinion between the peer committees and administration, rather than a breach of the university’s contract with the faculty union.
“Many factors may have entered into the decision of whether or not to approve someone for tenure,” Hoff said in a recent interview. “Everyone involved has to make a call using the best of their ability and judgment, which everyone did. We just came up with different conclusions in a few cases.”
Hoff denied that the administration is purposefully rejecting tenure candidates to cut down on the number of professors in some departments, a concern some professors expressed at the Feb. 25 Faculty Senate meeting.
“We understand there may have been a mistaken belief that we are going to make a department lose a position. In fact, we have made it clear that a department cannot lose a position by turning someone down for tenure,” Hoff said.
Hoff said the administration is somewhat concerned that peer review committees and others may have recommended tenure under the assumption that they would otherwise lose positions within their departments.
Each year, professors who hope to attain tenure are brought before a peer committee that reviews the applicants’ progress and decides whether to renew their annual contract, thus allowing the applicant to continue their work in hopes of attaining tenure, according to John Maddaus, associate professor of education.
“The un-tenured professors have to perform well enough to have their contract renewed each year,” Maddaus said. “It’s a hell of a lot of work.”
Once a professor’s contract is renewed five times, he or she may apply for tenure in the sixth year, Maddaus said. The professor is then reviewed once again by a peer committee, which may make a recommendation for tenure to the president and Provost’s Office. If approved, the recommendation is passed on to the board of trustees, which has the final say as to whether a professor is awarded tenure.
“When the peer committee, deans and chairs show support for three candidates and the administration votes it down, there is a strong feeling that an abuse of authority may have taken place,” said Tony Brinkley, chair of the English department. “A university works on trust and respect and an incident such as this tears at the credibility of the institution. That is why the faculty senate chose to pass what fundamentally approaches a vote of no-confidence.”
Professors who are denied tenure are given a one-year contract during which to find other employment, Maddaus said.
At the Feb. 25 faculty senate meeting, Brinkley expressed concern that faculty members are meeting departmental tenure criteria over several years and then being denied at the upper administrative level, according to meeting minutes.
In the past, some tenure applicants, even after being informed by peer committees of their inadequate performance, were nevertheless recommended for promotion, Hoff said. But an “overwhelming majority manage to attain tenure,” he said.
Sullivan said administrators did not follow her department’s criteria, which led to her being denied tenure, according to the meeting minutes.
Sullivan said a letter she received from the Provost’s Office indicated that she did not have sufficient peer review publications to meet tenure requirements, but her department’s guidelines did not indicate that she needed more than one, according to the meeting minutes.
Sullivan did not return a call for comment Wednesday.
Estler told the faculty senate that she believes the proportion of female faculty awarded tenure is significantly lower than that of male faculty, according to the Feb. 25 meeting minutes.
Estler declined to comment on the issue until her grievance has been formally addressed.
Jim McClymer, president of the Orono campus’s Associated Faculties of the University of Maine, the faculty union, declined to reveal the name of the third grievant, citing confidentiality concerns.
In a recent interview, Hoff said he recognizes the importance of tenure as a protection for academic freedom. Hoff’s parents, who were not tenured, were investigated by a district attorney for disputing prosecutions during the McCarthy era, he said.
Responding to a comment Brinkley made in a recent interview that the administration has become separated from the university community, Hoff said the opposite is true.
“We are probably more engaged than administrations in previous times, and there is plenty of evidence of that,” he said. “We have 600 or more professors at this university, and each person has a right to their own opinion. I think, however, that we can be proud of the amount of cooperation between faculty, students and the administration.”
The university administration sets its own broad guidelines for receiving tenure, which are broken down into three categories: teaching, scholarship and service, Maddaus said. Each academic department also adds more specialized requirements within those categories.
Outlining the various ways in which “research, scholarship and creative activity” could be interpreted, Hoff said one candidate who recently received tenure, Philip Silver of the music department, was approved because he had proven himself to be a talented pianist, among other qualifications.
Filed within the last two weeks, the grievances will be reviewed by the highest administrator who made a negative recommendation regarding each employee’s tenure application, said McClymer, also a UMaine physics professor. Such reviews are typically performed by the Provost’s Office, and involve a meeting with an administrator, the grievant and an AFUM representative, McClymer said.
“Things are going about as well as can be expected,” he said.
If a grievance is ultimately denied by the administration, the grievant can negotiate through an arbitrator with the Chancellor’s Office, McClymer said. Legal options include pursuing alleged equal opportunity or discrimination violations, he said.
The Provost’s Office has 21 days to respond to a grievance, but an extension is allowed if agreed upon by both the administration and the faculty union, McClymer said.
Although the issue has yet to be resolved, Hoff said he is relying on open lines of communication.
“[I am] very encouraged by the level of communication that is happening. People are obviously very interested in improving the tenure process,” he said.
News editor Jackie Farwell contributed to this article.
