Zack Lemon

@zack_lemon

As part of the ongoing prioritization process, changes to Faculty Rules and Regulations were proposed on March 13, and were discussed in last Friday’s faculty senate meeting. The call to review came early in the process, with President William Crothers and the Board of Trustees determining early that the Teaching Load and Tenure System workgroup would evaluate the Rules and Regulations. 

This committee included Crothers, interim provost Doug Fiore and Faculty Senate President Gordon Swain, among others.Two of the biggest changes pertain to the university’s tenure system. The proposed changes would set a goal for each program/department to have at least half tenure track faculty, and at least a quarter non-tenure track faculty.“Many institutions today are discontinuing tenure completely…and I’ve been saying since the day I got here there’s value to a tenure process and we need to maintain the concepts of tenure,” Crothers said. “On the other hand, we can’t let the institution get to the point where it is 100% tenured because we’d lose all possibility to adapt to new realities.”

Swain said this was the issue that concerned faculty the most.

“What really came up was by offering tenure you can attract faculty of high caliber,” Swain said. “If, for a larger percentage of those you cannot offer tenure, then who can you attract? You may lose academic quality.”

The other major change to tenure would allow the university to review departments if the department experienced a substantial

Swain said this would enable the administration to set aside tenure and make necessary cuts, but it should not be a regular occurrence.

“Ideally you never get yourself into that situation,” Swain said. “As long as a department is offering stuff that is still viable the institution should be able to recruit students for that program so you don’t have drastic changes in enrollment from a program in three years so that you can predict these things ahead of time and do the appropriate things.”

He also said that AU’s current situation does not fit that description.

“We are in a scenario now, the administration did lots of hiring probably eight years ago or something like that so there are some programs that probably have too many tenure track faculty, too many tenure faculty for the number of students they have,” Swain said. “Some of those decisions may have been unwise at that point but I think some of the problems that we see long term in the future could be solved through wise hiring not through setting up ways to correct for poor decisions in the past.”

Faculty Senate will review these recommendations and pass legislation in response to approve, reject or offer revisions to the recommendations before they are passed along to the Board. The legislation will be voted on at their April 24 meeting.