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Who Decides Whether You Will Be Promoted?

Starting in late spring and into the summer, the leadership of United Academics has grown increasingly concerned about a new area where the administration is asserting complete and total authority. For the first time in memory, the Provost’s Office has denied tenure or promotion to several faculty members against the recommendation of their department, their college, the Faculty Personnel Committee, and their external reviewers. The Provost’s Office has argued that the Provost, and the Provost alone, is the arbiter of unit-level and university standards for promotion and tenure, and in these cases all other levels of review were wrong. They have asserted this right while refusing to explain their rationale for their denials and arguing that they have the right to interpret the criteria for tenure and promotion in any way they see fit. 

United Academics has always supported the proposition that the university faculty and their peers at other universities are the people best able to judge their colleagues’ records, and it is the faculty who should take the lead in evaluating tenure and promotion cases. This is why unit-level policy is the foundation for evaluations. Shortly after our first collective bargaining agreement, the faculty in each unit wrote down the standards by which they assessed their colleagues. These standards were reviewed for fairness and excellence by the deans and reviewed again by the Provost before being posted as the official criteria for judging the records of faculty in a department or unit. This system relies on the judgment of the university faculty to create standards consistent with our campus commitment to excellence as well as the standards of the academy, and it is checked by leading experts in the field who help to evaluate and verify that our faculty meet those standards. While this system has not always worked perfectly, as no system does, it is the system that the faculty and administration agreed to based on a fundamental commitment to the process of peer review which underlies the success of the entire structure of higher education. 

Unfortunately, the Provost’s Office has decided to change the system of tenure and promotion and set aside peer review. Instead of relying on our tradition of shared governance and faculty-directed review, the Provost’s Office instead asserts that they must conduct an independent review of the file, and only the Provost’s review matters. …

Phillips mostly blew this question off, basically saying that it was too easy to get tenure and promotion at UO and he was tightening the requirements.

Senate President Berkman noted that tenure was a matter for the Senate and faculty, and promised to investigate.