As a direct challenge to the sacred tenure tradition, Georgia’s public university system will now allow its university administrations to remove a permanent professor with little to no faculty contribution.
The Council of Regents on Wednesday approved the new policy, which, according to the American Association of University Professors, is the only one of its kind in the country. The move has been criticized by many professors, politicians, and advocates of academic freedom as a threat to tenure, which is designed to protect faculty from unfounded dismissals to allow them to develop thoughts or ideas that may be unpopular.
“Georgia is now a huge outlier because that is the whole point of the term of office: it includes the protection of due process,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the professors’ association, which threatens to censor the university system. “There should now be a new word for it in Georgia, because term of office does not mean term of office there.”
The Council of Regency claims the policy change will streamline the process of removing faculty members who fail to contribute adequately to a university, and the 19-member board unanimously approved the new measure on Wednesday. In autumn 2020 there were more than 5,800 permanent teachers in the entire university system of Georgia.
“The goals of the changes are to promote the career development of all faculties and ensure the accountability and continued strong performance of faculty members after they have completed their terms of office,” said Lance Wallace, a spokesman for the state university system, the New York Times in a and later added: “Ultimately we all have the same goal”.
Previously, the process of removing permanent professors involved a peer review process with other faculties. Now professors at 25 of the 26 public universities can be removed after failing two consecutive annual reviews. If a professor does not complete an improvement plan even after the assessments, then this alone would be a reason for termination. The new guideline also included an additional measure – student success – in assessing a professor’s performance for life.
The new policy is the result of months of back and forth between professors and the Board of Regents, the governing body of the state university system, since it announced last year that it would set up a working group to review the post-tenure review process.
In a report released by the working group in June, the group cited several shortcomings in the existing process, including timing issues, burdensome documentation, and that “very few underperforming faculty members are identified and addressed”.
The report also noted that there was “accountability” in the tenure process and that the Council of Regency, as it was then, struggled to have “oversight”.
Last month the board released a draft policy that included a clause stating that a full professor could be removed for “reasons other than good cause,” which raised concern that led to the approval of its final policy.
While that language is no longer in the approved policy, critics remain concerned that the changes will reduce the academic freedom of professors who publish research or speak in a manner contrary to the beliefs of the board of directors or Republican governor of the state Brian Kemp , suppress.
“The voice of the faculty is being heard less and less now,” said Matthew Boedy, a permanent adjunct professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia, a public university, and president of the Georgia Conference of the Association of University Professors.
He considers the decision to be a “deep ideological attack on higher education”.
Others fear the new changes will affect the state’s ability to recruit and retain faculty and students at its public universities, including Georgia Tech, one of the country’s leading public research institutions.
“People are not going to want to go to a place where something like this happened,” said Dr. Mulvey. “So students and teachers will suffer from this decision.”
By Tuesday, more than 1,500 professors in the country had signed a petition against the new policy. In the hours leading up to the adjournment of the meeting, Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic candidate for governor, also publicly opposed the measure.
“Academic freedom guaranteed by tenure is more than a hiring gimmick,” Ms. Abrams tweeted on Wednesday. “Georgia cannot compete for talent or innovate if we undermine our public universities.”
The decision is made at the same time as the state leadership is being pushed back by some faculty members against a ban on mask requirements at academic institutions. The board adhered to the ban.
“We continue to adhere to the governor’s expectations and requirements of government agencies during this pandemic,” said Teresa MacCartney, incumbent chancellor of the university system.
