Tenure for professors

Each year, new professors are hired by Weber State University who have the chance to obtain tenureship as professors. A difficult title to achieve, taking six years, a lot of paperwork and good recommendations, professors work toward tenure for the benefits that come along. Tenured professors are safe from budget cuts, and can only be fired with just cause. "I think that it gives the faculty protection and job security," said WSU Provost, Michael Vaughan. Vaughan votes as part of the Board of Trustees in the final decision process for professors who have requested tenureship status. The process follows continual evaluations each semester. On the second year, the department chair reviews teaching performances, and on the third and final year, the professor is reviewed by a committee on the department level, college level and finally by the college dean. After receiving positive recommendations from all levels, the final packet may then be submitted to the Board of Trustees for final review. If there is negative feedback, or conflicting opinions regarding tenure status, Vaughan must look at the packet and make a decision. Tenure is sometimes thought to be a double-edged sword. While the professor is protected from termination without just cause, the classroom environment might suffer from the new freedom of the professor. But WSU's Dean of the College of Health Professions, Yasmen Simonian, disagreed with this idea. "There are a lot different kinds of opinions about tenure," Simonian said. "People might say when you get tenure you're too lax and you don't do all the things you are supposed from before the tenure. In my 28 years of being at Weber State and watching people, people who were always productive stay productive when tenured." All WSU professors are graded based on three main points: teaching, scholarship and service. Professors are required to go above and beyond outside the classroom, to participate on campus activities, publish articles, and further immerse themselves in their studies. The various committees in and outside a professor's department, along with the college dean, rank the professor's achievements in each area. "If you're tenured," Simonian said, you have pride in what you do, you'll keep on doing, producing, mentoring, presenting and servicing the areas of your expertise." Vaughan said the vast majority of universities grant tenure. "You could probably count the number of universities that don't grant tenure on one hand," Vaughan said. "I think its positive; it would be very difficult to recruit faculty if you did not have a tenure system, since most universities do. If you didn't have a tenure system, you would have to pay significantly higher salaries to faculty, in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 percent higher." Daniel Bedford, a WSU geography professor who obtained his tenureship just two years ago, said he remembers the stress of juggling classes, papers, lectures and applying for tenure. But the freedom of tenure didn't change his classroom attitude. "I've always tried to bring in new things," Bedford said, "to do new things, and that's continued since getting tenure. I've always tried to do the best I could for my students." In a recent MSNBC article, educational systems may suffer from the inability of administration to remove ineffective teachers because of the protection through tenureship. Vaughan disagreed with this idea. "It is really a myth that tenure makes it more difficult to terminate faculty members if there is a reason to terminate faculty members," Vaughan said. " All tenure says is that faculty members cannot be terminated without cause."