Point is, EMU faculty members get evaluated for their job performance.

Many EMU administrators are top notch and very good in all respects.

Other EMU administrators are really poor, and they benefit from the lack of any real internal system of evaluation for EMU administrators.

The contrast in accountability and evaluation between the 2 groups, faculty and administrators, is striking, and more so at EMU than at most schools.

* What I meant in the passage that you quote is we don’t hire people into tenure-track jobs unless we are confident that we will be able to tenure them– at least that’s the case in my department. In other words, we are hiring people who are really REALLY qualified at the get-go. New faculty in my department have PhDs and/or years and years of experience in academia, publications and presentations, they have lots of recommendations and have been subjected to lots of interviews, and all this only after conducting a national (and in some cases, international) search. We don’t put up a flier or a “help wanted” sign in the window, and faculty typically don’t get tenure-track jobs simply by being in the right place at the right time.

* If someone is in danger of not getting tenure for one reason or another (and at EMU, I think that’s usually because of service and/or teaching), then they tend to get a “heads up” about in the third year. I know of at least one case where this happened in my department, and I suspect it happens a lot around the university.

* I think if you compared EMU to comparable institutions (the WMUs and CMUs of the world), you would find similar rates of tenure. At most “tier 2,” regional universities– especially those that have faculty unions– the vast majority of faculty who are hired get tenure. The same is not necessarily true at the most prestigious universities in this country– places like Harvard or Stanford or Princeton, to a lesser extent at places like U of M. But the thing those tenure-seeking candidates have going from them is that the experience of working for one of these fancy schools can help with the next job. This is just an unsubstantiated guess on my part, but I’ll bet you that a lot of the faculty in fields like mine in Big Ten-type universities worked for a few years first in the tenure-track at a fancier school.

My point is this: at all the places where I’ve worked as a professor and graduate assistant (and this is in the midwest, west coast, and southeast in this country, and this is at tier 1, 2, and less than colleges and universities), a very high percentage of tenure-seeking faculty were granted tenure. The situation at EMU is not at all unusual.

* I would agree that not every tenure decision turns out to be the right one, and unfortunately, it’s usually too late to do anything about it when you find out that someone shouldn’t have been tenured. But in this “Dilbert-like” work world of ours, you show me any enterprise that has more than 10 employees (especially if that enterprise has something to do with government work or a large corporation), and I will show you at least 10% of the work force who shouldn’t be there but who are nearly impossible to fire.

* Finally, the reason why everyone is “freaked out” by two faculty being denied tenure by the BOR is because a) this seems to be in violation of the protocol set up by the union and the administration, b) this is the first time this has ever happened, and c) we still don’t know why this has happened (though rumors of course abound).

Actually, I kind of wonder if this wasn’t part of McKanders decision to leave EMU….

Sitedad – Are you !@#$%^& kidding me ! At EMU? Come on buddy get with reality…I would sure like to know exactly how many faculty get denied tenure at EMU. How many get a terminal contract after their third year review? How does Eastern compare with other University’s in EMU’s peer group (also those unionized vs. non-unionized)? My bet, very few faculty per year are denied at Eastern….probably none. Yea Yea….two were just recently denied…I know….and everyone freaked out because this is an extremely rare occurrence. Bottom line for me….if you have a pulse, your getting tenure at EMU. Your basically getting tenure the day your hired….unless you do something extremely stupid. The bar is so low it might as well be buried underground. Self evident from administrative structure and problems at EMU. Quite a few administrators at EMU came from the faculty ranks (internal). Yes…not all…but most. These people would have never received tenure anywhere else…and it shows….believe me….it shows. This is why EMU has so many problems and why it will only be one step above WCC.

We also have plenty of ex administration who chose to go back to faculty. Disagreement with policy, sick of working administration, missed teaching, want to finish out retirement with less stress than administration, etc.

In some of these cases, we get damn fine experienced instructors back in the teaching pool.

I agree that it is hard to dismiss a faculty member for cause, but quite frankly, it’s hard to fire anyone in a job like that– people who are “vested” and work for the state, for example.

In theory, faculty are tenured because they have put in five years of probationary service and have proven themselves worthy, and getting a tenure-track job in most fields (certainly in my field) is competitive. I guess what I’m saying is we don’t just hire anyone into these jobs and we don’t keep people who don’t do what they need to do to prove themselves. So, it might be hard to fire tenured faculty, but we don’t exactly pass out tenure-track jobs as if they were candy.

Keep mind too that many administrators– and I’d assume all the academic ones– are tenured. We’ve got plenty of ex-deans and even ex-provost around here who have been “sent back” to the faculty. I believe that Susan Martin and Jack Kay are both tenured. In a sense, tenure is a bigger safety net for them than it is for the likes of me.

Its a bit of the nature of the forum though, too. People tend to notice/get riled up by “bad” things, which is why the news tends to be not about what a great job some politician or whatever.

My second point was, I don’t think I’ve ever read a post on here about an administrator leaving EMU, voluntarily or otherwise, and anyone from the faculty saying, “You know what, they did a really great job. EMU is going to miss their service.”