Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, December 14, 1993 TAG: 9312140258
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The prospect that professors might vote "no confidence" in the university's Board of Visitors was averted last week, when faculty leaders and the board achieved a delicate truce. Their statement of understanding calls for more regular communications between the Board of Visitors and the faculty, including with regard to unusual tenure cases. A fine idea.
Still, you have to wonder about the origins of this controversy. More seems involved than differences over the merits of a specific tenure case.
Demands for reform and for greater efficiency in higher education have tended to put a low premium on faculty input, and sometimes even to treat faculty opinion as inevitably self-serving and hence inconsequential. The talk of a no-confidence proposal at Radford, which was out of proportion to the importance of the case at hand, may have reflected such larger concerns as well.
The proportionality issue aside, however, Radford faculty members were quite correct in criticizing the Board of Visitors' grant of tenure to a longtime aide to President Donald Dedmon. If not beyond the board's authority, the action was at least outside the spirit and purpose of tenure.
The aide isn't at fault, to be sure. But tenure's point is not to provide job security for administrators. In theory at least, it's to deter retaliation against faculty members who in their research and the classroom pursue unpopular lines of thought in the robust intellectual conversation that should characterize any campus with a pretense to quality.
The fact that tenure's purpose in theory is not always paramount in fact may have contributed to some of the faculty's defensiveness regarding this abrogation of tenure's point. Sometimes, if less often than the popular mythology has it, tenure serves as much to sustain substandard academic performance as to protect academic freedom.
Tenure can hinder an institution's ability to keep pace with the demands of a changing marketplace. Usually, it's when administrators try to restrict the system that controversies arise. They arise when an administration tries to fire or otherwise discipline a senior professor, or when junior faculty are denied tenure by an administration overruling the faculty's recommendations.
At Radford, the customary roles were reversed. It was the faculty that opposed an award of tenure which the administration favored; the faculty that questioned tenure qualifications which the administration deemed adequate.
This aide to a longtime university president - pointed out the professors, protecting their prerogatives - isn't a researching or teaching faculty member. He didn't jump through the hoops that the minority who are granted tenure must normally jump through.
Tenure, they argued, is warranted neither as reward for past service nor as assurance of future security. And they are right. But it is also important to hear, in the professors' short-lived revolt, a demand, a cry, for respect.
Perhaps, as higher education in the state undergoes re-examination and reinvention, it's time to give the opinions of faculty members more respect - in return for the changes that are and should be asked of them. In this particular instance, by criticizing abuse of tenure, it's the faculty that was promoting the cause of productivity and efficiency.
by CNB