Recently, I published a defense of Ben Sasse’s legacy as president of the University of Florida. The barrage of attacks against him are not substantive, I argued. Rather, they are ex post facto political retribution for his monumental efforts to reform the university.
An important part of the story lay within the political landscape of the University of Florida (UF) itself. In addition to the pressure that Sasse and his administration received from external media and politicized naysayers, they faced an internal threat as well, from disgruntled faculty.
In the spring of 2023, the Florida State Legislature passed Senate Bill 266, which (among other things) required each tenured state faculty member to “undergo a comprehensive post-tenure review every five years.” Governor Ron DeSantis pushed tenure review as a way to cinch the belt of the state university system. “The most significant deadweight cost at universities is typically unproductive tenured faculty,” DeSantis said in a press conference before the bill was passed.
The legislature listed a few metrics that must be included in the review, but it required the Florida Board of Governors — the governing body for all public universities in the state — to further define the post-tenure review process.
The board may include other considerations in the regulation, but the regulation must address:
1. Accomplishments and productivity;
2. Assigned duties in research, teaching, and service;
3. Performance metrics, evaluations, and ratings; and
4. Recognition and compensation considerations, as well as improvement plans and consequences for underperformance.
In response, the Florida Board of Governors issued Regulation 10.003. The regulation states that each state university’s board of trustees “shall adopt policies requiring each tenured state university faculty member to undergo a comprehensive post-tenure review” that must accomplish the following:
(a) Ensure high standards of quality and productivity among the tenured faculty in the State University System.
(b) Determine whether a faculty member is meeting the responsibilities and expectations associated with assigned duties in research, teaching, and service . . .
(c) Recognize and honor exceptional achievement and provide an incentive for retention as appropriate.
(d) Refocus academic and professional efforts and take appropriate employment action when appropriate.
The Board of Trustees of the University of Florida (to whom the university president reports) took Regulation 10.003 seriously.
While UF came under fire for following the law — with Sasse’s administration facing accusations that it was ideologically purging the faculty — nothing in UF’s post-tenure review rubric was political.
Post-tenure review is intended to: recognize and honor exceptional achievement; affirm continued academic professional development; enable a faculty member who has fallen below performance standards to refocus academic and professional efforts through a performance improvement plan and return to expected levels of performance; and identify faculty members whose pattern of performance is unsatisfactory and to take appropriate employment action. Matters such as political opinion, expressive viewpoint, and ideological beliefs are not appropriate matters for evaluation and shall not be considered in post-tenure review.
To begin the process, tenured faculty provided a current curriculum vitae to their department chair, along with a one-page narrative of their work and any further documents they wished to include that highlighted their service or research. The department chairperson then attached further information to the faculty member’s collection of documents, including the last five years of their annual evaluations, data on their sponsored research, and their disciplinary record. Taken altogether, this information constituted the “Post-Tenure Review Packet.” This packet then made its way across the desks of the dean of the college and an advisory committee and ultimately landed at the desk of the provost.
The review process did not examine what faculty were working on, but rather whether faculty were working.
Each department within UF was issued discipline-specific guidelines on the criteria for the “grades,” from “exceeds expectations” down to “unsatisfactory.” The standards for review offered both quantitative and qualitative measures, such as the number of peer-reviewed articles published or the kind of service performed in their field.
The UF faculty union was particularly outraged with post-tenure review, and they expressed their anger publicly. Meera Sitharam, president of the United Faculty of Florida union’s UF chapter, told Inside Higher Ed, “There’s no mincing words: Tenure’s gone. It’s been replaced by a five-year contract.” She said UF’s implementation of the policy “really gives them a chance to get rid of people they don’t like.”
Such criticism misses the simple fact that most of the faculty members who were reviewed met the standards — and many exceeded them. This reality is obscured by headlines on the topic, such as that published by The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Why U. of Florida Professors Decry ‘Chaotic’ Post-Tenure Review That Failed Nearly a Fifth of Those Evaluated.”
In fact, post-tenure review at UF did not enable the university to fire faculty for publishing or teaching something that the university leaders “don’t like.” Faculty can, however, get fired for publishing or teaching nothing at all (or diminished quantities of low quality, as determined by their peers). Regardless of tenure, the job is a job, and it has to get done. Tenure exists to protect academic freedom. Tenure does not exist to protect academics from their duties.
Sasse’s administration did not lead a vast purgation of tenured faculty. The number of tenured faculty who lost their positions as a result of the review is very small. Of the 262 faculty members up for review at UF, only five received the “unsatisfactory” designation — grounds for termination.
In his August 2023 State of the University address, Sasse described the problem of “quiet retirement” among tenured faculty — in which professors take on the workload (or lack thereof) of a retired professor without actually formalizing their status as retired. Sasse aimed to tackle this problem, saying, “[We need] to look at some of the institutional review obligations, which is a function that almost all universities that are our peers have. We don’t really have institutional review.”
As former Provost J. Scott Angle said in a Faculty Senate Special Meeting in June, many faculty retired or quit of their own volition before their post-tenure review was conducted or completed (data that confirm Sasse’s “quiet retirement” thesis). Thirty-one professors “either retired, entered retirement agreements or resigned during the review period” — i.e., 12 percent of the faculty up for review left the job of their own volition.
With regard to the five deemed “unsatisfactory,” Angle said,
I can tell you that those that were defined as ‘unsatisfactory’ really were not good teachers, they were not good researchers, and they weren’t doing any service. I found them to be quite easy and quite obvious. The other categories were harder to define, and that’s where you really have to dig into the cases for each one.
While only five professors received a notice of termination, 89 received the score of “exceeds expectations” — a denomination that includes a financial reward.
In short, Sasse and his administration took post-tenure review seriously, confronted the problem of “quiet retirement,” and rewarded 89 faculty for their excellent work. While it would have been simpler to follow the example of Florida State University — which claimed that every single FSU tenured faculty member met or exceeded expectations — UF approached tenure with the weight and consequence befitting the status.