http://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Bills/billsdetail.aspx?BillId=46848&SessionIndex=-1&SessionId=66&BillText=&BillNumber=&BillSponsorIndex=0&BillListIndex=0&BillStatuteText=1007.33&BillTypeIndex=0&BillReferredIndex=0&HouseChamber=H&BillSearchIndex=0
I am well known for telling my students, as well as my own children, that responding to an unpalatable proposed change by simply saying "OH NO! DON'T DO IT!" is not the most effective method to make others listen to your case. I heartily recommend proposing a solution to the problem that brought about the proposal, in the form of a better proposal, which addresses the same problem in a more logical way.
The employment of this technique seems very important in the current situation. After all, ousting a few ineffective community college professors by eliminating tenure for all faculty is tantamount to using a sledge hammer to eradicate a pimple. Let's get out some Oxy 10 instead and deal with the problem appropriately.
My proposal is built on the following tenets:
- Tenure, as a tool to ensure academic freedom and support learning, is a good thing.
- There are ineffective community college professors who have tenure.
Here's how it happens. At some institutions (and these may be institutions of the past, having since made positive changes that wouldn't allow this to happen today), faculty are/have been granted tenure after serving a certain number of years at the college. The process is somewhat hostile in that faculty can be denied tenure for the smallest of infractions, or with no justification at all. Many faculty are granted tenure who should not be given this protection, but they have played their cards right for the allotted period of time, and here they are - tenured.
That is not the way things work at community colleges where a high value has been placed on learning. I know of at least one institution where new tenure-track faculty are subjected to a strict regimen of faculty development courses to learn about outcomes-based practice, learning styles, diversity, rubric design, etc. leading up to a portfolio project that includes an action research component and, quite frankly, frightens me only slightly less than did my own doctoral dissertation on graph theory. Not everyone gets tenure at the end, but anyone does who places a high value on the process and follows it with the appropriate focus on its importance. Since this process was put in to place, I assure you, no dead wood has floated through the net. Even better, the potential dead wood professor can be transformed into a highly effective teacher through the process.
Doesn't it make sense, rather than eliminating tenure for new contracts, to require a rigorous process such as the one I just described to faculty under new contracts? Wouldn't this be closer to using an appropriate medicine on the pimple?
What do you think?
16 comments:
Here are the concerns that I have with the bill.
1) The bill focuses only on community, state, and junior colleges, leaving universities exempt. Why?
2) A continuing contract suggests tenure status but it is my understanding that some community colleges require tenured faculty to sign a contract each year. By definition in the bill, a tenured faculty member who has to sign a 10 month contract each year could no longer be considered a tenured faculty and therefore not grandfathered in.
3) The Board of Trustees from community/state colleges will determine Merit pay and other policies associated with annual instructional contracts under this bill. Trustees are political appointments by the governor and they are unaccountable to the electorate. At least our colleagues in K-12 have recourse via the ballot box in regards to school board members.
4) I have not forgotten the fixation by some in the state legislature who want faculty members to contribute to their retirement and to pay a percentage of their employee health insurance. So, in addition to a certain cut in take home pay next year the state wants to further destabilize its faculty by stifling academic freedom in the classroom. These are not incentives to keep loyal, hard working, and effective leaders in the classroom.
5) Educators on community college campuses have worked decades to define community colleges as a place for students to enhance their knowledge while earning a degree that is meaningful from a higher learning institution. This legislation will simply reverse that hard work and glorify community/state colleges as nothing more than Grade 13.
This is a bad piece of legislation and I am very concerned what will happen to the quality faculty members if this bill becomes law.
I think I'm going to disagree with your emphasis here. I see this bill as purely a cost-cutting measure, intended to give community college administrators a free hand in firing more expensive instructors and hiring cheap replacements.
Issues like instructor effectiveness and academic quality, let alone academic freedom issues, are really of no concern to the people who would benefit most by this bill.
I'm a different anonymous -- sorry, this function wouldn't let me leave my name: Charlotte Pressler
Put yourself in the shoes of our administrators for a moment. They've cut to the bone and still have to keep cutting. But they can't lay off full-time instructors with continuing contact, except for cause.
Some of their instructors are Ph.D.s who cost more than instructors with the master's only. Others are older and drive up overall health care costs. Still other long-serving instructors have accumulated step increases or other enhancements that drive their salaries above the mean. If you could fire just 10% of them, you could balance your budget, but you can't do it, because they are on continuing contract, and they haven't given you cause.
With this bill you can do exactly that. No need to show cause or wait for them to retire. Just fire the expensive instructors and replace them with people who cost less, or just outsource the whole "course delivery system" to an online service like Smartthinking. Ir's been done for years to people in private industry, so why not do it to public sector employees too?
We can talk about assessments and evaluations, but face it, these can be manufactured for any purpose desired. Highly effective instructors can be magically changed into poor ones, if administration has a need to cut costs, and the instructors cost money. Again, it's done all the time.
This is what it means to run a college like a business. I'm from Cleveland; we understand how layoffs work there.
Anonymous 2 again:
The language of the bill states: "Tenure, a multiyear contract, or a continuing contract in effect prior to July 1, 2011, may not be renewed, extended,
or readopted. " It further provides that all faculty previously on continuing contract will drop back to one-year contracts on the anniversary date of their employment.
Anon 2, those are scary thoughts I hadn't even thought of. Now this bill seems even more ominous, if such a thing were possible. Let's keep talking.
I'm actually Charlotte Pressler, and I worked in the business world for some years before deciding to join academia.
Many of my friends back in Cleveland have been victimized by the kinds of tactics I sketched out in my first posts. Older workers are particularly vulnerable to them. Corporate lawyers can craft ways of firing costly older employees that don't leave the company vulnerable to age discrimination lawsuits. Poor evaluations are easy enough to cook up and tend to hold up well as evidence in court. If worst comes to worst, company settles and binds plaintiff not to disclose the terms of the settlement -- thus blocking others from benefitting from plaintiff's strategy.
We all have scars from this stuff. I can remember when Pick'n'Pay set about to break the grocery workers' union. thirty-five years ago. A good friend's husband was produce manager at the time. (Believe it or not, he could feed a small family on his wages.) I'll never forget his stories about the brutality of the tactics used. They worked, too.
One takeaway is that the reasons being advanced for something like this bill will never be the real reasons behind it. Sponsors give the press slogans pre-tested on focus groups by their hired PR firms. Slogans that are easy to remember, push people's buttons and are guaranteed to work. Pure propaganda. They hope we will allow them to frame the debate, then get caught up trying to argue against their phony issues. We never get anywhere that way.
The bill is a cost-cutting measure pure and simple, and IMO we should frame the issue in its own terms, not in their propaganda terms. Let's look our legislators and administrators in the eye and say: "So you are in favor of firing older college instructors because their health care costs are too high?" Then see what they say.
Anon 2 a.k.a. Charlotte Pressler
Charlotte, thanks again for your insight. Keep it coming. I am scheduled to talk to one reporter so far on Monday.
Charlotte is exactly right. No one has identified a problem that this bill solves.
I've read that "some community college presidents" would find it easier to "do their jobs" if more faculty were on annual contracts. OK, which presidents? And what exactly is it that they cannot do?
If a teacher isn't doing her job, presumably her failure can be documented. If her failure can be documented, she can be fired.
(Many union contracts have an intermediate process that gives the bad teacher a chance to improve, but if she doesn't improve, even under those contracts, she can be fired.)
So the problem can't be "too many bad teachers," unless college administrators aren't doing THEIR jobs of identifying dead wood.
So what would be easier if there were no tenure? Budget cutting. How likely is it that administrators who can't bestir themselves to identify bad teachers will do so when they're planning layoffs? I don't think it's very likely. I think they will fire the most expensive and least deferential teachers. That means fewer unpleasant conversations to save the same $$$ and fewer future encounters with teachers they don't like.
It's always good to provide meaningful faculty development, but colleges should be providing it anyway. Faculty development costs money, though, so it's not likely to be the solution chosen by *this* legislature in *this* economy.
Hi Deborah. I don't disagree with anything you and Charlotte are saying. However, as long as the politicians are arguing "end of forever employment for ineffective teachers" as they did during the initial hearing on Tuesday, I think it pays to respond. I'm probably just an idealistic scientist who thinks that logic solves everything, but if we refute the argument that they state out loud, that should be the end of it, right?
It also pays to keep in mind the argument underneath and be prepared to refute that one as well. Since it is so inherently wrong, that should be easy.
Hi Lisa and everyone,
I agree with you that this is a bad bill which is not going to solve any problems.
A point which I would like to add is that tenure should not be a governmental issue. In my opinion Sate has all rights to make colleges accountable for how state money are spent to produce "final product" - educated college graduates, programs serving community needs, etc. How to achieve these goals/products -by keeping highly qualified tenured faculty and cutting on unnecessary personal or by struggling with finding someone to do a decent teaching job every year - should be left to the Board of Trustees and college administration. If a college administration cannot institute tenure properly and ends with not worthy tenured faculty, tenured contracts probably should not be offered in that college.
As far as I know, not all Florida colleges have tenure. So, why suddenly someone gets an idea just "to forbid the tenure" in institutions where it is working just fine?
Hi Irina! I am not sure that we'll ever know the "why" of this insane bill, but every thought you shared can be used by faculty contacting their representatives. Thanks for sharing.
Dr. Macon, thanks for creating this blog. I am concerned about how this issue has moved so quickly "under the radar".
But I am more concerned about how our state - and our country - sees educators as being the cause of so many problems, real or imagined.
Tonight I was told by someone that I do not even know that my job as a college professor in Florida is not to challenge ideas but to deliver the "state-sponsored" (his words) curriculum. I soon realized that there was no possibility for dialogue. And when he wanted to use Wisconsin as an example - for what, I am not sure - that is when I gave up.
And what is being reported by some media sources might be misleading. If you read the bill closely it isn't just about eliminating the possibility of tenure for new college faculty - but prohibiting tenure/continuing contracts for all college faculty.
J.D., thanks for your comment. I know - there is language in the bill that makes it clear that institutions choosing to renew contracts for faculty (or those that already do renew them annually) will not be allowed to include tenure in the contract.
It's very hard to engage in dialog with people whose views are so skewed from reality.
Hi Folks, I'm Ron Kephart, an associate prof of anthropology at UNF. I don't think that the central concern of these folks is either cost-cutting or "bad teachers." I think the heart of the matter is that they hate education at all levels, but especially higher ed. This is where students are supposed to learn to observe the world around them and make critical, rational analyses of that world on the basis of evidence. The right-wing goons know that they were elected precisely because we have not done this as well as we should have, and they also know that if we ever do teach people to think critically they will never be elected to anything again. So, they want to destroy this aspect of higher higher education and turn everything into training colleges turning out good, compliant carbon-units for predatory capitalism. If they are successful with the state colleges, they will come for us in the universities next (they've already begun, actually).
Lisa, thanks for this blog. I'll link to it on my own blog (crankylinguist.blogspot) and maybe on facebook as well.
Have you seen this press release from the Association of Community Colleges, which is heavily critical of the bill? Very heartening.
"Florida colleges say they feel blindsided by legislation unveiled this week that would eliminate tenure for professors.
The bill would get rid of both tenure and multi-year contracts for faculty at Florida's 28 state colleges and community colleges. [...]
But the Association of Florida Colleges says college presidents are not happy with the bill or the way it was sprung on them with no notice this week.
Association CEO Michael Braward says the bill is looking for a problem where none exists and faculty members are not happy with it.
"It wasn't a very inclusive process to come up with the bill and any time you change any purview which relates to professional teaching faculty at the higher education level regarding tenure, at minimum, faculty should be involved in that discussion."
[and there's more]
--Charlotte Pressler
This is logical. Apparently two wrongs make a right?
"Republicans on the committee supported the measure, saying if K-12 teachers won’t have tenure, then college faculty should be held to the same standard."
http://www.wctv.tv/home/headlines/Lawmakers_Mull_Ending_College_Faculty_Tenure_118833944.html
In the immortal words of Susan Powter, "Stop the insanity!"
I'm going to compile some of the literature published today in my next post, coming shortly.
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