Proposal seeks to modify University of Hawaii tenure system

When Jonathan Morse was a young English professor at Wayne State University in Detroit in the 1970s, rumors about a budget-related move by the administration to deny tenure to a colleague rocked the university and led him to pursue employment elsewhere.

He ended up at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he taught for 43 years, gaining tenure in 1982 before retiring in 2019.

Now, Morse says a proposal to modify UH’s tenure system promises to create the same kind of instability that led him to flee his job at Wayne State.

“Don’t weaken tenure,” is Morse’s advice to the UH Board of Regents, which today is scheduled to consider the changes as part its monthly meeting starting at 8:30 a.m. “Engineering for instability will probably bring unpredictable consequences.”

The recommendations, crafted by a special committee of the board over seven months this year, gives deans and other administrators a say in the five-year review of tenured faculty members. It also reserves tenure for faculty who actively engage with students in the classroom and eliminates tenure tracks for support faculty and extension agents.

These proposals and more have brought what appears to be universal condemnation from the university’s faculty, some members of whom predict the changes, if approved, will not only undermine the integrity of the university but end up harming Hawaii’s economy.

The University of Hawaii Professional Assembly, the faculty union, has come out forcefully against the proposals, saying they will negatively impact its members and the university, and individual faculty members have submitted more than 600 pages of testimony blasting the proposals.

Meanwhile, a task force created by last year’s state Legislature is comparing the UH tenure system for researchers and other noninstructional faculty to peer universities and is expected to propose best practices to lawmakers by the end of the year.

The leader of that task force is UH Board of Regents Chairman Randy Moore, who today is expected to recommend that the regents refer the new recommendations to the board’s Committee on Personnel Affairs and Board Governance for further discussion in conjunction with the eventual findings of the legislative task force.

Christian Fern, executive director of the UH Professional Assembly and the only representative of the faculty on the regent’s task group, said the board should dismiss the group’s work outright. He said it was flawed from the beginning.

Fern said most members of the task group, which included four regents and a handful of UH administrators, came to the table with misguided notions about tenure, and that affected the objectivity of the discussion.

Fern, who submitted a dissenting letter along with the group’s recommendations, said tenure is not merely about job security but describes the protection from interference in how faculty members carry out their work, including how they do their classroom instruction, or the right to publish thoughts, ideas, beliefs, political issues or research free from corporate, religious, or political pressure.

Despite limited marching orders, the task group went beyond its scope to tinker with tenure and propose changes even though the process is negotiated through collective bargaining with the union, Fern said.

Tenure, as the university defines it, is awarded to a faculty member on a tenure track through a review process initiated after five to seven years. The award of tenure gives the faculty member the “contingent right” to continued employment, and may be terminated only for just cause after “a careful process” or under extreme circumstances such as the discontinuation of a program. Tenured faculty undergo a peer-reviewed evaluation every five years or so.

Tenure has been under attack across the country in recent years, and only last week the University of Georgia Board of Regents approved tenure changes that its faculty asserts will help schools fire professors for political purposes.

In Hawaii, “I told them there would be lots of pushback,” Fern said, adding that the faculty worked with flexibility through the pandemic and helped graduate 17,000 students with degrees or certificates during that time.

“The faculty is not being recognized for the work they have done, but is being attacked in one of the core principles of higher education — tenure,” he said.

The faculty, however, did get one high-profile supporter when UH-Manoa Provost Michael Bruno expressed his “unyielding commitment to and support for tenure” in an Oct. 6 letter to faculty and staff that was posted on the UH website. Bruno said tenure represents a crucial component of the university’s ability to recruit, mentor and retain the best faculty.

Professor W. Steven Ward, director of the UH Institute of Biogenesis, agreed, saying he was lured to Hawaii 21 years ago from Rutgers University partly on the strength of the tenure offered here and the degree of security it provides. He has since brought in more than $30 million in federal grant funding — about 80% of which went into Hawaii’s economy.

“It’s a fantastic recruiting tool for scientists from around the world who can bring excellent science and teaching to the state,” he said.

Ward said the vast majority of faculty members are hardworking academics devoted to their students and committed to contributing to the institution, yet some feel it’s necessary to try to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist.

“You don’t punish the entire system,” he said.

In written testimony, psychology professor Ashley Maynard said that if the board implements the proposed changes, it will create a situation where tenure no longer really exists.

“You will create fake tenure and dead-end jobs. Fake tenure is no tenure. By inserting administrators in the process of periodic review, and by requiring faculty to provide “balanced, diverse and relevant input,” the Board will create a system where faculty have to be retenured every five years,” she said.

Stephanie Teves, chair of the UH Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, said her colleagues are particularly concerned that the loss of tenure might turn the campus into a hostile environment for feminists, queer scholars, Native Hawaiians, people of color and others whose teaching and research addresses current and past injustices and seeks redress.

“We encourage the (board) to appreciate the history of innovative teaching and research that was initially viewed with hostility by administrators but later turns out to change disciplines and create new fields of inquiry,” Teves said in written testimony.

Noted UH oceanographer David Karl said approval of the proposals would lead to a reduction in research at Manoa and the tarnishing of an international reputation of selected programs, as well as lead to a negative impact on the local economy due to the loss of research revenue and jobs.