Granting tenure at Carolina used to be a routine yet rigorous process. With this Board of Trustees, those days are over. Just read yesterday’s headlines:
WUNC: UNC trustees approve faculty tenure after monthslong delay
WRAL: UNC Board of Trustees approves 33 delayed tenure appointments
The Chronicle of Higher Education: UNC Chapel Hill Approves Tenure Bids for Faculty Outside the Health Sciences, Ending Unexplained Delay
Inside Higher Ed: After Delays and Public Blowback, Chapel Hill Board Votes Outside Meeting to Award Tenure
Approving tenure for qualified professors should not take this much pressure and prodding.
UNC Faculty Chair Beth Moracco called the lack of action on tenure “highly unusual” in a recent letter to Chancellor Lee Roberts and Interim Provost James Dean.
As WUNC detailed in yesterday’s coverage:
“The trustees had been delaying the tenure vote since March, but only for faculty in professional schools and the College of Arts and Sciences. In May, the full board met in closed session again to discuss tenure, but decided to only approve appointments in the health sciences.
The selective approval quickly spurred collective action among faculty. Chairs of departments sent letters, UNC’s Faculty Chair Beth Moracco met with several BOT members and Chancellor Lee Roberts, and even outside faculty from sister universities shared their concerns with the UNC System’s Faculty Chair.
Moracco said she’s received more texts, calls, and emails of concern from faculty than she ever has in her two years of being UNC’s faculty chair.
“There’s a very well-defined, rigorous process for appointment in tenure and promotion and all those processes were followed up until these cases got before the Board of Trustees,” Moracco said in an interview with WUNC after the latest board vote. “Since it’s such an anomaly and had such serious consequences, there was a lot of concern among the faculty.”
This is yet another point of concern when it comes to Trustees putting politics and personal preference ahead of the goals and interests of Carolina.
Politicians and their allies – several of whom currently sit on the Board of Trustees – have made it clear they are not committed to protecting tenure. They even filed a bill in the North Carolina General Assembly in 2023 to end tenure as we know it.
Undermining the tenure process isn’t just unfair to current faculty; it could jeopardize Carolina’s ability to recruit top talent in the future.
If education funding cuts didn’t already make a career in academia tremulous, what are we telling prospective faculty when Trustees hold up the tenure process?
Tenure approval is a thorough process with several levels of review before it gets to Trustees. Absent serious issues with a potential candidate – which would make it very unlikely the candidate would make it through multiple levels of the review process – Trustees have historically taken the guidance of university officials and quickly passed final approval of tenure nominees.
Trustees were rightly criticized for trampling on the process. We’re keeping an eye on what happens with tenure approvals in the future, and we’re hoping you will, too. Carolina’s faculty is key to our success as a top-tier university. They deserve to be treated with respect.
If you missed Monday’s webinar, you can follow this link to watch the recording.
Teaching and Using Artificial Intelligence at UNC-CH
