University Daily Kansan, April 1, 1982
Page 7
Tenure
From page 1
our foremost mission and no one should be promoted without being demonstrably good."
Teaching evaluations can be obtained by student and peer evaluations, and there are problems with both methods, Heller said.
"Learning is also subjective."
"Ideally evaluations come from students, but it is difficult. We need evaluations of the here and now and has learned something in the course.
THEERE IS A danger, he said, in evaluating a professor who is entertaining. There is also the possibility that a student may not be able to gauge right away what he has learned from a course.
Heller cited a program in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences 25 years ago that asked alumni to name their five best teachers.
"One student had written down two names," he said. "He said that it was a very difficult question to answer, but he said that professor X was the lousiest human being he had ever met. The next letter said that the very best teacher that he ever had was the same professor X."
And then there are the different kinds of teachers—the ones who teach classes to hundreds of students at a time, and those who teach classes one-on-one or in studies, he said. Some faculty members think the questions on the University-wide teacher database discussion-type courses, so there is a value judgement made on what constitutes a good class.
Heller said he looked at overall computer printouts when reviewing candidates' files, but some committee members did not. Committee comment sheets were more important.
THERE ARE also problems with peer evaluations, Heller said, because they are usually colleagues looking for the best in a faculty member.
June Micheal, assistant to the vice chancellor for academic affairs and recording secretary for the committee, said peers could evaluate each other by visiting classes and reviewing syllabi and books read in a class.
"They also hear students talk," she said.
Faculty members use different strategies when deciding which evaluations to include in their dossiers. Some form of evaluation is required, but a suspicious eye is cast on those evaluated as it can indicate favorable evaluations. Michaal said.
"They ask for a complete response, not a selective response, but some people still haven't learned," she said.
Heller said evaluating research also was hard because it was unusual for faculty members to know about conditions in disciplines other than their own. He noted that students required in some disciplines, and articles must be published in prestigious,
hard-to-get-into-to journals in some fields, while others require creative performance in lieu of publication.
FOR THIS REASON, all dews make a presentation to the committee indicating standards within the different schools and then in different departments of different schools. Heller said. For example, the committee needs to be reminded that there is a difference between what happens at an event and the sequence of journalism and the news sequence of journalism do, he said.
Some deans are better at getting their point across than others, he said, and some forget they are not supposed to meet specific cases and spout off anyway.
Also, Heller said, job descriptions were now required for all candidates so that they are judged on what they were hired to do.
Service is relatively easy to evaluate and is also the least important aspect of the three categories in most fields, Heller said. But in social welfare, Michal said, service is the most important aspect.
Service includes committee work and
services on national organization.
Mary said.
THE FILES of all the candidates—books, evaluations, and letters—take up three cabinets and a wall.
And the process has become a lot tougher to handle in recent years.
The demand for university professors was insatiable at KU in the late 1950s and throughout the 1980s, according to the University's study. More than a hundred were hired then decided to stay, turned out to be good at what they did and have since been tenured, locking them into many slots throughout the University, thereby keeping the chairman of the English department.
The result is that the English department is tenured-in, meaning that all professors eligible for tenure in the department have been granted it. This leaves no room for new teaching positions, except on the graduate level and those who teach for limited amounts of time. Zuther said.
"Most (professors in the department) are agreed that we would like to have more young people, from what we call young academics, and generate." Zuther said. "We find
This has lead to lack of spirit in the department, he said.
some of this in the graduate students who teach, but they wish for a little competition.
"we regret very much we do not have an influx of new blood."
ZUTHER SAID the department was not young.
"The competition is in rather well-established channels," he said. "People are mature and the people with the good ideas now are not received much as well as young people with young ideas who have received. We could use a little stream."
unter is further discouraged by the fact that it will be a long time before there is a new infusion in the department. The department has experienced a reorganization and a resignation in the last few years and those positions were not replaced.
"It depends on how quick we die, and we don't wish that on anybody," he said. "We would have to have a very valuable enrollment to create any new positions."
Cobb said that KU would be shocked one day 30 years from now when it realized that all professors were either 40 or 60 years old. There will be a team of professors are hired in the 1980s and that age group is not represented.
THEREFORE, PROFESSORS considered for tenure and promotion are moved through the process at a higher rate than in previous years in to come. Zother said.
"There is an 'army of generals'—no nasty protection of status, but the pool is smaller if most faculty members are tenued. So the process is slower, and the pressure from understaff The whole process is less populated," he said.
Without that pressure from underneath and competition between each other, does faculty production fall off too?
For some, Zuther said, research unquestionably falls off when they reach a plateau and there is no higher level for them to attain. But most people do not retire before making it formal, he said. By the time a faculty member reaches the professor status, he said, he has established an area of expertise in research, and because he enjoys it, he continues.
Evaluations are also taken into consideration for merit salary inquiries.
esoteric project and voted for it, while the others did not
Committee
There was also one popular faculty member who was tenured but remained an associate professor for 28 years. The man was a great teacher, Heller said, but rarely published. He promoted three years before he retired.
"It was a matter of justice," Heller said. "This man did a fine job."
HE GAVED ANOTHER examn
professor who was a fine scholar but not
a very good teacher, and he had to wait
14 or 15 years before he was promoted.
Heller said the promotions were a way of saying, "You've done well, but you haven't done all the things faculty members are expected to do."
The promotion process sometimes puts the applicants under pressure.
"You always wonder whether your sense of achievement corresponds with another person's sense of achievement," said Bernard Hirsch, associate professor of English, who was tenured two years ago. "In an era of a tight job market it is very difficult to find other work, work at a comparable institution, so a lot hangs on it. It is your future."
He said he found that the committee's decision had been fair and open-minded.
As far as I've been able to see, the committees are not rubber stamps," he said. "They act independently."
HELLER AND Ingemann said they felt no pressure serving on the committee, even though they were making crucial decisions.
Ingemann said she did not feel pressured, even though this was the first year of the three-year appointment, because there were so many candidates for the job deciding—the department, the school, the committee—that one vote did not mean so much. There were relatively few candidates she felt uncertain about, but she did change her mind on some issues or discussion by the committees she said.
Heller said there were precautions against the threat of pressure when the committee was first formed.
Committee members serve for three years, and Heller said the rotation was good so that there was not a vested
interest and so that many faculty members could introduce themselves into the larger University community.
HELLER SAID some faculty members, when not promoted or tenured, raised and invaded, while some staff were already present. It was mostly deans who complained.
Robert Cobb, executive vice chancellor, said the process for deciding tenure was superior to any other alternative. He said he thought politics were more important as far as he knew, because the process was so thorough and protracted.
Heller said, "There are a number of people who wish the process was simpler, with not so much paper work and not so much time taken up by it. But there is not a sentiment that says, 'You want the process to office decding.' There is simply so much variety one simply can't drop the procedure.
"Having this work done by the faculty is of critical importance.
"Even though you spend a lot of time deciding, it would otherwise have to be made either arbitrarily or by people who are really not themselves a part of the enterprise, making a general decision.
Valium, pill prolong sedation
Bv United Press International
BOSTON—Women who take a combination of birth control pills and Valium are likely to have long-lasting sedation and might have to cut down their use. The tranquilizer, Tufts University researchers reported yesterday.
A hormone in the oral contraceptives increases the amount of time the Valium remains in the woman's system, which can cause side effects or heavier sedation, the report in the New England Journal of Medicine said.
Valium, said the study did not reveal any "significant clinical effects" between the two drugs, but said it had always supported the concept of physicians monitoring patients who take more than one prescription.
The researchers said physicians should monitor patients who are taking both drugs to determine the degree of valium if necessary, cut the amount of Valium.
VALIUM IS most widely prescribed tranquilizer in the United States with 33.6 million prescriptions for the drug written in 1880.
One out of every five women 18 or older will take tranquilizers at some time in a given year, according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse.
A spokesman for Hoffman-LaRoche Corp., the Nutley, N.J.-based drug company that holds the patent on
Women are prescribed twice as many tranquilizers as men and females take 71 percent of all anti-depressants, government figures show.
The Tufts study compared eight women of an average age of 27 who had been taking low-dose estrogen pills for six months with eight women not on the pill.
All were given Diazepam, Valium's
generic name, intravenously. The study
found Estrogen from the pill lengthened
the response to norepinephrine in
aogram by an average of nearly 30 hours.
Sarvin K. Abernathy, associate chief of the Tufts-New England Medical Center's Division of Clinical Pharmacology and chief author of the study, said the larger amount of Valium might cause side effects or heavier sedation.
"Reduced Diazepam dosage might be required in these individuals to prevent over-medication," he said.
The study described intravenous Diazepam only. But because the drug is rapidly absorbed and none is lost it taken orally, the same reaction would probably take place with Valium pills, the researchers said.
The contraceptives contained less than 50 milligrams of estrogen. Such contraceptives can contain up to 100 or more milligrams of estrogen.
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The Board of Class Officers will hold Sophomore, Junior and Senior class elections April 21,22
Petitions and filing forms are available in the BOCO and Student Senate offices.
FILING DEADLINE—Tuesday, April 6