Growing Pains:

Without review

By Jimmy Thomas
Courier Staff

This article will not be about Monmouth’s growth issues, but about a problem that affects all college faculty that are allowed to be tenured. No one, in any profession, at any point should be above firing, which is unfortunately what tenure often equates to. Tenure is both an extremely valuable asset to colleges and at the same time a great danger to students and institutions.

Before I begin I would first like to state that I fully support tenure, and that I believe granting professors a sense of stability and security in their jobs and allowing them the opportunity to be creative and thought provoking in the classroom is both a good idea and a necessary one. For these reasons I fully support granting tenure to qualified professors and granting them the benefits this position affords them.

I do however, have one serious issue with the tenure system and that is that professors become immune to normal and healthy systems of review and possible firing. No other position in the United States is without this system of review, even the President of the United States is subject to review and firing after following a specified process. Yes, I understand that professors may be fired for some heinous crime against the school or the students, but that is not my issue. My problem lies with those professors who clearly should not be teaching at Monmouth College or any institution because of their poor job performance, but are simply allowed to continue on because of their tenured status.

Certain professors on this campus, and believe me the students and often times the faculty know exactly who they are, are simply horrible teachers who no longer care about their students, have become out of touch with current discourse in the discipline, or have grading practices that are both illogical and biased. They do not belong at an institution that has such excellent professors who are not only competent in their field but passionate about their job.

If I were a plumber, a stewardess, or an astrologist I would want those in my profession not meeting certain standards to be reprimanded and/or fired for poor performance. To allow them to go on performing at a low quality is to signal to others that my professional quality work is not worth as much. Professors who are well known for their excellent service to students and the school should want these poor examples of teaching to be removed in order to save their own reputation and to enhance the reputation of Monmouth College faculty and of Monmouth College.

I do not support professors being fired for minor incidences, slight disagreements with the college, or even for the occasional disagreement with a student over a grade. For the most part tenure is an excellent system with many benefits, and for the most part this article does not apply to Monmouth College professors. There must be one important change though, and that is the regular review of ALL professors no matter how long they have been at Monmouth. The fact that professors could be teaching for 10, 20, or even 30 years and never be subject to a serious review is embarrassing. No other profession allows for such an elongated period of freedom from any sort of review.

Those professors who are consistently poor performers, who are completely out of touch with their students, and/or who no longer care about the progress of their students should be let go for their consistently poor performance. These offenders are not hard to find, ask any gathering of students and the same names will certainly be mentioned. Do not allow students to suffer under poor instruction in the name of tenure. Too often students feel cheated in the classroom by an awful professor, but feel helpless to do anything about it because they are tenured. Some system should be instituted to give students a voice in the matter and to allow for the eventual removal of consistently poor performing professors, tenured or not.