Bangert: Peace in Purdue tenure showdown

As Purdue University faculty members come to grips with a two-year contract extension for President Mitch Daniels — a deal that will keep him in West Lafayette until 2020 — is the case of new tenure rules approved last week proof that professors and the administration can, in fact, see eye to eye when they need to?

Maybe so.

Consider that in less than a month’s time, faculty and Purdue trustees went from blood in the water over the first overhaul of a university-wide tenure policies in decades to nothing but mutual admiration around the trustees’ conference table on Friday.

What gives?

“Classic sausage making,” Kirk Alter, chairman of the Purdue University Senate, said last week.

In other words, you don’t want to know the details from the slaughterhouse. Just appreciate that tenure turned out to be a dish everyone at Purdue could enjoy — or at least stomach.

Here’s the background — and how that sausage was made.

Last spring, the Purdue trustees were getting ready to sign off on new criteria for promotion and tenure on the West Lafayette campus. The documents had been vetted and approved, as well, by the University Senate, a faculty-heavy body of representatives from across campus.

But armed with initial results of the Gallup-Purdue Index, released in May 2014, the trustees asked Provost Deba Dutta to add several new guidelines over the summer. In particular, trustees wanted something that put a premium on mentorship and one-on-one relationships with undergraduates — something recent grads said they wanted in their time in school. The trustees also added sections that rewarded professors who worked with at-risk students and on developing competency-based curriculum.

Faculty balked, saying the rules, as written, were vague and even unnecessary, because the criteria were already assumed by tenure procedures. On Sept. 14, the University Senate went as far as to cross out nearly entire sections added by the trustees.

And they put it in red ink.

“That could have been interpreted as the faculty saying, ‘Hell, no,’” Alter said. “The real sausage making started at that moment.”

Almost immediately after the University Senate vote, Alter called the faculty move “amateurish.”

In the coming weeks, he would send two lengthy letters to members of the trustees’ Academic Affairs Committee to explain that all that red was not a wholesale rejection of what university leaders wanted.



“Senate leadership was quick to realize the unintended messaging of the red-lining was the result of poorly presented documentation and owned up to that,” Alter said.

In one of those letters, Alter said he needed something from trustees, too. Namely, trust that faculty members and the provost put enough stock in the tenure system that they had no reason to water it down. Trust that tenure and promotion have never been a cakewalk at Purdue, no matter how anyone felt about it politically. (In fall 2014, 80.6 percent of Purdue’s 1,880 full-time professors had tenure, according to Purdue’s Office of Institutional Research, Assessment and Effectiveness.) And trust that faculty and the provost could come up with suitable measures that met the trustees’ desires and still “stand the test of time and be clearly quantifiable.”

Alter called it “the rub and the gist of the problem.” He laid it against a backdrop of his own role as a board member of Tipmont REMC and the trust that board needs to put in the experts hired to get the details right at the local utility.

“If (Purdue trustees) do have confidence in their management team, then they will allow that team to find the best way to accomplish that,” Alter wrote on Sept. 20. “If they do not, then they choose to delve into the inefficiencies of micromanagement, and risk introducing into the promotion document things which will either have to be ignored or interpreted very loosely if the document is to be useful.”

Alter and Trustee JoAnn Brouillette, chairwoman of the Academic Affairs Committee, said there were weeks of back and forth. Eventually, revisions from a University Senate committee and the provost’s office finally landed with the trustees for a vote last week.

“One of the things I made sure,” Alter said, “in my first email to JoAnn, was to tell her, ‘We’re not going to use red anymore.’ So what we have now are blue changes.”

Instead of the expected grilling, the only comments made by trustees dealt with praise.

“I think this has been a great learning opportunity,” Trustee John Hardin told Alter, a business owner before coming to Purdue. “The fact that your experience has not just been in academia allows you to speak to us in ways that others can’t. And I’m grateful for that.”

Daniels, during his monthly report to the trustees on Friday, flashed a Gallup-Purdue Index stat tied to the percentage of Purdue graduates’ feelings on this statement: “Professors cared about me as a person.” The Gallup-Purdue Index result: 19 percent of Purdue grads strongly agreed with that, compared to national figures that were in the mid-30s.

“Barely half the national average,” Daniels said. “I think this just underscores the significance of the board’s action requiring some sort of personal involvement engagement with students in our future promotion.”

That might have been a last-second swipe, culled from mounds of data from Gallup-Purdue Index surveys. Alter, though, didn’t seem to flinch.

The sausage had been made.

“Here we were with a controversy — an apparent controversy, as seen by Mitch at the last Senate meeting — to where now we have accord,” Alter said. “I’d call that a great negotiated settlement.”

“This was clearly a team effort,” Alter said, “and it’s a better document because of that. We found a way forward. We proved it could be done.”

Bangert is a columnist with the Journal & Courier. Contact him at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.