Students on the Green at the University of North Florida. | Carter Mudgett, Jacksonville Today
Published on March 15, 2024 at 4:01 pm
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A renewed battle is brewing at the University of North Florida as the faculty union claims that the administration broke an agreed-upon process for how post-tenure review is supposed to work.
Post-tenure review is a new requirement at Florida’s public universities that requires tenured faculty to undergo a performance review every five years that decides whether they keep their tenure or not. Though it’s required by law, the union has repeatedly argued it’s an attack on academic freedom.
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Last fall, the union and the university’s board of trustees negotiated for months to nail down an exact process for how post-tenure review would work. That all culminated to a 12-page Memorandum of Understanding each side signed in October that outlined the implementation of the process and specifically how it works.
Union leadership said in a faculty-wide email Wednesday that the administration used peer comparison in the review, something they pushed for months to ensure wouldn’t happen.
“We negotiated to remove peer comparisons and departmental averages from the process, and we are concerned that the administration would allow for this deviation in the process,” union Vice President Mark Halley wrote to Jacksonville Today.
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Jacksonville Today requested a statement from UNF, and a spokesperson denied the union’s allegations, writing: “The university is in compliance with the post-tenure review MOU.”
Faculty are solidly against peer comparison. An overwhelming 97.3% of respondents to a union poll last year noted so before the agreement was signed, UNF’s student newspaper Spinnaker reported. It showed that faculty thought they should be evaluated according to guidelines and not compared with their peers.
Beyond the signed agreement, UNF President Moez Limayem also assured faculty last year that peer comparisons wouldn’t be part of the process: “You are not being evaluated on a curve that would arbitrarily rank you lower or in comparison to others.”
The specific violation here allegedly happened about midway through the review process, the union said, on step six of eight during the dean review.
Lead image: Students on the Green at the University of North Florida | Carter Mudgett, Jacksonville Today
