Andrea Flores A new law will became part of the Texas Education Code on Sept. 1 with the purpose of clarifying the conditions for which tenured professors can be terminated.
According to Chair for the Political Science Department and Professor Clyde Barrow, the new law is an effort to clarify the meaning of tenure, which Barrow said leaves the expectation of continuous employment subject to a professor’s performance.
“They can expect to be continuously employed at that institution for the rest of their life, so long as they do not engage in misconduct, professional incompetence, or what’s called moral turpitude,” he said.
Barrow said UTRGV has followed this process to evaluate professors for decades. He added that this law would apply to those institutions that did not yet follow some kind of evaluation assessment.
“One of the things the law did was require institutions to have a very clear written process for evaluating faculty and for awarding tenure,” Barrow said. “It also requires that faculty undergo annual evaluations each year to measure their performance and things like teaching research and university service.”
He said this law is a representation of symbolic legislation and that the main concerns of those who authored the bill were regarding faculty competence level and laziness.
“We already have a process for what we call post-tenure review, where tenured faculty are also periodically evaluated on their performance,” Barrow said.
He added that the only thing that caught people’s attention was the specification under which a tenured professor could be terminated; for example, misconduct and violation of university rules and policies.
“I don’t think it affects the vast majority of professors at our institution and in a significant way at all,” barrow said. “I know there were some concerns about the termination things. But the fact is that the things that are in that bill have already been endorsed by the American Association of University Professors as legitimate causes for removing professors.”
For more information, watch the upcoming KVAQ-TV Sept. 4 newscast.
