Plan for Firing of Inept UC Professors Stirs Debate

The University of California is considering a controversial proposal to deal with what critics say are skeletons in academia’s back closets: incompetent tenured professors.

Some UC faculty want to publicly set guidelines for the discipline and firing of “grossly incompetent” professors. Others, saying such cases are better handled informally, fear that any definition of incompetency could be used to harass dissident scholars and attack the concept of lifetime employment promised by tenure.

“To many faculty, when you say something about possibly terminating a tenured person, all hell breaks loose,” explained Richard Gable, the UC Davis political science professor who headed the entire UC system’s faculty council last year.

A proposal about firing the grossly incompetent passed the Faculty Senate at UC Berkeley last spring but is opposed by UCLA’s professoriate. So, a university-wide panel has been formed to study the matter.

Meanwhile, the American Assn. of University Professors, wary of possible threats to academic freedom, also has expressed concern. The association says that a UC plan could start a trend throughout the country. Few other schools now specify incompetency as grounds for dismissal. Among those that do is Stanford University. No Stanford professor has been formally fired for incompetence in at least 20 years, officials said, although some may have been pressured into retirement.

Supporters of the UC Berkeley proposal say it probably would affect a tiny number--Gabel estimated a dozen--of the 6,700 tenured professors on the nine UC campuses. But they say it will be more important to define professorial incompetence as UC prepares at the end of 1993 to drop its mandatory retirement at age 70.

“Removing the time of retirement might well increase the number of people unaware that they have ceased to function,” said history professor John Heilbron, chairman of the Faculty Senate at UC Berkeley. All tenured professors, along with police officers and firefighters, were given a seven-year exemption when Congress abolished mandatory retirements in 1986.

According to Heilbron, “gross incompetence” describes only professors “one cut above moribund” and “means that the party is a disaster in the classroom, has stopped research and just no longer functions as a professor.”

Firing for such a person “seems to me difficult to argue against,” he added.

However, Jordan Kurland, associate general secretary of the American Assn. of University Professors, objects to a hard-and-fast definition “No one is arguing that we should just wink at these (incompetent) people and carry them,” he said. “But what is needed is not a specific procedure. What is needed is enough initiative, enough gumption to step in and deal with an unpleasant situation.

“When you start writing criteria and procedures to deal with the most grossly unfit, it just opens the door to have another category not quite as bad and another category not quite as bad as that,” Kurland added.

Under UC rules, a professor can be disciplined or fired for plagiarism, taking undue advantage of a student, or a criminal conviction, among other things. Officials say that the university can take similar action against an incompetent under a general policy of “good cause” but that most such cases are handled informally.

Ellen Switkes, UC’s director of academic personnel, estimated that three or four tenured professors a year leave the system because of their poor performance. Most are pressured into early retirement. “There are arrangements made for people to leave,” Switkes said. She and other UC officials declined to give details about those cases, citing privacy rules.

Policy Critics

Critics of university tenure policies contend that professors are brutally scrutinized for their research and teaching abilities during the selection for tenure but that there is little follow-up once approval is granted. However, in 1986 UC began formal performance reviews for professors every five years, linking it to promotions and salaries. That uncovered some cases of incompetency and raised questions about what to do with them, faculty leaders say.

Some professors think the current policy is too vague and that the university needs to confront recent criticism on tenure. For example, state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig in August complained that UC professors spend too little time in the classroom. And, some students and faculty were outraged that former UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Robert A. Huttenback remained on the payroll for a year after his conviction for embezzlement of university funds; the UC Board of Regents suspended his salary in July and said Huttenback would be the first professor in the history of UC to be formally stripped of his tenure if he loses court appeals.

The “gross incompetency” proposal at UC Berkeley says that a professor must be a flop in both research and teaching to lose tenure. That is an important point because some older professors slack off on new research but remain wonderful lecturers. For possible dismissal under the plan, a professor must show no likelihood of renewed scholarship and be so poor a teacher “that it is a disservice to students.”

If counseling fails to bring improvement, action against such a professor would go through a complicated ladder of review by peers, the campus chancellor and possibly the UC system’s president and regents.

However, biological chemistry professor Sidney Roberts, chairman of the UCLA Faculty Senate, said any such plan would be very difficult to administer fairly. “Take someone in literature,” Roberts suggested. “He might be working on a book for 10 years and would appear to accomplish nothing in the interim. He might not have been doing as good a job teaching as he might. But 10 years later, he may win the Nobel Prize.”

A seven-member panel of professors from around the UC system is to meet soon on the matter. “It’s unlikely that any resolution will be easily forthcoming and certainly not without considerable study and discussion,” said committee chairman Charles Nash, a UC Davis chemistry professor.