HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A Future Without Tenure?

Florida Polytechnic University’s re-envisioning of a public research institution is making some radical departures from the norm, including scrapping the idea of tenure. The state’s union leaders, however, say that decision should be reversed if administrators are serious about their aspirations for the university.

Instead of tenure, faculty members “will be offered fixed term, multi-year contracts that will be renewed based on performance,” the university-to-be announced on Tuesday.

“We want to be a leading university, and we wanted to attract faculty who think out of the box, and who are ambitious and creative,” said Ghazi Darkazalli, vice president of academic affairs. “We don’t want them to be worrying within the first five or six years whether they’re going to be tenured or not.”

The faculty contracts will last for one, three or five years, and will be renewed based on merit “rather than on a set rule within the boundaries of tenure,” Darkazalli said. He said that abandoning the tenure model means that faculty members will be less inclined to pursue the kind of “trivial publication and research” professors on the tenure track sometimes feel is required of them to succeed, and instead focus on teaching and research beneficial to their students.

Stay tuned.