For the first time since 2008, the Mississippi State University Robert Holland Faculty Senate could revise the institution’s promotion and tenure document to incorporate various changes requested by administrative officials within the past year.
Meghan Millea, Faculty Senate president, said the concept of tenure plays a vital role in a faculty member’s continued success at MSU.
“Tenure provides security and academic freedom for people who are engaged in the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge to be able to ask questions and to be able to report their findings, which is necessary for the functioning of the university,” she said.
Faculty members are divided into four categories: extension, research, clinical and academic, but only academic faculty is eligible for tenure.
David Shaw, MSU’s vice president of research and economic development, said a faculty member is only allowed to go up for tenure upon the completion of his or her sixth year of employment.
First, the faculty member must prepare a portfolio of materials that exhibits his or her academic contributions to MSU’s tri-fold mission of teaching, research and service.
The portfolio will be used by the department to solicit letters from professionals that are outside of MSU and in the faculty member’s field.
Shaw said these external letters assess the individual based on the standards of the external source’s university.
“Institutions like ours throughout the country are doing this for good reasons, and, if we are going to be one of the prestigious institutions that we believe we are, then we need to be using the same level of rigor in the promotion process,” he said.
In order to be granted promotion or tenure, the current document stipulates a faculty member must achieve a level of excellence in at least one and a minimum satisfactory in the other two categories of MSU’s tri-fold mission.
However, if a faculty member is not granted tenure, he or she will enter a terminal period and have one more year of employment at MSU before being dismissed.
Though the revision process is in its preliminary stages, Shaw said the administration has already approached the Faculty Senate with important changes suchas altering the language of the document’s service component.
“The overall promotion package should be focused on developing a national reputation for the individual faculty member and therefore for the university as a whole,” Shaw said. “But the service activities often, at times, have reflected more on internal service like serving on departmental committees.”
Shaw said he spoke with the Faculty Affairs Committee of Faculty Senate about providing stronger and clarified language to help MSU faculty better understand the expectations are for participating in national and international activities.
He said because external letters can be difficult to acquire from a timing standpoint, the administration expressed a desire for a timeline that precedes the Oct. 1 deadline, which would require the faculty member to provide an advanced statement of intent to the department.
Jerry Gilbert, provost and executive vice president, said he proposed adding a signature line for MSU’s provost in addition to the current lines for the MSU president and Faculty Senate president.
While the concept of tenure may seem solely to affect the faculty, Millea said she recognizes how it ultimately influences students in a very positive way as well.
“You can be able to have discussions and explore topics that you otherwise might not be able to explore without the faculty member having tenure if they were at risk of losing their job,” she said. “You have people who are trained and also just creating an environment for free exchange of knowledge, which is a big deal because that is what the university is all about.”