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Recommendations Issued on Work-Life Balance
By Gwendolyn Bradley
In March, the American Council on Education (ACE), an umbrella association for higher education institutions, released a report that discusses "critical work-life dilemmas" facing tenure-track faculty, including barriers to advancement for faculty with children and widespread dissatisfaction with academic careers, especially among women and people of color. The report, An Agenda for Excellence: Creating Flexibility in Tenure-Track Faculty Careers, proposes a number of ways in which colleges and universities might enhance their faculty recruitment efforts, improve career satisfaction and retention of faculty, create family-friendly environments, and develop incentives for faculty retirement.
While AAUP research director John Curtis served on an advisory committee for the report and the AAUP has supported some of its proposals, the association is concerned about a proposal to "create flexibility in the probationary period for tenure review" by offering "flexible tenure frames of up to ten years" for the tenure decision. As AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen noted in a letter to the ACE, this proposal would allow a maximum probationary period significantly longer than six years. The six-year limit for reaching a tenure decision is called for by the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure jointly issued by the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges and Universities and endorsed by nearly two hundred professional organizations and learned societies.
As the general secretary's letter explains,
the stated maximum [i]s basically nonnegotiable, and for good reason: increasing the time available postpones the decision with a resulting general erosion of the concept of probation and tenure. At the same time, the AAUP has recognized that exceptions to the maximum, for limited specific purposes and upon demonstrated need, can and should be made. There can be developments be-yond anyone's control, such as a lengthy illness toward the end of the probationary period, where delaying the decision is the only reasonable course to follow.
Indeed, concerned about the same conflicts between work and family responsibilities that prompted the ACE report, the AAUP in 2001 adopted the Statement of Principles on Family Responsibilities and Academic Work, which recommends allowing the probationary period to be extended for a year, with faculty duties and salary continuing, for the primary or coequal caregiver of each newborn or newly adopted child, with no more than two such extensions to be granted.
The ACE report's proposal for allowing ten years for the tenure decision does not limit its availability to those with family responsibilities, but suggests that the longer probationary period could help faculty members who may need the time "because of unanticipated professional or personal circumstances." The proposal's lack of specificity is of concern, according to Bowen, because it could be applied to nearly any faculty member. While such a wide application of a ten-year probationary period might indeed make tenure more "flexible," Bowen says, it would not contribute to the quality control and to the protection of academic freedom that characterize a sound system of tenure.
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