2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Recently there have been renewed attempts across the United States to introduce new or more-comprehensive post-tenure review policies. These efforts revive memories of the efforts undertaken in Wisconsin in 2015-16 to enact strict post-tenure review policies. The Wisconsin policies require faculty to undergo a comprehensive review at least every five years after receiving tenure. The reviews began in 2017, and as a result one full set of reviews should be complete, with some faculty scheduled for a second post-tenure review.

In this paper, the impacts of comprehensive post-tenure review at one institution in the University of Wisconsin System are reviewed and analyzed. While it is difficult to determine how the post-tenure review policy impacted the behavior or decisions of individual faculty members, a general idea of how the campus faculty as a whole have been affected can be formed. Briefly, the impacts of the productivity of the campus faculty due to comprehensive post-tenure review have been small.

In addition to the analysis of the impacts of post-tenure review, observations on how the process has been implemented are made in the paper. The process that was created relies heavily on faculty participation and decision-making, and as a result there has been little influence on the process from administrators or external actors. This has also led to a need for faculty to monitor how they approach the process and their need to maintain the integrity of the review process.