UNI settles with five assistant professors, offering early promotion and tenure

The University of Northern Iowa has signed settlement agreements with five assistant professors promising them tenure and back pay after they filed grievances based on the institution’s initial denial of their “early promotion” applications.

Since the Iowa Board of Regents must approve all promotion and tenure actions, UNI is taking its retroactive faculty proposals to the board for approval at its meeting next week. If regents agree to grant the professors early tenure — as is spelled out in five different settlements — the salary increases associated with each will be applied retroactively to July 1, 2024.

Each professor also will be paid “the $3,700 salary increase associated with early promotion and tenure,” along with a lump sum for the prorated amount earned as of the date of his or her first pay cycle.

In exchange for the early tenure appointments — which, according to UNI, require a “documented record of accomplishment in teaching, scholarship, and service” — the faculty members have agreed to dismiss pending grievances and release UNI and regents from any future related claims.

“This agreement is the result of a compromise and shall never be construed as an admission by UNI or the Iowa Board of Regents of any liability, wrongdoing, or responsibility on its part,” the settlements say.

‘Outstanding probationary faculty’

Tenured appointments involve lengthy and extensive evaluations, but once attained they can be terminated only “for just cause or extraordinary circumstances such as financial exigency or program closure” — drawing criticism from Republican lawmakers in recent years, including through proposed legislation to eliminate tenure entirely.

UNI’s “early promotion and tenure” program — as described in its 2024-2025 faculty handbook — allows tenure-track assistant professors to apply to receive tenure as associate professors one year shy of the normal six-year evaluation period.

“Early promotion and tenure has been available to outstanding probationary faculty members one year early,” UNI professor and United Faculty President Christopher Martin told The Gazette. “Early promotion and tenure candidates are those who demonstrate consistent, exceptional performance, surpassing their department standards and criteria. It’s a way for UNI to recognize our very best young scholars, give them a well deserved early raise, and retain them on our faculty.”

UNI in its handbook notes early promotion and tenure “is exceptional and rare and reserved for cases of consistent, exceptional performance.”

Faculty applications for early tenure require approval from both the department head and the institution’s “professional assessment committee.” If both don’t agree, “the case does not move forward” and it reverts to a standard fifth-year review.

One left for another job

Six assistant professors applied for early promotion and tenure in the 2024 academic year — all of whom were denied, Martin told The Gazette. One then left UNI “for another job at a larger research university,” he said.

“United Faculty assisted four of the remaining faculty members in grievances,” Martin said. “Those four, plus one other who didn’t grieve it, were ultimately offered the same settlements by the university and board of regents.”

Although each of the professors who filed grievances had specific arguments, Martin said, all said UNI did not assess them “according to their departmental standards and criteria document.”

“The facts in each case demonstrated that the young faculty members did indeed surpass their departmental standards and criteria — they exceeded the standards,” Martin said. “So United Faculty felt they all had very strong, slam-dunk cases for early promotion and tenure.”

The five professors

The five UNI professors who settled their grievances in exchange for early promotion and tenure include:

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All five applied for early promotion and tenure in the 2023-24 academic year, to become effective July 1, 2024, and all were denied.

Although the professors were offered the same tenure and compensation stipulations in their respective settlements, three — Wen, Dickey and Dickinson — also agreed to “special provisions for age discrimination.”

“The waiver of (his or her) rights on claims arising under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 is in exchange for the consideration outlined above, which is above and beyond that to which (he or she) is otherwise entitled to receive from UNI.”

Tenure losses

All three of Iowa’s public universities have reported losses in tenured professors on their respective campuses.

Where the University of Iowa a decade ago in 2014-2015 employed 1,240 tenured faculty, 376 on a tenure track and 1,478 non-tenure track faculty, UI in the last academic year had 1,074 tenured, 333 tenure-track and 1,888 non-tenure-track faculty.

Over the same period, Iowa State University’s faculty count dropped from 1,003 with tenure, 315 on a tenure track and 570 non-tenure-track to 933, 208, and 611, respectively.

And UNI’s faculty makeup over the decade shifted from 438 with tenure, 130 on a tenure track and 245 non-tenure-track to 326 with tenure, 63 on a tenure track and 246 non-tenure faculty.

Where tenured faculty in 2011-12 accounted for about half of all full-time faculty across the three campuses, they accounted for about 41 percent last year.

“The goal of tenure is to ensure academic freedom to innovate, create and engage in explorations that advance knowledge,” Board of Regent representatives said when asked by lawmakers in 2021 to defend tenure.

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com