Post-tenure review is one of those features of the modern professoriate that provide a further testimony, if any is needed, that the public no longer trusts college faculty members to do what they are paid to do at some minimal level of competence. State after state has adopted required post-tenure review, usually at the behest of impatient legislators for whom tenure is a suspicious device to protect the lazy, incompetent, or even demented from well-deserved loss of employment. Among these states is our own North Carolina; and one of the editors of the volume under review, Betsy Brown, has responsibility for the implementation of that policy, in her role as associate vice president for academic affairs at the general administration. She has worked with the AAHE "New Pathways" program, which includes efforts to find alternatives to tenure for the 21st century professoriate.

I looked forward to reading this book, despite the somewhat rebarbative title, to find out what central administrators are thinking about post-tenure review. My disappointment is not really the faulty of Licata and Brown; the book is, I would judge, aimed at provosts and policy-makers rather than professors. It includes considerable discussion of a research project on how Texas has implemented its state policy and what people think about it; there are extensive appendices comprising reports from states and institutions involved in ptr, and forms usable for the collection of further data.

Among the less data-friendly questions that I, as a faculty member, am interested in is the old one about whether ptr is formative or summative. The language on this one includes some discussion of formative uses; but everything about it makes it clear than the process originated in a desire for summative action and continues to emphasize summative, and in fact, punitive aims. Consider the discussion, in chapters 3 and 4 (written by Daphne N. Layton and Brown) of whether post-tenure review is "achieving its purposes." Obviously the question can only be answered by one who knows its intended purposes. Layton implies that the purpose is to punish or reprimand a significant number of faculty and that failure to do so requires a defense.

For example, one university explained to its trustees and other external stakeholders that while only 9% of reviewed tenured faculty had to revise their formal written statements and create developmental plans, many more had formative conversations with their department chairs in the process of thinking about and writing their statements. In those cases, the formal written statement was acceptable, because it already reflected some valuable feedback and direction. These are indications that a developmental process is working well, even if the statistics do not capture the information.

Ponder that "even if" in the last sentence. Here is a university that was able to reassure its trustees that the process was in fact working because, though the statistics seemed to suggest that only 9% of the faculty had been found deficient and required to undergo some corrective procedure, in fact many more had been found wanting, just at an earlier stage of the process. A successful post-tenure review process, it seems, is one that arrives at negative summative judgments of a fairly high (certainly higher than 9%) proportion of the faculty reviewed, and is able to assure outside stakeholders that its nets are fine enough to catch a sufficient number of offenders.

Perhaps as a faculty member (and a veteran of ptr) my suspicions are heightened. Still, when I read that "In private institutions with a tenure faculty review policy, recent data show 60% came about due to faculty or administrative request," I immediately wonder if that couldn't be disaggregated. Of that 60% what percentage was actually a faculty request?

I do not mean to be unfair to the authors. Clearly post-tenure review is a sign of the times; clearly college and university faculty must shoulder some of the blame for having been too complacent, too long, about misfeasance and nonfeasance in their ranks; and, most important of all, institutional administrators and state system officers have worked hard to substitute a reasonable and at least partly formative activity for the bigoted and unforgiving process envisioned by some legislators and other vocal critics. Yet I wonder if post-tenure review has achieved significant results in improving college teaching in America that in any sense justify the enormous financial and human cost involved.

Merritt Moseley
UNC Asheville