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May 22, 2008
Baylor Line News
A publication of the Baylor Alumni Association
Baylor President John Lilley recently announced that seven of the twelve faculty members who had been denied tenure this spring were granted tenure after a reconsideration process. Two of the originally denied candidates chose not to ask for reconsideration, and three who asked for reconsideration were denied again. In total, twenty-five of the thirty faculty candidates who applied for tenure this year will receive it. To read the story from the Waco Tribune-Herald, go to "Seven BU faculty see controversial tenure denials overturned." And to read the text of Lilley's May 14 e-mail announcing the change, go to News and Notes.
The reversal came after weeks of tense dialogue between faculty members and the Lilley administration. As previously reported in Baylor Line News, faculty members asked Lilley about the tenure denials during an open forum on April 21, and on May 6 the Faculty Senate passed a "Failure of Shared Governance" resolution that criticized the administration's handling of the tenure process.
The Faculty Senate has also requested information from the administration that would clarify how many tenure denials were made at the various levels of decision-making--whether by negative letters from the candidate's departmental faculty, by the vote of the University Tenure Committee, or by the provost or president. In an e-mail on May 8 to Baylor faculty and staff, Lilley said that the information would not be forthcoming until the tenure process was complete.
Faculty Senate chair Matthew Cordon told the Tribune-Herald that he was pleased with the reversals, but he added that the senate's concerns about the issue of shared governance still need to be addressed.
"We still need to look at the decision-making because we have a tenure class that has to file their [tenure] notebooks by next November," Cordon said. "We still have policies, and substantive policies, that need to be reviewed in depth, so I don't think the senate's position on shared governance is going to change at all."
To share your thoughts on this and other topics, go to Baylor Line Forum message board.
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