In the wake of the Ward Churchill debacle, a University of Colorado report has recommended 40 changes in tenure, some of which sound promising – such as a faster process for dismissing incompetent academics and an outside audit of tenure cases every five years.
But one state legislator, as reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “said the university should have spent more time looking for better mechanisms for accountability, rather than a review system that is self-reinforcing.”
This report is but a start. A nationwide look at corrupt tenure practices is way overdue.