The disagreement between some faculty members and the Fulbright College dean at the University of Arkansas that prompted the dean’s resignation this week centered on a peer-reviewed system of employee evaluations and the extent to which it was being honored, those familiar with the issue said.
On Monday, Dean Robin Roberts announced she will step down Aug. 1, in an e-mail sent to tenured and tenure-track faculty members in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.
She cited a stalemate between herself and leaders of the college’s academic departments concerning the evaluation system.
Roberts has not responded to requests for comment since Monday.
This week, Fulbright College faculty members familiar with the issue said university policy outlines a procedure for evaluating faculty members for merit raises.
It involves elected peers from the faculty member’s particular academic field reviewing their teaching, research and service accomplishments and making a recommendation to the department chairman, who then makes a recommendation to the dean on the raises. The process is separate from tenure and promotion decisions.
The college has 19 departments in fields that range from arts such as drama, music and visual arts to various social sciences, mathematics and the hard sciences like physics and chemistry-biochemistry.
Doug Rhoads, a biological-sciences professor and chairman of the Fulbright College Cabinet, said that in his 23 years at the university, “every dean has handled the faculty evaluations differently.”
“It’s not etched in stone as to how they’re supposed to happen, other than that the state Legislature mandates that we will have peer evaluation,” he said. The university has Academic Policy 1405.11 designed to carry this out.
Faculty members who serve on the college cabinet meet with the dean, he said, and the cabinet has standing committees focused on topics such as faculty development, academic programs and personnel. It is separate from the 19 departments’ individual personnel committees, which are composed of elected faculty members who evaluate their peers’ scholarly work, such as journal articles, books, teaching achievements and service activities.
“Dean Roberts instituted an evaluation process last year, and it was, I would have to say, not received with overwhelmingly broad support by the faculty,” Rhoads said.
That system was abandoned and the sides tried to come up with another process this year, he said. His understanding was that the sides came to an impasse over the peer-review issue.
Or as Lynda Coon put it: “I think the issue is the degree to which there is a peer-reviewed process.” Coon, a history professor, is chairman of the Fayetteville campus’s history department.
Fulbright College is the university’s largest academic college. In addition to its degree programs, it teaches the mandatory “core” courses all students must take for graduation. It arguably is the university’s most diverse college in terms of fields of study, and no dean can be an expert in them all, the faculty members said.
“When you have physics paired with fine arts paired with medieval history, I think the expert opinion has to be part of the process,” Coon said. “I would be loathe to evaluate physics.”
Rhoads said, “We do more than 50 percent of the teaching, we have more than 50 percent of the majors, and we are the largest college in the university.”
Patsy G. Watkins, who chaired UA’s journalism department from 1992-2010, said performance evaluations at the departmental level always involved clearly communicating up the chain of command why a certain achievement was remarkable in a particular field.
“Departments do think differently,” said Watkins, an associate professor of journalism.
“We would always try to spell out why this particular performance stands out for this area,” she said. “It was just a matter of trying to [be] clear on what we did.”
Coon said the dean’s role in evaluations is an important check-and-balance to ensure that university standards are followed, and that departments should not have “free rein. ”
“The problem might have been the degree to which expert opinion was not being listened to,” she said, adding that good intentions likely fueled the issue. “A lot of this is probably attached to the drive to raise standards. But in order to do that, you have to be super careful in how you write procedures.”
Roberts’ resignation-notice letter to the provost dated Monday seems to reflect that she and the university had already agreed upon the terms of her departure later this summer and her new spot at the university as an English professor.
UA spokesman John Diamond said Roberts’ new faculty salary will be $152,588, or 80 percent of her dean’s salary, and she will have a standard nine-month appointment.
Roberts also wrote that she will keep her laptop and receive “$10,000 start-up to assist me in the transition to a full-time faculty position, and be provided a suitable (single) faculty office.”
Dorothy Stephens, chairman of the English department, said Tuesday that she wasn’t familiar with Roberts’ start-up money but professors commonly get such funds to equip their offices or labs.
“As a dean, she wasn’t expected to do research,” Stephens said, so Roberts establishing her faculty office could require more resources.
Diamond added that the start-up packages are funded through two sources: the faculty member’s college and the office of the vice provost for research and economic development.
Roberts will take a research leave this fall and return during the spring 2014 semester, said Stephens, who is soon to be Roberts’ new supervisor and also is an English professor.
Stephens added that Roberts was granted tenure upon being hired as Fulbright College dean nearly two years ago. The faculty voted to recommend that she receive tenure and the provost approved it, she said.
“The English department is greatly looking forward to having her as a colleague and working with her as a member of the department,” she said.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 06/13/2013