The Faculty Executive Committee is planning to examine its policies on tenure this semester in response to a proposal made last semester to offer tenure at the Watson Institute for International Studies. The request - made by the Watson Board of Overseers - met with dissent among faculty, and the University looks to make a final decision about it in the spring, said former FEC Chair Ruth Colwill, associate professor of psychology.
Current University policy states that only departments can recommend a professor for tenure, Colwill said, adding that this policy excludes interdisciplinary programs and institutes such as Watson from recommending their professors.
The Watson Institute's ability to grant tenure to faculty would strengthen both the institute and related departments, said Vice President for International Affairs David Kennedy '76, a member of the Board of Overseers.
"The feeling that only with tenure could one be assured of building and retaining the highest quality faculty" motivated the board, he said, adding that the ability to make appointments at the Watson Institute would "bring new people to Brown who wouldn't otherwise come."
Tenured faculty at Watson would have greater teaching responsibilities, thus strengthening the international relations program, Kennedy said.
In January, Provost David Kertzer '69 P'95 P'98 created a working group to evaluate the Board of Overseers' proposal to grant tenure to professors at the institute. The committee recommended that tenure be available to professors at Watson.
But when the issue of tenure offered outside of departments was brought to faculty, there were several comments against the proposal, Kertzer said. Consequently, Kertzer and Kennedy decided to postpone addressing the matter until this coming spring semester.
The FEC plans to discuss the issue of having tenure lines outside of departments in a broader context this semester, Colwill said, rather than making the discussion specific to Watson or to Kennedy's proposal.
If the Watson Institute were granted permission to recommend tenure, there would be two kinds of professors who could receive tenure: professors in other departments at the University who would receive joint appointments and professors who do not belong to already existing departments, Kertzer said.
Kertzer said the University is currently waiting for more information from Watson about the number and "kind" of professors the institute would recommend for tenure. This information will be crucial for faculty when the issue is raised by the FEC, he added.
Still, some professors and department chairs said they are skeptical that giving the Watson Institute the right to grant tenure is a good idea.
"I'm against stand-alone tenure appointments at Watson in the way that the institute is currently configured," Professor of Political Science Alan Zuckerman said. "At Brown University, all tenure appointments ought to go through a department because academic research primarily works through a department and Ph.D.s are produced through the disciplines that are linked to departments."
Zuckerman said that if tenure were offered at the institute, there should be joint appointment with a department so that "members at Watson ... and members at the department would agree" whom to recommend for tenure.
Andrew Foster, professor of economics and the department chair, said the issue of granting tenure in institutes other than departments could cause problems if there isn't a core group of faculty to evaluate the new hires.
"Trying to build up tenure from scratch, you don't have those appointing judges, and it won't be in the long-term interest of the University," he said.
Foster added that professors who have joint appointments could feel disconnected from the departments, and that the departments would do the best job of hiring professors in their respective fields.
"The way to get the best economists on campus is to have them brought in through the economics department," he said.
Robert Kreiser, associate general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, said that tenure is granted by universities as a whole. Whether an institute can grant tenure should not be an issue, he said.
However, Kreiser added, "the normal procedure for faculty peer review should not be bypassed in order to consider candidates for tenure" at institutes.
Kennedy said that Watson would follow the University's normal procedure when reviewing faculty for tenure. Only tenured faculty would be allowed to review the new tenure candidates, necessitating a "transitional arrangement" for the institute's first appointments, he said.
The Watson Institute would not be the first institute to recommend tenure - Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs also has tenured faculty, the school's spokesman Steven Barnes wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. Woodrow Wilson is considered a department at Princeton for tenure purposes, he added.
