Do Professors Receive Annual Performance Reviews?

Professors at Research I universities are supposed to receive annual performance reviews.

Untenured faculty are reviewed nearly continuously. The first weed-out occurs at the three-year mark, when unpromising performers are counseled out of their positions. But by the time a faculty member advances to full professor, the odds go way down that he or she will be reviewed every year.

Having had four deans since I was promoted to full professor in 2000, I have received only one performance review since then.

Before we go further: Professors submit annual activity reports every year to their department chairs or deans. Usually, these are clearly formatted and sectioned to account for research, teaching, committee and disciplinary service, awards and recognition, and miscellany. These reports take about 20-30 minutes to complete. In my one annual review since 2000, my Dean noted the highlights from my report and provided brief but appropriate evaluative comments.

So, why doesn’t this occur routinely?

From a Dean’s or Department Chair’s perspective, this is a losing proposition. Tenured faculty tend to have delicate egos (I include myself here), and we tend to overrate ourselves. Tenured faculty are also powerful. If we feel a shared sense of personal grievance, we can wage a low-grade war or mount a coup against our reviewer. Finally, as a group, we don’t listen well to personal criticism.

So, why would anyone want to review a professor’s performance under these conditions?  

But this is bad for professors, bad for students, and bad for higher education.

For professors, we submit annual reports and get as much feedback as we see from the IRS after we file our annual return.

Does anyone actually read our reports? Probably, though not deeply, I suspect.

After 16 years of mostly administrative silence about my performance, I have made myself my own boss, as I suspect others like me—and ironically, this feeds the cycle of a superior not wanting to conduct a meaningful review. Surely, our swagger shows.

Without droning on, I add this: The cumulative effect of no review can leave a professor feeling passed-by, isolated, and not valued.

This, too, is probably off-the-mark—and ironic, too, because a professor’s superior might feel, to the contrary that this professor is so valuable, that there’s no need to acknowledge this fact.

For students with unsatisfactory experiences, the system tends to ignore issues that they might consider important, such as a professor’s classroom tone, accessibility, open-mindedness, engagement and the like.

For higher education, there is no getting around the fact that lack of annual performance reviews lend some credence to society’s critique that the tenure system is outmoded.

I welcome comments from anyone, especially those of us who are faculty, administrators, or students. To the extent that my comments are off-base, your feedback is especially welcome at m-leroy@illinois.edu.