MU to cut 12 School of Medicine tenured faculty salaries by 10%-25%

At least 12 tenured faculty in MU’s School of Medicine will see salary cuts ranging from 10% to 25% starting Sept. 1 after recent productivity reviews.

MU spokesperson Christian Basi said the reviews started in early spring and were conducted over several weeks.

Productivity reviews are a common method of measuring the performance of tenured faculty, Basi said, but salary adjustment is a relatively new tool in that process. He said the reviews and cuts are ways MU holds itself accountable.

Some faculty in the School of Medicine and beyond disagree with the planned cuts and the reviews.

Dennis Lubahn, a professor of biochemistry appointed jointly to the School of Medicine and the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, sent an email to MU faculty members declaring the cuts an “attack on tenure.” He said he hoped to make faculty aware of the issue.

Lubahn also invited faculty members to attend a meeting to discuss potential action. He said more than 20 people came in and out of the meeting, representing various schools and colleges at MU, the MU Faculty Council and the American Association of University Professors. He said many people who were out of town wanted to attend via Zoom, but Lubahn wanted to keep the informal, brainstorming feel of the meeting.

The cuts have “nothing to do with tenure,” Basi said. He said when expectations and productivity become unbalanced, adjustment is required. The review showed only a small number of tenured faculty aren’t meeting the School of Medicine’s standards, Basi said. The school has more than 650 faculty members, including tenured, tenure-track and non-tenure-track.

“The vast majority of faculty are meeting and often exceeding expectations,” Basi said.

Lubahn said the productivity reviews showed a lack of appreciation of faculty effort and rewarded results instead of effort.

“Effort isn’t being judged, and it should be,” he said.

Lubahn said tenured faculty already undergo years of evaluations to achieve tenure and shouldn’t be penalized if they continue putting in the work. He made an analogy using doctors, arguing they aren’t penalized for failing to cure a patient, but rather if they don’t try or behave inappropriately.

He also thinks the productivity reviews use a “top-down, one-size-fits-all” approach that doesn’t work.

“It’s like using the same metric for a quarterback and a defensive lineman,” Lubahn said. “If you ask both of them how many completed passes and tackles they made, they’re both going to fail.”

Basi said the evaluations used in the reviews depend on the role of the person being reviewed. Research professors, for example, might be reviewed based on the number and worth of grants they bring in, the research they publish, the awareness gained by their laboratories and their success with their teaching responsibilities and interaction with students.

Short-term issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be solely blamed for performance issues, Basi said, because the reviews look at multiple years of work. However, the people conducting the reviews took the pandemic into account. The School of Medicine reviews were done by a team within the school.

Lubahn said the main issue with the tenured salary cuts is the lack of communication around them. He said this is part of a bigger problem at MU: faculty not having a say in the governance of MU despite the long-term commitments many of them have made.

“We love MU,” Lubahn said. “A lot of us have been here so long we bleed black and gold.”

Lubahn said success at a modern university requires shared governance and communication between administrators and faculty.

“A small group of administrators don’t know more than an entire faculty,” Lubahn said. “They need to ask us for ideas.”

Basi said a couple of groups and task forces with faculty representation have looked into setting appropriate work expectations in the past and have made recommendations similar to what’s in the current policy.

Lubahn worries the cuts could become a “slippery slope” that demoralize faculty across campus.

Similar review processes are in progress at other schools within MU, including CAFNR and the College of Veterinary Medicine, but Basi said they aren’t as far along as the School of Medicine.

Lubahn said he just wants the administration to communicate with him and the other faculty. He said he would happily stand down if it turns out the university is in financial trouble, and faculty won’t fight “if they just tell us what’s going on.”

“It’s like the mushroom analogy,” Lubahn said. “We’re kept in the dark and fed you-know-what.”

The reviews and cuts ultimately come down to accountability, Basi said. ”Is it fair for MU to not take action when people aren’t meeting expectations?” he asked.

Lubahn conceded there is some “dead weight” among tenured faculty but said there are already mechanisms in place to slide them out.

He said those mechanisms haven’t been used much and thinks they should be implemented more instead of making what he called broad cuts “that will eventually lead to the destruction of tenure as the administrators arbitrarily continue to reset, in a top-down fashion, inappropriate performance standards; and this destruction of faculty tenure will eventually destroy MU.”