Study: Post-Tenure Review Pushed Researchers to Leave Florida

Florida’s controversial post-tenure review policy has led tenure-track faculty members at public institutions to leave the state, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Southern California. At the same time, the policy resulted in no improvement in professors’ productivity, the researchers found.

After the policy was implemented in 2022, the percentage of tenure-track faculty at public institutions who left Florida increased one percentage point, from about 4 percent to 5 percent. There was no such increase among Florida’s non-tenure-track faculty, who are not impacted by the policy, nor among tenure-track faculty at private colleges and universities, which are not subject to the policy, suggesting that the departures were caused by the policy.

And while legislators claimed a key goal of post-tenure review was to “enhance performance and recognition for those faculty doing exceptional work,” as former Florida Speaker of the House Chris Sprowls said at the time of the bill’s signing in 2022, highly productive faculty—those who put out a significant amount of research—were more likely than less productive faculty to leave the state.

“That suggests that there was some impact of the policy that was intended, as it kicked out those that were unproductive, but most of the effects of this brain drain were the highly talented ones leaving Florida,” said Simon Quach, an assistant professor of economics at USC who co-authored the study with Ph.D. candidate Zhengyi Yu.

Post-tenure review isn’t a new phenomenon in higher education, but Florida’s policy has been criticized for its severe penalties: receiving an “unsatisfactory” rating leads to immediate termination, and a rating of “does not meet expectations” puts faculty on a one-year improvement plan that can result in termination. About one in five faculty under review at the University of Florida either received one of those ratings, gave up their tenure voluntarily or quit during the first post-tenure review cycle since the policy was put in place.

Critics of the policy say it essentially renders tenure moot, allowing universities to “to get rid of people they don’t like,” Meera Sitharam, president of the United Faculty of Florida union’s UF chapter, told Inside Higher Ed last summer following the first cycle of reviews. Higher ed leaders and researchers have expressed concern that laws limiting faculty freedoms will lead researchers to leave Florida and other states that have passed similar legislation, but this study is the first to concretely show the merit of those fears.

In addition to pushing researchers out of the state, the policy didn’t seem to lead to an increase in productivity among tenured faculty, the study found; the rate at which faculty produced research remained unchanged before and after the policy went into place.

“Contrary to the reform’s stated goals, we find no evidence that the policy improved academic productivity among incumbent faculty. Measures of publications, citations, and preprints remained flat, including for those most at risk of failing post-tenure evaluations,” the report says.

The researchers used a database called ORCID, which assigns unique codes to different researchers to help catalog their work, in order to identify tenure-track faculty in Florida and document their research output and whether they had remained in the state. They acknowledge that not all faculty use ORCID; its user base likely skews towards STEM professors and more productive researchers, who are more likely to apply for grants from the National Institutes of Health and similar agencies, which require applicants to provide their ORCID identification.

Quach said he believes the report is the first to investigate the impact of post-tenure review policies on faculty performance in higher education. Such research has been conducted on K–12 teachers, but the results are the opposite of the USC researchers’ findings; in K–12 schools, post-tenure review correlates with improved teacher performance. Quach guessed one reason Florida’s post-tenure review process may not be as effective at helping faculty increase productivity is because most tenured faculty are already very internally motivated to complete research.

“Tenure evaluations for faculty at universities are pretty strict already. So, people tend to work really hard to get tenure; it sort of helps select people who, in a way, devote their life to research,” he said. He also noted that K–12 teachers may not have the choice to move to a new institution as professors do, because different states require different licensing for teachers.