By: Dr. Jason Jewell, Chief Academic Officer
On June 3, Inside Higher Ed published a story about a study alleging that the State University System of Florida’s post-tenure review policy has resulted in a “brain drain” from the system. Specifically, the study claims that the policy has caused an increase in faculty departures—led by young, “academically productive” scholars—from the SUS, while also failing to increase “productivity” among incumbent faculty and degrading the quality of new tenure-track hires. Although it employs an innovative methodology to track faculty employment and scholarship, the study suffers from severe limitations and does not provide sufficient evidence for its conclusions. Its usefulness for informing policy discussion is thus negligible.
The study, “Fight or Flight: The Impact of Post-Tenure Evaluations on Faculty Productivity and Selection,” is a working paper that has not yet undergone peer review, and its raw data have not yet been made available for independent assessment, so its conclusions must be treated with caution. Its authors, Simon Quach and Zhengyi Yu of the University of Southern California, merged publicly accessible faculty profiles on the ORCID database with metadata from the Dimensions database to create a dataset that includes employment history, publication and citation history, and “predicted” gender and race for millions of higher education professionals. The authors used a difference-in-differences method to compare Florida’s faculty with those in other South Atlantic states and concluded that, since the announcement of the unified post-tenure review policy in 2022, the annual exit rate of professors from the SUS has increased from 4% to 5%, the number of prior publications among new hires has decreased, and the publication rate of incumbent faculty has remained flat. Furthermore, they claim that these changes were caused by the policy.
A reasonable person might find it implausible to argue that in today’s environment of college closures and disappearing tenure lines, young, tenure-track scholars would be so concerned at the prospect of being reviewed five years after attaining tenure in the SUS, that they would be willing to turn their backs on it today. That consideration aside, at least three serious problems beset this study:
- It attempts to measure only a subset (research productivity) of what post-tenure review assesses.
- Its dataset cannot capture everything relevant to research productivity.
- It fails to account for other reasons researchers might have left the SUS.
The authors claim that post-tenure review has backfired because “productivity”—defined as the number of peer-reviewed publications and citations—has not increased among incumbent faculty or new hires. However, neither the legislature nor the Board of Governors has ever identified this definition of productivity as the sole or even the primary benchmark for the success of post-tenure review. BOG regulation 10.003(3) stipulates a number of factors that must be considered in the post-tenure review process: research, teaching, service, compliance with regulations and policies, and other measures of faculty conduct. “Fight or Flight” attempts to measure none of these elements except research and thus cannot provide a holistic assessment of the SUS’s post-tenure review.
Moreover, the authors’ methodology for assessing the impact of post-tenure review on the SUS’s research climate, while innovative, suffers from the constraints of its dataset. ORCID is a database the use of which is mandatory for scholars seeking grants from the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation, but its use is far from universal across the academy, and it relies on manually updated documentation by its users for its data to remain current. The authors’ merging of information from ORCID and Dimensions yielded only an 83% success rate, and the paper does not address at any length the question of how representative the resulting dataset actually is. The authors’ dataset does not differentiate among different tiers of journal quality or academic presses, which means a scholar publishing frequently in lower-tier outlets would seem more “productive” than one publishing less frequently in higher-tier outlets. Citation counts could offset this lack of differentiation to some degree, but the narrow window of time observed in the study both makes citation counts less useful and biases against types of research, such as monographs, that have a longer runway to publication. And the study attempts to evaluate Florida’s policy after only a single year of implementation and the evaluation of a mere 20% of the SUS’s tenured faculty. All these factors call into question the authors’ assertion that post-tenure review has eroded academic productivity in the SUS.
Even assuming for the sake of argument that the above problems did not exist and that researchers’ rate of departure from the SUS did increase between 2022 and 2024, there is no compelling reason to conclude that post-tenure review is the cause. The economic and political landscape in Florida underwent significant change unrelated to post-tenure review between 2020 and 2024, and this change has influenced the SUS. For example, an inflationary environment and Florida’s strong economy led to skyrocketing real estate prices in Central and South Florida, making it more challenging for young scholars to establish themselves in the region.
Politically, the passage of S.B. 266 in 2023 ended federally and state-funded DEI spending in the SUS, and this affected faculty hiring, some of which was being done with federal grants, and some of which was the result of internal policy at individual institutions. The authors claim that the change in Florida’s DEI policy was not a causal factor in the departure of researchers that they believe has occurred. This assertion rests on their finding that researchers with “white-sounding names” left the state at a higher rate than those without. Leaving aside the question of whether a scholar’s race can be guessed with a sufficiently high degree of confidence from his or her surname, it is by no means clear that DEI restrictions would have no disincentivizing effects on the large majority of white professors who identify as progressives politically. As scholars such as Musa al-Gharbi have persuasively argued, support for DEI policies is often most evident among white “symbolic capitalists,” a class of educated professionals that includes the professoriate.
S.B. 266 also mandated a major reform of the SUS’s general education curriculum in a direction likely to be uncongenial to political progressives. Disciplines and courses deemed by the legislature to be excessively ideological in nature have been deemphasized or removed as a result of this reform, with the most dramatic example being the removal of sociology from the SUS’s core curriculum. This change could account for the departure of many progressive researchers from the SUS. The authors’ claim that the increase in departures is entirely attributable to non-STEM disciplines is consistent with this hypothesis because disciplines such as the humanities and social sciences are where the political imbalances among professors are the most lopsided.
To take just one more dramatic example, Inside Higher Ed reported in July 2023 that one-third of the faculty of New College had “fled” the school in protest over Governor DeSantis’s appointment of new trustees and the subsequent selection of Richard Corcoran as president. According to “Fight or Flight,” those departures should be attributed to faculty opposition to post-tenure review. Which is the more likely explanation?
Other objections could be raised to the methodology and assumptions of “Fight or Flight,” but these should be enough to call into question its conclusion that Florida’s post-tenure review policy is responsible for a “brain drain” from the SUS. If a slightly higher percentage of researchers are leaving the SUS today compared to five years ago, it is most likely the result of normal sorting in the changing labor market. With the recent elevation of Florida Atlantic University to R-1 status, more research is going on in the SUS than ever before. Its scholars continue to be a key reason why Florida has just been named the #1 state for higher education for the ninth year in a row by U.S. News and World Report. Every state’s public universities should hope for such a “brain drain.”
This essay was originally submitted to Inside Higher Ed, which declined to publish it.
Jason Jewell is the Chief Academic Officer and Vice Chancellor for Strategic Initiatives of the State University System of Florida.