Utah Audit of Colleges Finds Tenured Professors Not Held Accountable for Bad Teaching By Beth McMurtrie October 21, 2026 An audit of the post-tenure-review system in Utah has found deficiencies in the way underperforming professors are dealt with, attributing the problems highlighted to the tenuous position academic-department chairs often hold as fellow faculty members with temporary leadership responsibilities.
It recommends that the State Board of Education take steps to strengthen those positions while holding department chairs accountable for professors who are performing poorly. It also suggests that overly cumbersome due-process procedures on some campuses may get in the way. Faculty leaders reached by The Chronicle, though, said auditors seek to impose yet another layer of administrative bureaucracy that would diminish shared governance.
The audit, overseen by a subcommittee formed by the state Office of the Legislative Auditor General, included more than 120 interviews with administrators, deans, and department chairs. The committee also examined 666 performance reviews of tenured professors. In Utah, tenured professors are required to undergo a review every five years.
Among those, auditors found only eight instances in which tenured faculty members with poor teaching performance were required to go through remediation. They identified an additional 40 cases they said illustrate how someone identified as a persistently poor teacher could end up being rated satisfactory or given no remediation plan.
“Poor instruction can contribute to students abandoning majors and academic programs, including in high-demand fields Utah needs,” the report states. “Even when students persisted through a course with poor instruction, they report being unprepared to succeed in their field. Students also reported avoiding or withdrawing from courses taught by these faculty and having to repeat courses due to inadequate instruction, potentially delaying graduation.”
The report lays the blame for this problem largely on systems and structures that inhibit accountability. Department chairs, the authors note, are selected from among their peers, are in rotating positions, and face heavy workloads. Performance reviews are just one among their many responsibilities. That setup does not provide strong incentives or support for requiring that underperforming colleagues address their shortcomings.
“Institutions must empower department chairs to fully lead their academic units and hold them accountable for performance,” the report says. “A department leader should have sufficient time, clear authority, training, protection, and incentives for effective leadership. Without those conditions, post-tenure reviews will remain less effective, and students will continue to receive lower quality instruction.”
Professionalizing the Chair The audit received mixed responses, including praise from the head of the State Board of Education and deep skepticism by a former president of the Academic Senate at the University of Utah.
Geoffrey Landward, Utah’s higher-education commissioner, found the audit to be “pretty positive.” He said it affirms the value of tenure and academic freedom and recognizes that most tenured faculty members are excellent. “The overall theme here is this is not about wanting to undermine tenure. This is about 'let’s make sure tenure works so that it allows for accountability.’”
The audit lays out a series of recommendations that focus on redefining and strengthening the supervisory role of academic-department leaders, including a selection and evaluation process that emphasizes their leadership capabilities.
Landward said he likes that approach, but it raises another set of challenges: Where are colleges going to find the resources to do that? The report is, in essence, recommending that institutions professionalize the role of department chair, he said. But how would that work, for example, in a department with four professors?
It’s “not something that a magic wand can just fix by saying, Let’s just change the organizational structure,” he said. “Because it’s so intertwined with workload and time.”
The audit also asks the Board of Education or the Legislature to consider streamlining due-process procedures for removing tenured faculty members and consider setting a time limit for remediation plans.
Landward said the board, which he oversees, will dig into this issue by bringing in representatives from Utah’s higher-education system and looking at national literature and research on the topic. Ultimately, he said, the board’s recommendations will likely vary by type of institution.
“We just want these department chairs to be successful,” he said, “and I think right now we haven’t set them up to be.”
Accountable to Whom? Kelly Benjamin, spokesperson for the national American Association of University Professors, said in an email that several of the recommendations in the audit are inconsistent with the AAUP’s Statement on Government. One of the recommendations is that department chairs should be appointed by and accountable to institutional leadership. The AAUP holds that chairs should be elected or appointed by or in consultation with faculty members. It also says they should be primarily accountable to their department, not the administration.
The same holds true, Benjamin said, when it comes to evaluating a chair’s performance. That should be done primarily by faculty members.
Richard Preiss, past president of the Academic Senate at the University of Utah, was even more critical. He wrote in an email that the audit’s findings were based on interviews with administrators and unspecified materials from performance reviews. “It does not specify what materials those were, but they seem largely to be student satisfaction surveys, flawed diagnostic instruments from whose data one can always isolate and exaggerate what the audit calls 'concerns,’” he wrote.
Preiss also questioned whether the relatively small number of problematic cases cited in the report support such sweeping changes to the post-tenure-review process.
While he agreed that chairs should receive better training and support, he said the report seemed to envision instead “the replacement of chairs by administrative managers not drawn from the faculty.” That would be “disastrous for the everyday operation of departments, which requires, at an absolute minimum, leaders who understand the field practiced by those they lead.”
Preiss also found the idea of streamlining due process troubling, noting that tenured faculty members are subject to mandatory five-year performance reviews “with robust administrative participation, and with strict provisions for remediation and discipline in the event of substandard performance.”
Given that the audit was conducted about one year after that system was put into place, Preiss sees a more nefarious play at work.
The audit “is designed to create a pretext for yet another legislative intervention — the intent of which is not really to improve teaching quality, but to dissolve academic tenure, whose protections are precisely what make innovative, challenging teaching possible. If it cares about producing not just an educated work force but a freethinking citizenry, the state should be invested in strengthening those protections, not weakening them.”
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