At what other job would the employees all band together and decide that they were granting permanent jobs to each other, and their employer would have to accept this plan? There has to be a process where the the employers are involved, where they have a say in who is hired, promoted, retained. Tenure wasn’t invented to give mediocre teachers permanent employment, but to guarantee professors the right to publish their ideas, to present radical ideas without fear of repercussion.
I’d sure like a job where I could gather 7 or 8 of my co-workers and we’d all vote each other tenure. We could agree to keep other employees out, maybe even other workers who might be better than us. We could decide if someone else needed tenure without regard to whether the employer needed another worker or could afford another worker. It wouldn’t really matter if our customers were happy with our performance because performance reviews wouldn’t be considered.
There is a process and it includes approval at the department level, usually at the dean of the college level or chancellor level, and for the big university whose case I worked on, at the President’s level. Each level has its own standards and really no level had a bigger influence than the others.
This guy had the votes of 6 other Spanish teachers. So what? The university isn’t run by 6 Spanish professors.