Administrators and professors debated several major reforms to the university’s tenure system at a Faculty Senate meeting Tuesday, including a hotly contested proposal to give professors who are denied tenure an optional extra year of employment.

Senators decided to table the issue until the Faculty Senate’s next meeting, scheduled for Nov. 17, after some members requested more time to seek their constituents’ views on the planned changes.

Non-tenured faculty are currently allocated seven years during which they can teach and conduct research in preparation for a tenure application. If associate faculty members are not granted tenure by their seventh year, their employment is automatically terminated.

Faculty normally apply for tenure during their sixth year at Georgetown.

“The discussion was tabled in order to give faculty and departments more time to discuss the issue,” Faculty Senate President Wayne Davis said. “When an issue as important as tenure standards are under consideration, it is important to make sure everyone has a chance to give it due consideration, indicate problems, suggest alternatives and so on.”

If enacted, the reforms – which include revisions to the status of non-tenured professors from other institutions as well as the duration of the tenure period – would significantly alter the university’s policies for hiring and managing its longest-term teaching employees.

The new proposals were drafted last year by the Main Campus Executive Faculty Committee and the senate’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility.

If the senate approves the groups’ reforms, the proposal will be forwarded to University President John J. DeGioia and the university’s board of directors for approval.

The measure’s backers said they were seeking to standardize tenure decisions across departments and make the application process fairer, according to various memoranda distributed to senate members and university professors.

The debate focused largely on the plan for an eighth year of non-tenured employment for associate faculty. Proponents claimed that an extra year would allow professors denied tenure a chance to find work elsewhere and give departments a longer period of time to find suitable replacements. Tenure decisions are normally announced during the summer.

Other senators said they were concerned that professors would have no incentive to teach up to adequate standards during their eighth year, and that such a policy could force departments to keep unqualified faculty on staff for an extra year.

Davis said he supported most of the proposed reforms, although he was still cautious about the plan for an extra year for professors denied tenure.

Provost James J. O’Donnell said during the meeting that the eighth year is “inappropriate and uncalled for,” citing university statistics that showed that in the past eight years only three people would have been affected by it. He also said that the eighth year would ultimately be detrimental to those applying for tenure.

“The longer you stretch out that period, the harder it becomes … to compete,” O’Donnell said. “Nothing is more important to a university than the tenure program. Nothing.”

Some senators had suggested an alternative proposal making the extra year an option for the departments, but it was unclear how exactly the decision on an eighth year would be made.

Senator Peter Pfeiffer of the German department said that the eighth-year clause could produce a “very destructive environment” for students and professors.

“There are situations where this would in fact not be in the best interests of the students or the department,” he said, adding that he was afraid the university could be forced to retain employees who do not meet Georgetown’s academic standards.

There was less debate over other aspects of the proposal, including a plan to restrict professors’ ability to take leaves of absence that do not count toward their seven-year tenure period.

Professors can currently take months-long research-related leaves while their tenure clocks are essentially stopped, allowing them to accrue research and academic experience without sacrificing part of their seven-year probation period.

The proposed changes would allow the tenure clock to stop only when the faculty member is on family or medical leave, or when the member is on a leave that prevents him or her from performing extensive research. Davis assuaged some concerns during the meeting that the change would make the process overly rigid.

The third major issue was whether or not the tenure clock should be reduced for those who had already undergone several years of probationary period at a different university. The new proposal would limit the probationary period to four years, based on the length of tenure at the previous school.

Discussion of this last issue was limited, though one senator did say that, given the number of schools of advanced learning in the nation, it might be unwise to give across-the-board approval to shortened probationary periods to all incoming faculty from other universities.