LEXINGTON — A contract clause that allows Charles Wethington to take a lifetime faculty appointment after he steps down as the University of Kentucky's president has some faculty grumbling.

        There's no record that Mr. Wethington underwent the usual rigorous review that professors undergo for tenure, according to a published report Monday in the Courier-Journal of Louisville.

        By contrast, research and teaching by incoming UK President Lee Todd received a thorough examination by other faculty members before he was granted a tenured electrical engineering position.

        Tenured professorships are usually part of presidential contracts. But Carolyn Bratt, a law professor who voted against hiring Mr. Wethington as president in 1990 when she was a UK trustee, said tenure “is an incredibly difficult thing to earn, and it has to be earned.”

        Michael Kennedy, a geography professor who is chairman of the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said Mr. Todd “is a real teacher and a real scholar, and Charles Wethington is an administrator who sort of slid in.”

        Tenure, which is important for academic prestige and financial security, means that a faculty member has earned a permanent teaching and research position at a university.

        Mr. Wethington, 65, said he's not sure he'll take a professorship once his contract ends in two years. After Mr. Wethington steps down June 30 as president, he will become a school fund-raiser for two years.

        If he decides not to teach, he could take his pension — 15 percent of his annual salary.

        Mr. Wethington's contract, revised in 1999, allows him to join the faculty as a tenured associate professor when the contract runs out in 2003. His annual salary will be at least $212,562 — 80 percent of his final UK salary, now $241,000 with annual raises of at least 5 percent still to come.

        The tenure clause of Mr. Wethington's 1999 contract was based on a 1971 action by the UK board of trustees.

        Mr. Wethington began his UK career as an educational psychology instructor in 1965. In November 1971, soon after he was appointed assistant vice president of the community college system, which was then controlled by UK, the university's trustees granted Mr. Wethington a tenured associate professorship in the college system, a special board action that came without the usual faculty review.

        In 1982 Mr. Wethington became chancellor of the community college system, and eight years later UK trustees selected him as president.

        In response to an Open Records Act request by the Courier-Journal for Mr. Wethington's tenure review records from 1971, UK records custodian George DeBin said that none existed because the trustees' decision was a “special action.”

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