Everyone, it seems, is talking about tenure, or rather its demise. This month an article in The Chronicle suggested that the academic tenure system may be on its last legs. The reporter, Robin Wilson, cited stark statistics from an upcoming report by the U.S. Department of Education, which is expected to note that ...

Over just three decades, the proportion of college instructors who are tenured or on the tenure track plummeted: from 57 percent in 1975 to 31 percent in 2007. The new report is expected to show that that proportion fell below 30 percent in 2009. If you add graduate teaching assistants to the mix, those with some kind of tenure status represent a mere quarter of all instructors.

Wilson goes on to ask and attempt to answer the big question.

What does vanishing tenure mean for higher education? For starters, some observers say that college faculties are being filled with...

E-mail may be a useful tool, but academics are drowning in it, thanks in large part to a growing tidal wave of silly student messages, the Berkeley law professor Mary Ann Mason observes in her most recent Balancing Act column. It's "not just e-mail messages from professional associates, friends, family, and spammers that demand our attention," she writes. "Students, sometimes by the dozens, e-mail their instructors daily, seeking an immediate response" to "trivial or inappropriate questions, like 'Sorry I missed class today, can you send me the lecture notes?'" (Sound familiar? If not, check out this 849-page thread in The Chronicle's Forums in which professors share their "favorite" student e-mail messages.)

Gems such as this one ...

It has come to my attention that you have an attendance policy for our class of which I did not know because I did not read all of the syllabus before now....

According to a report released this week, tenure-track faculty members in the physical sciences at research universities are happier with their jobs than their tenure-track faculty peers are, an article in The Chronicle says. Tenure-track humanities professors also gave their jobs high marks, found the study, by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, or Coache, a research project at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education that is supported by the Ford Foundation. Those in education and the visual and performing arts said they were least satisfied with their jobs, the report said.

The survey, which was based on responses from 9,512 tenure-track faculty members at 63 institutions, also examined satisfaction levels along gender lines, with women reporting less satisfaction than men when it came to the tenure process, hours worked, amount of time for research,...

• The president of Tennessee State University, Melvin Johnson, announced yesterday that he would retire in January, the Nashville Post reports.

• Via The Ticker comes word that Frederick M. Lawrence, law dean at George Washington University, has been picked to lead Brandeis University.

• Roy J. Nirschel, president of Roger Williams University, has resigned, says The Boston Globe.

• Times are good for university presidents in the Washington area, the Washington Examiner says. The newspaper notes that several DC-area chiefs took home fatter paychecks last year: Georgetown University's John DeGioia, for example, took home $911,613 in total compensation—42 percent more than in the previous year. Patricia McGuire, of Trinity University, got a 14.3-percent pay bump. And at George Mason University, Alan Merton's pay raise was 10.5 percent, thanks to deferred benefits.

•  Meanwhile, 10 top a...

• Pablo Eisenberg, a senior fellow at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, takes college and university administrators and tenured faculty members to task in The Huffington Post for fostering a caste system that treats contingent instructors—now nearly 80 percent of all college and university instructors—like "untouchables."

• The Ticker reports that Central Michigan University and the American Federation of Teachers have finally reached an accord on which non-tenure-track faculty members can join the collective-bargaining unit, thus narrowly averting a protest that had been planned for today. Adjuncts who teach at least a quarter of the time will be eligible. Next, instructors get to vote on who will represent them.

• According to The News & Observer, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is having a tough time hanging on to professors. The university has lost 53 of of 77...

Summer is just around the corner (sigh), so now's the time when many people's thoughts turn to lazing on a warm beach somewhere, curled up in a hammock with a novel. Not so professors. Despite the public's (mis)perception that professors get summers off, in reality a professor is more likely to spend the summer break with a laptop than a good book, wrote Kevin Dettmar, chair of the English department at Pomona College, on the Awl, a New York City-based Web site about politics, culture, and ideas.

"In the public imagination (or at least, my imagination of the public imagination), we're supposed to have essentially three months’ vacation every summer. My experience has been rather different," Dettmar wrote.

A professor's life sounds "luxurious," and no doubt in some ways it is. But here's the rub: Full-time professors are paid a nine-month salary, and the summer months "when we're...

• The Nevada Board of Regents unanimously passed a measure last Friday that will make it easier to cut tenured professors' pay, the Reno Gazette-Journal reports. The new rules allow the board to extend state-imposed across-the-board salary reductions on all employees to tenured faculty members without declaring a financial emergency. Cuts would be capped at 6 percent, unless the state opted to slash employees' pay by more than 6 percent and the board declared fiscal exigency, the newspaper notes.

• Arizona won't offer domestic-partner benefits when a new state law takes effect this fall, but the partners of employees at the University of Arizona will still have health coverage, thanks to a similar plan that the university is offering on its own, the Arizona Daily Star says. Allison Vaillancourt, the university's vice president for human resources, told the newspaper that offering the...

Ever wonder how hiring committees separate the wheat from the chaff? The Prodigal Academic, an assistant professor in the sciences, slides back the tenure-track-search curtain to reveal how the various committees she was on this year winnowed their applicant pools of over 200 down to five.

Naturally, the first applications to go (about one-third) were generally from unqualified applicants—i.e., those sans a Ph.D. or a postdoc—or applicants who didn't follow directions—i.e., those who submitted incomplete applications or applied despite being in the wrong field or subfield, PA writes. Exceptions were made for "SUPER AMAZING" applications, but that was "not most of them," she adds.

Notably, the committee didn't generally give a hoot about where the applicants had done their Ph.D.'s or postdocs "as long as the productivity [was] good," nor was teaching experience a consideration; what...

• The University of New Orleans has mailed letters to about 40 instructors warning them that their appointments could be up on May 20, 2011, The Times-Picayune reports. Louisiana State University has also issued similar letters to some instructors in preparation for systemwide budget cuts of up to $300-million in 2011-12, a system spokesman, Charles Zewe, told the newspaper.

• Dale Chapman, president of Lewis and Clark Community College, will retire at the end of this month, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. Chapman, who has led the college since 1992 and takes home nearly $260,000 per year, told newspaper that he is retiring because he needs to get access to his retirement account so he can pay off federal taxes and property-related debts. His wife, who is the college's vice president for academic affairs, is not retiring, the Post-Dispatch writes.

• Jon Whitmore, president of San ...

Many people don't love their jobs (or at least, not every aspect of their jobs), so why are teachers and professors — particularly women — held to a higher standard? Why are they expected to love teaching above all else?, Clio Bluestocking wonders, taking a cue from Professor Zero. In her thought-provoking post, Clio compares the feelings of pressure, worry, and guilt she has toward her job to those often felt by (read: imposed by society upon) mothers:

In some ways, being a teacher is like being a mother, especially if you are a woman, because the cultural expectations of women and of teachers are beyond reasonable human abilities and because so many people bring so much baggage into the classroom in regard to female authority figures.

Which explains why it was so hard for her to confess that ... shhhh ... teaching is not the be-all and end-all of her existence. And why it took...