Last week’s news brings a remarkable story from Delaware State University. President Allan Sessoms and five other university administrators “have lost their academic tenure as part of a settlement with the university’s faculty union,” reports the Delaware News Journal. Moving from the administrative ranks into senior faculty positions will no longer be automatic. The Delaware case turns on contract language between the university and the faculty union, and as I do not have that text I will not comment on specifics. But there are some general issues in this story worthy of broader consideration.

People join the administrative ranks at universities and colleges for a variety of reasons and do so by multiple career paths. It is most common, for instance, for a dean to be appointed from the faculty ranks. Law deans mostly come from law faculty, strangely not from practice or even the judiciary. Arts and Sciences deans, likewise, have usually risen to the rank of full professor of a discipline under a liberal-arts umbrella; most have been chairs of their departments; less often associate deans. I do recall a faculty member once saying to me that an associate dean was a mouse hoping to become a rat. Not that I hold such a view, having myself been an associate dean. Almost all are tenured as faculty before joining the administration. Likewise for provosts or academic vice presidents. They come from deanships or chairs of departments. They, too, usually have received tenure in teaching days.

Many administrators, however, move from one institution to another as they climb up the career ladder. A dean at College X becomes provost at College Y and then president at College Z. Like most senior teaching faculty, administrations are thoughtful about relocating without the ability to transfer certain key employment benefits. The two most significant are job and pension security. Once granted tenure, faculty members commonly have a lifetime contract as professors, barring some cataclysmic episode even after becoming administrators.

There is no tenure for senior administrators as administrators. As we saw the other day at William and Mary, most serve “at the pleasure” of the board, or the president. Since the average term of a college president these days is under eight years, a dean or vice president who comes to the job midway through a president’s term has security for at most only a handful of years. What happens next? When a new administration gets underway, the press release usually reads, “Dean Smith will be returning to her first loves — teaching, writing, and research.”

Tenure protects faculty from retaliation for speech and research. It liberates professors to do what they are paid for without looking over their shoulders. Within defined parameters, teachers are free to profess as they wish inside their classrooms (the closer the topic spoken about is to the expertise of the faculty member the better the justification for protection). Tenure is both a supplement of First Amendment rights and a barrier from critical or hostile colleagues, governing boards, donors, and legislators, or from administration. Faculty are free, even encouraged, to hold innovative, novel, distinctive, contrary views, and/or research groundbreaking subjects.

While serving as senior staff, administrators — from the president to the deans — have an institution-wide view and often make decisions that, while undertaken for the collective good, have the potential to make some segments of the campus unhappy.

In other words, it is a dynamic political world out there. What thrills faculty may be annoying to students and troubling to trustees. It doesn’t make the decisions any less correct or needed but it also doesn’t earn the administrators a lot of friends. Look at the recent episode at William and Mary. President Nichol is returning to the Law Faculty.

If the concept of shared governance within the academy is to continue as a working model, then some of the best and brightest of the academic world must be encouraged to leave full-time teaching for some period of time to join the administrative ranks. Without some type of job security, it will be a difficult recruiting assignment. It need not be conventional faculty tenure but some safety net arrangements must be made for college presidents as well as for faculty. I know of no case parallel to the one at Delaware State.