Tenured Radical’s recent post suggesting that tenure be abolished on the grounds that it’s hurtful has sparked an interesting debate in the blogosphere. She and Marc Bousquet, among others, would rather see unions take the place of kowtowing for tenure.

She writes:

The truth is that many of us don’t think tenure is a good system, and would prefer to be in a union. Tenure is, in fact, a more or less abusive system, and one that reproduces power hierarchies as they exist in society and in the university. Many of us who make it through the tenure process with the lifetime sinecure that is promised often do so because we are really good at repressing what actually happened. It is true that women, queers, and people of color are not always turned down anymore just because our presence makes others uncomfortable, or just because the kind of knowledge we produce is actually critical of what more senior people in the department do. But it is also true that the people who control tenure nearly always make us hurt for it, even when we get it. …

But each complicated tenure case … leaves endless circles of damage in its wake. The number of walking wounded out there is staggering. I traded some e-mail with someone this morning who told a familiar story: working in a department where so many people had been turned down for tenure, the senior people had forgotten how not to be abusive as a matter of daily practice. Not only does a tenure case gone bad hurt the person who has been denied, it creates havoc for supporters of that person. …

Who else is hurt by tenure? All the people who are friends, lovers, children, and companions of those who come up for tenure. People who get tenure are harmed by tenure, often because they have had to bow and scrape for so long before The Man and the women who are also The Man that they don’t know how to get back up again. Or they are so damaged by the process that they turn around and do the same thing to the next candidate coming up the pipeline.

LumpenProf, however, says tenure isn’t the problem. It may be one of academics’ last defenses against complete and utter exploitation, he argues:

I have been hurt by the lack of health care from my years as an adjunct. I have been hurt by the uncertainties of working as migrant, contingent labor in academia for more than a decade. I have been hurt by deans, provosts, and by some of my colleagues who put time and effort into delaying my start in a tenure-track line and in further delaying my final tenure decision for another decade. I have been hurt by decades of debts and low wages that I may never recover from. I have grudges, depression, anger, rage, and issues aplenty from my sojourn through the academic labor market. But the one thing that has NOT hurt me is tenure.

Tenure has put an end to these predations.

There are certainly problems with work in academia. But getting rid of tenure is not the solution. It’s like telling someone with a headache that decapitation will help. It may be brutally effective, but it’s not advice you want to take.

We have a very clear picture of what academic work without tenure looks like: contingent labor. …

On the other hand, Craig Smith over at FACE Talk suggests that academics have already hit bottom:

We have already arrived at the point where contingent faculty greatly outnumber full-time, tenure-eligible faculty and the fastest growing group of faculty are full-time faculty off the tenure track—all of whom have considerably less (typically no) job security or real academic-freedom protections. And, well, do I really need to rehash how horribly compensated most contingent faculty are?

Share your thoughts. Can tenure be saved or is it time to chuck the system? Before you weigh in, be sure to check out related posts by Oso Raro, Historiann, Citizen of Somewhere Else, and Professor Zero.

Categories: Faculty-hiring