Our friend is full of promise. Bright, energetic, discerning, able to think broadly and also drill down. His prose excites those who hear him; his classes fill up quickly. Writing an article based on his dissertation, he finds a new way to explain an old puzzlement. Likeable and perceptive, he lunches with colleagues, serves on committees and mentors students. And yes, he’s on the tenure track. A year before the mandatory review, he’s proposed for promotion and tenure and everyone says, yes — it is yours.
We watched our friend soar through the ranks. His first book was nominated for a great prize. He served on panels at annual professional meetings and guest-lectured around the country. However, 20 years after the award of tenure, he finds the work no longer engaging. A highly reputable press publishes his second book, although it is far less impressive than the first. He’s thinking about writing another article, but doesn’t. He’s asked to teach a special seminar. He demurs. Still bright and eloquent, he has nonetheless lost the spark for innovation, for lighting up the classroom. His intro course is a requirement for the major and for him. Students show up grudgingly, not out of intellectual curiosity. Friends talk about his listless behavior.
He has a lifetime contract, voted on during the blush of early promise and now he feels trapped. How can the academy help him?
In the late 1960s when I was a baby dean at Boston University, a kindly, genteel chairman who was about to retire, took me for a walk across campus. Anticipating my future, he gave me two rules of the road about working with faculty colleagues.
“Never makes friends with someone who doesn’t have tenure,” he said, “because your decisions on retention and promotion must always be made objectively and dispassionately.” Secondly, he cautioned, “be careful with the professor who is a series of flashing lights, rather than a steady glow. Sparks have a way of burning out.”
The academy needs better, more imaginative ways for working with professors who are no longer happy warriors and who are not performing up to potential in the classroom or in research. We must look for creative ways to allow them to reinvent their career opportunities, to transition into new jobs.
What ties people to their work is a complex web of entanglements, not the least of which is security of salary and benefits — especially health insurance and pension protection. Few white-collar jobs found outside of the academy offer a layer of financial protection similar to the one guaranteed by a tenured faculty line. Yet job security alone is not a formula for happiness. For the post World War II generation, job-hopping was out of the question. But that mind-set has changed. Ask a young person in Silicon Valley how long they expect to be with a particular company and they say, “About three years.” Ask someone over 60 to comment on that type of movement and he’ll retort, “Why can’t that person keep a job?” Mobility in the workplace is far more common today than it was 30 years ago, or even 20 years ago. But in the academy — post tenure — mobility remains relatively rare.
Yes, colleagues do move from school to school for a better faculty position — to a school with more prestige, located in a more appealing part of the country, for a better salary and/or research opportunities, but the movement is still within the narrow confines of the academy. How about encouraging more flexible movement between the academy and the outside world?
Years ago, a chairman at MIT explained why so few of her students changed majors once they declared a preference for a given field of study. They are socially conditioned from an early age to consider such changes as failures. While the initial selection may make them unhappy, the stigma of not appearing focused is apparently much worse. It is also difficult for a tenured professor to say to his colleagues, “I no longer want to do this.”
Many schools will permit up to a two-year leave of absence from full-time teaching in order to allow a faculty member to pursue another job, without the loss of position and tenure. Common arrangements of this type include people entering government service, becoming guests at other campuses or researchers/writers at policy centers or think tanks. But in almost all these examples, the expectation is that the person will return to campus. What about the person who wishes to leave the academy for longer, perhaps not to return, but doesn’t know how to transition to the outside world?
Presently, universities have in place formal steps up the academic ranks, rising from lecturer to assistant, then associate, and, ultimately, to full professor. Write a book, serve on a committee, speak on a panel, be a mentor — up the promotion ladder. How about a graceful way to step down the ladder, going away from full professor through a different set of titles, with different responsibilities, different pay scales and perhaps for defined time periods?
Tenure binds both the faculty member and the university. After all, deciding to give professors lifetime contracts is one of the most important decisions a college or university makes each year. Each full-time tenured position (earning on average $80,000 a year, plus benefits) restricts either $112,000 in operating dollars or approximately $2.5 million of endowment (using a 5% return). Do the math: Multiply those numbers tenfold for each additional 10 tenured faculty members on the payroll.
I recall the story of a tenured faculty member at a modest college who, while on leave teaching at a more robust and distinguished college, is offered a position in her new department. However, under that school’s rules, she must spend two years on campus before coming up for tenure. She asks her old college to grant her additional leave. They decline and, afraid to take the risk, she declines the offer of the second. Tenure bound her ambition and diminished her freedom.
Creativity is tricky to model: in some disciplines, youth appears to have an advantage; in other fields, wisdom and age seem more aligned. Elizabeth Campbell, a former dean of Mary Washington College, was in her mid-60s — the age many people retire — when she was a founder of the new industry called public broadcasting. Perhaps age has less to do with the development of ideas than does the intellectual stimulation that comes with change.
“My job no longer pushes the envelope,” a friend said recently. “I know how to do it and I do it regularly and with success, but without joy.” Part of a university’s responsibility should be not only to educate students but to also allow faculty to continue their own education, to grow and change and be able to push the envelope, if not in the classroom or laboratory, then somewhere else.
But if routine breeds stagnation, will well-established universities be able to change? Professor Richard Light of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education thinks so. He has a grant from the Spencer Foundation to demonstrate that colleges can themselves become learning institutions. Not only do schools impart education to students, but they also have the potential to embed creative ideas within themselves. Light is working to develop best practices that schools can share to keep innovation in teaching moving forward.
Perhaps one of those new ideas will allow faculty greater and continued freedom of choice in their careers. For those whose light is steady, let’s encourage them to stay at the academy. For those whose lights are flickering, let’s find a place where they can begin to shine with an even glow.
