I am a passionate defender of the tenure system, although in fact I have not been its beneficiary since 1986, when I resigned my professorship at Princeton to take a job at the American Council of Learned Societies. I returned to full-time teaching after retiring from my ACLS job in 1997 on the basis of annual lecturer appointments, and I am both happy and secure here.
But I have had an unusual career, and Princeton is an unusually faithful university. Most academics would not and should not feel secure without tenure — and of course the dramatic decline in the percentage of tenured faculty should be a source of concern to all of us. Tenure remains crucial for “tenure track” faculty, and it is especially important to defend the system.
That is not to say that the tenure system is without problems, even in distinguished universities such as my own. On May 16, Matt Westmoreland, a very capable undergraduate investigative reporter for the Daily Princetonian published a fine piece entitled “Tenure Road Rough for Professors.” He focused on the recent denial of tenure to one of our assistant professors of chemistry, a man with what sound like excellent credentials both as a scholar and a teacher. Tenure is tough to come by at Princeton. Sixty to 70 percent of assistant professors here fail to receive tenure (or decline it). No assistant professor of chemistry has been tenured since 1996. Westmoreland quotes a couple of college seniors who are very upset that such a brilliant teacher will be forced to leave, though I am not aware that there was a widespread student concern about his denial. Of course chemistry is a small undergraduate department here.
When a popular young American historian (the winner of a teaching prize) was denied tenure in 2003, however, there was a very loud protest to the president, who pledged to review the tenure system the next year. She deferred the review at that time, since a new Dean of the Faculty and Provost had just been appointed. But last month she told Westmoreland that “I have become less and less persuaded that there is a better way to do [tenure]. . . . I actually think our system is as good as any.”
Well, that is perhaps true, but that is not the same thing as saying that the system is the best one possible — or the best for us. The problem, as the Prince piece points out, is that the system primarily evaluates scholarship. And almost no one at a university like this buys into Ernest Boyer’s notion of “the scholarship of teaching.” One chemist interviewed by Westmoreland opined that “average teachers become much better with time . . . Average researchers become worse with time.” Perhaps, but we are not talking about giving tenure to the average assistant professor, and there are in fact many researchers (especially in the humanities) who become better over time.
The reality is that we do not take teaching sufficiently seriously partly because in the end we in research universities do not give much of a damn about it, and partly because even when we do care, we do not know how to evaluate teaching effectively. Until we have better and more systematic measures of teaching success (among them, objective measures of student learning), the case for taking teaching seriously in tenure decisions will remain weak. To leave matters as they are is to do a disservice to our students — and to some very dedicated and talented assistant professors.
