Getting Tenure in Tough Economic Times

Many people are nervous about hanging onto their jobs these days. But you know things are dire when tenure-track faculty members are fearful that the reeling economy, not to mention the tanking job market, will doom their tenure chances.

In this recent post on The Chronicle’s forums, for example, a concerned professor at “Middling U” wonders whether this year’s strong job-applicant pool will negatively affect tenure decisions at his institution, which has its pick of the litter as it is among a shrinking number of institutions that is still hiring: “What are the chances that the issue of the strong applicant pool comes up in tenure discussions, as in ‘Should we really tenure Tom, when so many out there with records stronger than his?,’” he asks.

While a few responders (including the author of the original post) note that such considerations shouldn’t factor into tenure deliberations, others were willing to wager that they do anyway.

As if those coming up for tenure didn’t have enough worries already, now along comes this post by FemaleScienceProfessor, who asks, Will departments attempt to save money by denying tenure to deserving tenure-track faculty members?

While it’s possible that some universities could “deny tenure for economic reasons but not admit to this being the reason,” that scenario seems farfetched, she writes. For starters, there are rules against it, she notes. In addition, “a department is very unlikely to vote against tenure for budgetary reasons because … [i]t is not in a department’s interest to solve a budget problem by losing a tenurable tenure-track faculty member and therefore possibly the faculty line altogether,” she writes.

In fact, FemaleScienceProfessor wonders whether some departments might award tenure more readily in tough financial times in order to safeguard their faculty lines.

What do you think? Do tenure-track faculty members have cause for concern?