Tenure for Administrators

In a recent post on Brainstorm, Stephen Joel Trachtenberg calls attention to a report in the Delaware News Journal. “Delaware State University President Allen L. Sessoms and five other administrators have lost their academic tenure as part of a settlement with the school’s faculty union, which argued the status was awarded by the board of trustees in violation of the union’s contract,” the paper reported. “Under the terms of an agreement reached late last month, the administrators no longer can move automatically into senior faculty positions should they lose their administrative posts.”

Trachtenberg suggests that while tenure is designed to shield faculty members from retaliation by university administrations for speech and research, some form of job protection for administrators might be a good idea, if only to make it a little easier to entice “the best and brightest of the academic world” to leave full-time teaching and 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,” he concludes.

Thoughts?