In a recent post, Female Science Professor considers the “not-uncommon” gripe voiced by many an anxious professor who is going up for tenure — that those “deciding their Fate” had it easier in their day and would probably not win tenure under today’s tougher standards — and wonders, by extension, whether the tenure process is a just one:
“How can the process be fair if people unqualified for tenure today participate in decisions about the tenure of others?,” she asks.
But hold on a minute. Few would dispute that tenure bar keeps being raised, but how can we know “whether someone who had too-low-for-tenure-today productivity way back when would rise to the challenge of today’s standards or not”?, she asks. Sure, she’s met the odd deadbeat senior professor here and there who seems to have succeeded because … well, who knows why? FSP admits: “These particular senior professors have published only a few no/low citation papers, got few or no grants, and mostly got by on their charms, which in some cases are not considerable.” But they’re the exception, not the rule, she’s quick to add.
Maybe “some tenured professors can’t be trusted” to judge their junior colleagues fairly — “whether because they have no idea what it is like to be constantly working on manuscripts and proposals or for their own nefarious reasons” — and maybe “in some departments there are a few professors who reflexively vote no in tenure cases,” she writes. Yet such bad seeds are rare, she argues: “In my limited experience, these unpleasant individuals have been vastly outnumbered by more reasonable people” who take the process seriously.
Which is why she concludes that the tenure process, while not perfect, works pretty well most of the time:
In most cases, I think the system itself has enough checks and balances to keep these unfair naysayers in the minority. I am not saying that the system is completely fair; every year, deserving candidates are denied tenure and others with similar records attain it. But I do think that the process of frequent evaluation at one-to-three year intervals, although stressful, provides a lot of data and accountability to somewhat demystify the process.
What do you think?
Meanwhile, over at the Freakonomics blog, James McWilliams, a historian at Texas State University at San Marcos, argues that, thanks to technology, it’s actually easier for humanities and social-sciences scholars to do research today (and, by extension, win tenure) than it was back in the day: With the online databases available at university libraries today, it’s “no exaggeration to say that, in many cases, a scholar can accomplish in a half hour what might otherwise have taken, literally, an entire career,” he writes. So why not raise the tenure bar even higher?, McWilliams asks:
Right now it’s typical for a history department to require the publication of a book for tenure—some places, like my own institution, will accept five peer-reviewed articles (which basically means you can cannibalize your dissertation). Writing a serious book in six years (the average time for tenure review) is no mean feat, but keep in mind that every newly minted Ph.D. has already done most of the research for his or her book when the tenure clock starts. It’s just a matter of revising the dissertation into a book. Not easy, but then again, not a project that necessarily demands six years. It’s perhaps for this reason that some universities are starting to demand the publication of a book and “significant progress” toward a second.
But, to my knowledge, that’s as aggressive as upping the tenure requirements have gotten. [...] I think there’s a case to be made that a university’s tenure demands should keep pace with technological advances. Recall, it took me an hour to generate a decent document base for my weed article, a couple of days to see what other historians have said about the topic (not much), and a few weeks to write the piece.
Share your thoughts.
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14 Responses to Tenure: Who’s to Judge?
supertatie - February 25, 2010 at 5:35 pm
I think the system is questionable, not because those using it wouldn’t now satisfy it, but because it has become what it was intended to protect faculty from: a blunt instrument of power held in the hands of a few, easily manipulatable (they like you? Who cares about your teaching evals? They hate you? Your good evals are the kiss of death, and the bad ones are worse) and actually manipulated to keep out people you don’t like, whether their work is satisfactory or not. It has become like the “intellectuals’” version of fraternity and sorority rush.
snwiedmann - February 26, 2010 at 7:08 am
People this intelligent should have figured out by now that no process will solve the problem. All processes must, utimately, depend on the integrity of the people who implement them. Do most members of tenure committees take their responsibilites seriously and do their best to be fair and objective? Yes. Do I know of cases where this was not the case? Yes. It’s a matter of people — not process.
skaking - February 26, 2010 at 8:58 am
i don’t see any problem really with having an increasing demand for tenure in terms of publishing, nor of having more senior faculty who have not published anywhere nearly as much as i have sitting in judgement. (it does bug me at a personal level, but in theory at least there’s no reason why they can’t effectively assess another person’s research.) so long as the way things are assessed for tenure are clear and relatively objective. the problem comes when subjective stuff works itself into the equation, such as ‘collegiality’ or things that can be really vague in assessing, such as ‘mentoring students’. and that’s when it becomes poisonous. and as the academic vp at my school said, it’s not administration that the junior faculty have to fear, it’s senior faculty who can be horrible. and given my experience, i’d have to say he was spot on.
hillaryprocknow - February 26, 2010 at 10:48 am
my concern about the increased publishing expectations for tenure is not, as others have commented, that senior faculty have not had to endure the same push to produce. rather, it’s that the sheer amount of published works generated each year is bordering on ridiculous. whenever i speak to someone in my department (i’m a ph.d. student about to defend and trying to publish), about publishing, including faculty, eyes begin to roll and everyone says, “yeah, and 4 people are going to read it.” it seems as if we, as a culture of academics, are requiring faculty to produce works that do not contribute significantly to the field and are more or less representative of hoops that must be jumped through in order to play the game. considering all the remarks about students who should not have been encouraged to go to college, that many students would be happier and better served pursuing other avenues, i think the same of the impetus to publish. certainly we know that a great publishing record does not mean an excellent teacher. we are producing too much work that does not add significantly to the conversation, making the technology that handles it necessary, but also adding to the time it takes to sift through work that should not have been published in the first place.
tgroleau - February 26, 2010 at 12:47 pm
There are also supply and demand issues here. Some fields have greatly over supplied qualified faculty while schools are decreasing demand for tenure track hires. When hundreds of people apply for a position that would have a few dozen applicants in a previous generation, it’s no surprise that schools will raise performance expectations. Small, relatively unknown schools can now hire graduates of Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc. and departments can demand a great deal of work because the new hires know that there’s a long line of contract faculty/adjunct faculty/new graduates who will gladly take their place.
kerr7920 - February 27, 2010 at 8:33 am
Regarding “the subjective stuff” like “collegiality” and “mentoring students.” I agree that many aspects of a faculty member’s job are difficult to measure objectively. But the flip side of this is that the tenure process at most institutions over-emphasizes publications, precisely because they can be counted. Remember that it is undergraduate tuition that is paying most of our salaries, and outside of some sciences, research is at best revenue neutral, and often extremely costly. Only an academic could fool themselves into believing that their article in an obscure journal which contributed some fragment to a debate going on between a handful of scholars is more important than the teaching they do in the classroom, or even the work they do to keep the department major updated and functioning. The over-emphasis on research reinforces the most self-centered, myopic part of our jobs. What we really need is a conversation about how to measure teaching, mentoring, and departmental and university contributions more effectively, so that we can give them their proper weight in the review process.
skaking - February 27, 2010 at 10:41 am
kerry7920,well that’s the kicker now, isn’t it? i teach at a teaching intensive place, and assessing teaching is a joke. student evals are poor ways to evaluate and peer evals are even worse. (senior profs are assumed to be good bc they’ve been doing it a long time? that may in some cases be true, but it’s a poor assumption.) and how to define, let alone measure mentoring is even more problematic i think than teaching.my point about mentoring and collegiality is that because they are so incredibly subjective they can be used as weapons (first hand experienced wounds).so you’re right i think, we do need to figure out how better to measure ‘objectively’ these things. but until we can figure it out, i think they should be abandoned, and sticking to research even at teaching-intensive places (like where i am) makes more sense. that’s right, research has to figure in because it’s at least measurable, whereas all the other stuff we actually get paid for isn’t really.
kerr7920 - February 27, 2010 at 5:25 pm
I don’t think student evals are completely useless, especially if you review the comments students make. My experience tells me that students tend to be pretty generous in scoring faculty, and a “4″ out of “5″ might be a an average score for all faculty. I don’t think there’s meaningful difference in teaching ability represented by a 4.2 and a 4.8. The higher scoring faculty member might simply be much less demanding, or tell better jokes. But when a faculty member’s scores are well below the campus mean, it probably is a sign of ineffectiveness in the classroom. Paying close attention to student comments and combining this with many peer evals (from many different faculty) can help a young professor identify problems and offer strategies for improvement.
skaking - February 28, 2010 at 9:07 am
kerr7920,maybe not completely useless, but you make the point that the vast majority of teachers score really high with little variance, and that the only thing worthwhile you can tell from the numbers is if someone is atrocious. (though it could also be that they are demanding, something not universally appreciated by students.) if that’s all the numbers can tell you, well, that’s not particularly useful. and not everyone has written student comments, and even if they did… well, we all know the criticisms. and not all faculty give honest assessments as a negative one can damage candidates. teaching evals at my university can only hurt you, not help. my dean told me that good teaching does not get you tenure, but bad teaching will get you fired. basically, student and peer evals are bunk because of their methodology. put it this way — if you wrote an article based on these sources of data, would it get published in any reputable journal?
kerr7920 - February 28, 2010 at 11:50 am
Skaking,Let me throw it back at you to hear what you suggest as legitimate ways to assess teaching effectiveness. It doesn’t seem to be a credible position to simply assert that it is impossible to evaluate the most important part of our jobs, so we should make decisions about tenure only on the less important but more measurable parts of our job. We all know faculty members who are producing impressive quantities of scholarship in a narrow niche but are dismal and uninspiring in the classroom. Is that person really worthy of tenure at a teaching-focused institution? I don’t think the people writing the tuition checks would think so. I’d say this is a case where more data gets you closer to the truth. Include a written evaluation element prominently in the student evaluation process, , include multiple peer reviews, incorporate data on a faculty member’s grade distribution alongside student evaluations (4.8 out of 5 scores suddenly seem less impressive when you learn that the faculty member gives out all A’s; 3.9 scores look much more impressive when you learn the mean score in a class is a “C.”)
skaking - March 1, 2010 at 12:59 pm
kerr7920,i do think it is important to be able to assess teaching, critically important. my point is that it is much more difficult, and if done wrong, far too subjective and ineffective, even dangerous to the teacher (esp if she is, for example, a hard grader, which might lead to poor student evals, which administrators love to quote since they give pretty numbers). the ways we collect data (non-random student surveys and once a year [at my teaching first institution anyways] peer evals) leads to unreliable data. the stuff we ask of students often tells us little — q’s such as ‘does the prof know her stuff?’ ‘is she available?’ That first one, how does an undergrad assess (i cant evaluate my doctor’s knowledge) and the second, well, i hardly have anyone come visit me, so how do they know? Better question design would help. We don’t have that.you’re also right that we need more data, and better and more reliable data. that will go some ways toward ‘objective’ data. but at many places (most? nearly all?) we’re not even close to that point. which makes me circle back to my original point about subjective stuff sneaking in, like the vicious old prof who slammed me for poor mentoring where there is no data — positive or negative — to make such an assessment (in my school and my case anyways.)as for suggestions to make the whole eval process better… there’s the ideal and the real. the ideal is more teacher training from the get-go, and evals by people who know teaching, maybe a disinterested party from teaching resource centers (if they’re properly trained to do evals.) the real of course is that faculty won’t let go of this for various reasons. another is better writing of student eval surveys and timing of student evals. i’ve read that some places make you do the eval at the end of the term before your grade is released. so you get 100% response rate. there’s problems with that as well… thoughts?
facultydiva - March 1, 2010 at 2:47 pm
In some subspecialties, the research process may be easier but if the work requires actually traveling to gather information it isn’t any easier than it was years ago. The journal research part may take less time but more time is being required of the faculty member for a dozen other assorted things.
kcchymist - March 4, 2010 at 1:06 pm
After 40 yers in the educational field I’ve seen to much “deadwood.” Many students have been hurt. Abolish tenture.In the business world if you produce you stay; if your a slacker, a deadbeat you get fired. We educators need to be “educated” by the business world.
kerr7920 - March 4, 2010 at 7:57 pm
kcchymist–I think you have a highly idealized version of “the business world.” I’ve spent substantial amounts of time in the academic world and the business world, and have encountered as much or more “deadwood” in large American corporations as in academia. In both worlds, there are people who are motivated to work exceptionally hard, and there are those who spend most of their time pretending to be productive. And pay seems not to be a determining factor. Motivated, productive people like what they do, and are inspired to do more when given freedom to do it they way they see fit. Micro-managing and over-carroting-and-sticking people to death generally results in lower productivity and less creativity. I don’t believe tenure either promotes or hinders productivity to a significant degree. It can be a predictor of future productivity, however. Candidates who just scrape over the tenure requirement bar tend to become more mediocre in the years after; those who sail high over the bar are motivated by other things rather than job security, and are likely to continue to excel in all of the parts of the job they were excelling at before tenure.