Indeed Janet, to stop at only eliminating tenure would be a bad solution, since it would still leave the administrative hierarchy in place to bend those below them to their political will. A solution of Kelly Services would simply place yet another hierarchy over the students and their teachers in addition to that already in place.
At the moment, two groups, administrators and tenured faculty, are struggling for control in many universities. For either one to win, is for the university to lose. If tenure goes, then we must reduce the administrators to little more than hypertrophied janitors. To do that, we must spread the decision making on funding to all the consumers of the university's knowledge.
What I would like to see is the development of a network in which no one central group decides who gets the resources in the educational system. As you may guess, this works out as a marketplace, but only if many people have resources. These can be provided in the form of vouchers to all the stakeholders in the university, or whatever replaces it. Tenure was essential to allow intellectual freedom to limp along, as long as we put a hierarchy over the heads of everyone on campus, to keep them under control. Tenure didn't do as good a job in this as was needed, but it did keep the idea alive.
If we take away tenure, then we need a new mechanism to get resources into the education process without the deadening hand of the administration. The growth of teaching teams in a market network would allow greater intellectual freedom than now, without the agency costs of extended hierarchy.
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- --Tom Billings, President, Institute for Teleoperated Space Development, Oregon (posted 2/25, 10:30 a.m., E.S.T.)
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