Off the Clock

U. of Michigan may give professors more time to earn tenure, but whom would that really help?

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By ROBIN WILSON

For three years now, Gavin Clarkson has been working in an academic no man's land. He has all the duties of a typical assistant professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, but his tenure clock has not yet started ticking.

Michigan has in effect suspended time so that Mr. Clarkson can get a head start on an ambitious research project on intellectual-property management and economic development among American Indian tribes.

When the new semester starts this fall, Mr. Clarkson will finally, and officially, be on the tenure track. Like any brand-new faculty member in the School of Information, he will have six years to earn tenure — even though he will really have had nine.

That Michigan's information school felt it had to come up with a way to give Mr. Clarkson a running start toward tenure proves that the rules on tenure are antiquated and need to be fixed, say some professors and administrators on the campus. In the more than six decades since seven years became the national standard for earning tenure, these Michigan scholars argue, it has become harder for young professors to prove themselves in that period. Mr. Clarkson is not the only young professor at Michigan who has been given extra time.

Now a high-level panel at Michigan, appointed by the former provost, has recommended that young scholars be allowed up to 10 years on the tenure track. The seven-year probationary period came into being when life was simpler, argues David A. Bloom, associate dean for faculty at Michigan's medical school. "I think the world is faster and far more complex," he says. "We didn't have the genome project or giant hospitals. Now we have umpteen drugs, clinical trials, and whole fields that didn't exist. There are now people for whom the traditional number of years is not enough." Indeed, as is the case at other prestigious research universities, only about half of the scholars hired at Michigan stay long enough to make a tenure bid and then earn it. (See article on Page A10.)

But the Michigan proposal has touched a nerve — both on campus and off. Tenure is a cornerstone of academe, and its standards are considered sacrosanct. Any tweak or modification, so the argument goes, could give ammunition to those who would like to dismantle the concept altogether. Why does one of the nation's most elite institutions want to go down that road, critics ask, and water down its own standards in the process?

The American Association of University Professors has fired off two letters to Michigan, saying as much. Robert M. O'Neil, a well-known law professor at the University of Virginia, gave a talk on Michigan's campus last December, warning that the proposal could foster mediocrity. "Those that most need a rigorous, time-limited review and appraisal process would, in short, be the first to seek an escape from it," he said.

Many on the campus agree, including the university's Senate Assembly, a group of elected faculty members that passed a resolution opposing the plan in January. The university, it says, risks keeping young scholars on the tenure track for too long, where they have lower pay, less clout, and little job security.

"There are people at Michigan who would like to see us be the first to take this step," says Bruno Giordani, past chairman of the assembly and an associate professor of psychiatry. "But is this simply just another attempt to keep people under the thumb of the administration for 10 years?"

'Artificial Constraint'

Bylaws written by Michigan's Board of Regents stipulate that the university must evaluate all professors for tenure within eight years. The idea is to allow faculty members enough time to accomplish something, but not so much that they feel delayed in their attempts to ascend the academic ladder.

The actual amount of time an individual scholar gets, however, varies according to academic field. In Michigan's law school it is five years, in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts it's seven, and in the medical school it is eight. All of those fall within the AAUP's guidelines, which recommend seven years but tolerate an eighth. The standards were a compromise arrived 1940 by the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Since then, the seven-year period has become nearly universal in academe.

"Those that allow more than that are very few and far between," says Jonathan Knight, director of the AAUP's department of academic freedom and governance. Lengthening the tenure probationary period to a decade would make Michigan an outlier in higher education.

The Committee to Consider a More Flexible Tenure Probationary Period released its report at Michigan last summer. The world has changed a lot since 1940, says the report, and so has the nature of academic research. Young professors are pursuing much more complicated questions while at the same time facing a shortage of university presses that publish scholarly monographs and experiencing longer delays between the time they submit a journal article and when it is finally published. They also compete more for research funds.

"We are at a point now where a lot of things have already been done," says Lori J. Pierce, associate vice provost for academic affairs at Michigan. "There is a more complex nature to the research, and it is more high risk, high gain. Proposals professors are submitting now require even higher levels of sophistication than in the past."

People are also living longer, perhaps raising children while holding down academic jobs, and accomplishing more in later years, says John Leslie King, vice provost for academic information at Michigan. "In the 20th century, the human life span increased by 50 percent, and the average number of years at work nearly doubled," he says. "Why are we worried about adding two years to a process that was determined 65 years ago? That artificial constraint doesn't necessarily do the job at the beginning of the 21st century."

Janet A. Weiss is dean of the graduate school at Michigan and co-chair of the committee that made the proposal. Over the last few years, she says, she has watched junior professors struggle to finish their work on time.

"We were seeing some real stresses and strains on the tenure-and-promotion process, in part as a function of the rigidity of the rules," she says. Ms. Weiss won't name names, but she recalls one assistant professor at Michigan who lost three years' worth of data in a laboratory fire, and another who did research in Tibet that was confiscated when the scholar left the country. Then there was the academic couple who were collaborating on research but lost years of work when their marriage disintegrated before they could publish.

Mishaps like those are nothing new. But what has changed is how critical the tenure probationary period has become. A young scholar's pretenure years must move like clockwork, with any misstep or research dead end jeopardizing the entire process.

"Some people have tremendous promise, but they run into setbacks in part because their research programs are so ambitious," says Mr. King. "We want to be able to say, 'We really like your boldness and smartness and you're on the right track, but we think it may take another two or three years for your work to jell.'" Scholars could take less time, he points out, but if they needed an entire decade they would have it.

Work and Family

As it stands, Michigan offers only two reasons for delaying the tenure clock, and neither includes research complications. Scholars can get one year off the clock for the birth or adoption of a child or to care for a sick relative. Those who face research disasters have been known to appeal to the provost for extra time, and some have succeeded. Still, there is no guarantee. "If you know to ask, there are things that can be done that will allow them to weather the storm," says Ms. Pierce. "But for those who don't know to ask, they are often lost in the process."

In addition to concerns over research and productivity, Ms. Weiss's committee said more time on the tenure track would be a good thing for women. They are "particularly burdened" by family responsibilities, the report noted. It nonetheless devoted only one long paragraph to "family circumstances" at the end of its section on "Why Flexibility Matters," and few of the policy's supporters mentioned family reasons in conversations with The Chronicle.

In its letter to Michigan, the AAUP said family responsibilities were the only legitimate reason for considering a change in the tenure clock. "The policy recommended by the report contemplates many other conditions under which the probationary period might be extended," said the letter, "but with remarkably little argumentation."

The Michigan committee also proposed creating a part-time tenure track that would allow scholars to "balance work and family demands or to balance the demands of academic work and other personal or professional commitments." Other universities are beginning to experiment with allowing scholars to work part time along the tenure track. But Michigan's proposal has been roundly criticized on the campus as unworkable because it would allow part-time scholars to spend up to 13 years on the tenure track. Even members of the committee seem to view the part-time option as something that will have to be scrapped if the overall proposal has a chance of being adopted.

Ms. Weiss's committee has collected hundreds of pages of correspondence from professors offering their views on the proposal. Leaders of the Medical School, the College of Engineering, and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts support it, and they say their facuties do, as well. The Executive Committee in arts and sciences — an elected group of six professors — voted unanimously in favor of the proposal. The university's Senate Assembly, however, opposes it.

An assembly committee studied the tenure proposal and determined it had a fatal flaw. "The missing link, we feel, is actual data," the committee wrote in a report it issued late last year. Ms. Weiss's panel produced not a shred of evidence on the extent of the problem, said the Senate Assembly. Why create universitywide rules to accommodate what may be a few isolated circumstances, it asked.

'A Bad State'

This spring Charles B. Smith, the new chairman of the Senate Assembly, teamed up with Michigan's statewide AAUP office to come up with some numbers. Their study found that of the 2,828 professors Michigan hired between 1990 and 2005, only three have remained on the tenure track for more than eight years.

"These data prove that individuals very rarely use more than seven years on the tenure track," says their report. "The flexibility of the current system works." Critics of the study, however, say it merely proves that Michigan enforces its eight-year rule, and that the study says nothing about those who have trouble and leave before their tenure decisions arise.

Mr. Smith, who is a professor of pharmacology at Michigan, says hotshot young scholars won't come to the campus if they know it may take 10 years to earn tenure, while it takes only seven or eight elsewhere. No one wants to be in limbo for a decade, he argues.

Rebecca A. Lange, a professor of geological sciences, agrees. "Being untenured is a bad state of being," she says. "You don't have a true voice in faculty meetings, you feel like you have to be careful, you are still on notice."

Ms. Lange is concerned that if young professors know they have 10 years, they will take them, even if they may not need them. "I remember being scared to death when I was untenured, and if someone had asked me, 'Do you need more time?' I would have said yes," she recalls. "But I flew through tenure."

Ms. Lange also says the Michigan proposal could stigmatize women, who are less confident than men when it comes to estimating their qualifications.

"There is a tendency for men to be aggressive and women to be less so, with the man pushing to go up for tenure early and the woman waiting, even though you look at their actual records and they are identical," says Ms. Lange. If men on average take seven or eight years, while women take 10, she says, academic departments won't want to hire them. "This is going to reaffirm those people who think women are not as good as men," she adds.

This fall Ms. Weiss's committee will send another report on the tenure proposal to the university's new provost, reflecting the comments the panel has received. Mary Sue Coleman, Michigan's president, seems to support the plan. She was one of 10 university leaders who endorsed a similar proposal by the American Council on Education last year (The Chronicle, February 25, 2005). Ms. Coleman declined to comment for this article.

Mr. Clarkson, the assistant professor in Michigan's School of Information, received job offers from four other top research universities.

But he chose Michigan precisely because it was the only one that gave him three more years to earn tenure.

"The Michigan structure gives me the freedom to explore both of my research interests in an interdisciplinary way," he says. "At another school, I would have had to make a Hobbesian choice."

Although he is still a junior professor, Mr. Clarkson's research is already getting noticed. In May he testified before the Senate Finance Committee on how the U.S. tax code discriminates against American Indian tribes. Two senators introduced legislation last month to eliminate the inequities and based their bill on Mr. Clarkson's data. The research, says Mr. Clarkson, never would have been done had Michigan not given him the extra time.