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About the Author
Laurie Fendrich, a painter who lives and works in New York, is a professor of fine arts and the director of the Comparative Arts and Culture Graduate Program at Hofstra University. Her writing has focused on the place of art and artists in society and the education of young artists, but she has also written essays questioning the viability of beauty in a post-Darwin era, the meaning of abstract painting, and the tyranny of outcomes assessment. She will blog about university life, the arts. and culture.
About Brainstorm
Mark Bauerlein
Marc Bousquet
Laurie Fendrich
Dan Greenberg
John L. Jackson Jr.
Stan Katz
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
Brainstorm Alumni
Marty Nemko, guest bloggerBob Zemsky
Recent Posts
Mirror, Mirror, On and Off the Wall | Comment
Monsters of Achievement | Comment [11]
Where's Czechoslovakia? | Comment [27]
The Bad Cover | Comment [61]
Tickle Me Emo | Comment [16]
Featured Articles By the Author
What Is to Be Done (About Tenure)?
In a previous post, I advocated either the abolition or the radical modification of tenure. I argued that tenure in its current form terrorizes junior faculty and renders them (to greatly varying degrees, of course) timid and impotent. It permits — even encourages — tenured faculty to act like bullies.
Moreover, I argued, tenure is responsible for many tenured faculty slowly evolving into deadwood who, although way past their prime, adore their medical insurance and office perks too much to give them up. I also raised the tenure-generated problem of “softies” — tenured faculty who are unwilling to take a stand on anything.
Readers’ comments make it clear that tenure is intertwined with a lot of issues in higher education — the “corporatizing” of the university, the “adjunctification” of the university, the “amenities arms race” in attracting students, grade inflation, the underestimating of community colleges, capricious administrators, old-boy networks, and more.
Abolishing or greatly modifying tenure won’t get rid of these problems, of course. It may even exacerbate some of them. But I still think either abolishing tenure or dramatically modifying it would, on balance, do more good than harm.
A lot of the problems associated with tenure stem from human nature, one reader noted. But as with all things having to do with human nature, it is our responsibility as mortals to structure human life so as to bring out the best in us, and at least tamp down the worst.
The first proposal: Replace tenure with fixed-year contracts. I’ve heard and read several different versions of this, but the one I tend to favor is this—an initial three-year appointment followed by a five-year appointment, followed by a 10-year appointment which would be one-time renewable. The second 10-year contract would be followed, until retirement, by as many three-year contracts as the professor can earn.
This plan is not all that different from traditional tenure. After eight years, a faculty member would be eligible for a guaranteed full decade of employment, which should be enough time do to enough advanced research and publication to earn — given talent and industry on the part of the faculty member — a second full decade on the job. After that, the professor — who’d typically be around 60 years old by then — would, in effect, have to renew his or her driver’s license by taking a road test every three years to make sure he or she hadn’t turned into deadwood.
Objections to this proposal will, I’m sure, abound. One will say that it doesn’t eliminate the potential for abuse on the part of those deciding whether or not a professor gets a new contract. No, but it will mitigate it, since every faculty member will always be looking down the road at his or her own contract renewal.
Another will say that it doesn’t eliminate the pressure on de facto “junior” faculty, i.e., those anticipating a five-year or the first ten-year appointment. That’s right. Life is not an anxiety-free experience. But failing to have a contract renewed would never be the humiliating and traumatizing experience of life-or-death tenure that we now suffer.
Yet another will say that replacing tenure with reappointment contracts would increase the emphasis on quantity over quality, but I can’t see how this situation could be any worse than it is now.
An alternative proposal (fasten your seatbelts, this is a bumpy idea): Have the second instance of the tenure decision (the five-year reappointment) reside in the hands of a department of another college or university of roughly the same size and rank, using such criteria as admissions competitiveness, faculty/student ratios, percent of faculty doing research, and research grants to decide what are equivalent institutions.
Peer assessments from the home department and institution regarding teaching, service, and research would be in the form of written letters addressed to the departmental committee at the other college or university. A yearly rotating lottery system would determine what institution served as judge for all faculty hiring and firing decisions that arise during any particular academic year.
This idea will never go anywhere, I admit. But consider the benefits. Personality would be almost entirely removed from the equation, while academic peer evaluation would still remain the crux of hiring decisions.
Candidates up for reappointment, rather than having to spend their first three years at an institution tiptoeing around tenured faculty, would be able to know their teaching, research, and service would be evaluated by a neutral third party, and people ahead of them in their own departments would themselves be busy working on earning their own reappointment. Bullies would be defanged and forced to behave themselves in order to have their own contracts renewed.
How then will colleagues in the candidate’s own department and home institution — those most familiar with his or her teaching, research/publication, and service — make their evaluations known? They could write letters to the reappointment committee, or have meetings and author a joint letter (or letters, if there’s a dissenting opinion.)
Another far more moderate proposal is to move the first reappointment vote (three years into the hire) outside of the home department. Instead, send the dossier straight to a school-wide committee on which no member of the candidate’s department is a member. Faculty members in the home department instead write individual letters or have meetings and author joint letters.
The point of both these proposals is to change the venue of the first reappointment committee vote away from the place where most (if not all) of the bullying, servility, hallway politics, doctrinal prejudice, favor-currying, and rumor-mongering occur, and remove it to a place where perspective can be had and cooler heads might prevail.
The dangers in my proposals are obvious: Things on paper often fail to express the quality of the work of a candidate; moreover, there’s the problem of either a mismatch in expertise, or, in the case of a university-wide committee, a lack of expertise. And sending a decision to a university committee won’t get rid of hallway politics. They’d clearly continue to play a part (albeit somewhat attenuated). And then there’s the problem of doctrinal prejudice: The further from the home department, the more apt the candidate is to encounter opposition from people who dismiss out of hand whatever it is they do.
I haven’t addressed the question of the role of deans and provosts in deciding contract renewals or tenure. Even if their role remains the same as it is now, however, a system of faculty contract renewals, instead of tenure as we know it, would improve higher education.
Posted at 10:52:56 AM on April 16, 2008 | All postings by Laurie FendrichComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
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Only tenure protects academic freedom — which in practice is not merely the freedom to have unpopular opinions but the freedom to participate without fear in the governance of institutions of higher education. Faculty who argue against the system of tenure are undermining the chief protection of academic integrity.
— Tom Benson · Apr 16, 12:12 PM · #
Faculty members should face the same pressures to work hard and produce that they put on dry cleaners, mechanics, reporters, deans, college presidents, senators, and department secretaries. “Academic freedom” is an insufficient justification for lifetime tenure. Many of our colleagues are too weak — tenured or not — to take advantage of academic freedom. Many others do so in ways that bring harm to the community. The small number remaining are perfectly capable of obtaining whatever freedom they need, even without tenure. (I did that both as a graduate student and as an assistant professor and have never had to use the concept as a weapon in my many difficult battles as a full professor.)
Of the ideas that Laurie Fendrich suggests, only multi-year contracts seem workable to me. They encourage long-term, productive work but diminish the special status that sets academics apart from society and makes us so irrelevant. Thus, I estimate this kind of change has ~.001% of a snowball’s chance in Hell.
— S. Britchky · Apr 16, 12:48 PM · #
I’m probably in the minority here, but I like the idea of tenure. It is one of the “perks”, if you will, of academia as profession. If the potential for this type of job security wasn’t on the table, I’d go straight to the private sector, double my income, and never look back.
— Marcus · Apr 16, 01:09 PM · #
I am also a proponent of tenure and would like to offer the following challenge to our colleagues who think otherwise: If tenure is of no use and faculty should work under the same conditions as the rest of the population then why have multi-year contracts? Let’s go to an employment-at-will model. Ideally my boss should wait for the end of the semester to fire me but he should have the right to do so with a two-week notice.
— John Mazis · Apr 16, 02:00 PM · #
Tenure protects: 1. Long range, high risk, basic research, with no particular forseeable prospects for pecuniary profit 2. The institution’s ability to have a cadre of personnel with a long term stake in the health of the institution as a whole — presidents, deans, students all come and go. 3. As a corollary of 2, the administration’s and public’s (in public institutions) right and ability to get considered advice even when it isn’t what they want to hear. Especially when it isn’t what they want to hear.
4. Our students’ right to hear what we really think about our subject of expertise, and not what is politically correct or expedient. Most tenured faculty I know do really think about their subjects of expertise. Those who are tired of doing it usually become associate deans, “first year experience” directors, or other types of parasitic prattlers of pedagogy.
— Joseph F Foster · Apr 16, 02:32 PM · #
Not knowing which external department will be evaluating your work would mean that you could never publish anything that contradicts or criticizes anyone. So much for academic freedom.
— Elaine · Apr 16, 03:38 PM · #
I agree that the current tenure system is far from perfect. But to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as it were, is equally absurd. Tenure is supposed to be a validation of one’s work and standing in the field, not a blanket permission to coast to retirement. In my view, it is the post-tenure reviews that need to be strengthened and revised, so that there is some procedure to deal with the so-called “dead weight” professors. Most of the tenured professors I know work very, very hard indeed.
— Ken · Apr 16, 04:29 PM · #
A somewhat Swiftian proposal: put the names of however many four-year bona fide, not-for-profit, public and private colleges and universities (all of them nationally, by region, by athletic conference, etc.) into a hat and draw them out, first in a pair, then one at a time. The first school drawn does the second’s tenure decisions. The third school drawn does the second’s decisions, and so on. What delicious possible combinations! Some mid-size state school on the prairie doing Harvard’s, Yeshiva doing Notre Dame’s, Smith doing The Citadel’s, Reed doing Oral Roberts’s, Oberlin doing Ohio State’s, or all vice-versa, etc. (On second thought, strike that “ahtletic conference” option. I hate to think what Aw-barn* would do to Ala-bubba’s* tenure cases, and vice-versa.) Think what professors on tenure committees would learn! The Yalie exclaiming, “Those poor dears out in the academic boonies actually teach three classes a semester!?” The rhet/comp teacher in a meat-and-potatoes state school in the southwest wondering just how many masturbating girls Jane Austen really knew. And, as tenure decisions are handled here as in the traditional intra-campus manner—by papers being sent back and forth—tenure committees will sort of double as academic conferences. Faculty in Florida will no longer have to fly to the MLA in Chicago to find out what professors in their fields are thinking about literary theory; professors in Maine won’t have to leave brodbignagian carbon footprints to hear what the California contingent is up to at the APA. There, I’ve saved tenure and the planet.
* Actual terms of endearment used by citizens of the University of Alabama and Auburn University to refer to each other’s schools. Parallels abound.
— LuckyJim · Apr 16, 04:40 PM · #
Faculty bullies and faculty “dead wood” exist at the pleasure of the administration, period. No ifs, ands, or buts.
There is no tenure crisis if administrations simply do their duty and earn their increasingly-higher six-figure salaries: ensuring an honest, full workload from all employees, and initiating the due process procedures for discipline or termination for any employees, including professors, who manifestly deserve review.
Regardless of public and academic opinion about the free speech aspects of the Ward Churchill case, the fact remains that once the administration of his university decided to pursue his alleged egregious research misconduct, the process pretty much went the way the public would have hoped: plagiarism, etc. was not tolerated.
Administrations in this country (composed in the main of tenured faculty at most upper levels, but increasingly headed by CEOs from industry) have pursued a course of action to undermine tenure by simultaneously permitting the abuses which it should be policing and reducing the number of faculty on the tenure-track, thereby driving down wages and gaining more at-will employees. Killing off the tenure system slowly but surely — and with it, any hope of academic freedom and integrity.
This strategy is transparent in the extreme. The fact that it is ignored by the critics of tenure who prefer to attack the faculty rather than the cowardice of administrations is at best a sign of ignorance and not of responsible critique..
Tenure does not mean an unqualified job for life. It means the guarantee of due process by a jury of one’s peers.
It would appear that the critics of tenure are having difficulty understanding not only the First Amendment but also the Fourteenth: a heritage that goes back to the Magna Carta.
It would be amusing, were it not so tragic, all this faith in the divine right of kings….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 16, 08:00 PM · #
This is the nuttiest essay I’ve ever read in the Chronicle. Does the paper no longer employ editors to review essays for coherency?
— Lou · Apr 16, 10:48 PM · #
But seriously, folks:
“Faculty bullies and faculty “dead wood” exist at the pleasure of the administration, period. No ifs, ands, or buts.”
* Would that be because there’s nothing—short of a Ward Churchill episode—that an administration can do to get rid of a tenured full professor gone bad? Follow question: When was the last time—be honest now—when a tenured full professor found himself/herself unemployed at your school?“There is no tenure crisis if administrations simply do their duty and earn their increasingly-higher six-figure salaries: ensuring an honest, full workload from all employees…”
* Why don’t tenured full professors perform “an honest, full workload” of their own volitions, out of the same sterling qualities that got them tenured and promoted in the first place? Follow question: How many tenured full professors also earn “six-figure salaries” these days?“Administrations in this country (composed in the main of tenured faculty at most upper levels, but increasingly headed by CEOs from industry) have pursued a course of action to undermine tenure…”
* At what point do tenured full professors who have become deans and provosts turn into Mr. Hyde? Follow question: Is it the big bucks or the power or the genes—or something else—that turns them into people so different than they were when they were still faculty? Follow follow question: What’s the percentage of presidents of four-year, non-profit colleges who come from other than higher education backgrounds? (Note: a change from zero in a thousand to one in a thousand technically constitutes “increasingly.”)“…by simultaneously permitting the abuses which it should be policing and reducing the number of faculty on the tenure-track, thereby driving down wages and gaining more at-will employees.”
* If an administration wants to reduce the number of employs on the tenure track, wouldn’t it make more sense to police abuses aggressively, drag the miscreants into that “due process” (which hardly ever gets rid of anyone, but never mind), get rid of them, and then replace them with non-tenure-track employees? Follow question (well, the same question rephrased): How does leaving tenured “deadwood” faculty in place for practically the rest of their lives provide more opportunities for administrations to hire more adjuncts?“Killing off the tenure system slowly but surely — and with it, any hope of academic freedom and integrity.”
* Killing off “any hope of academic freedom” assumes, as the lawyers say, what is being argued. Killing off “academic integrity” appears to have already been largely accomplished by tenured full professors all too frequently not performing “an honest, full workload,” by their “abuses,” by their turning into Mr. Hydes when they accept deanships, etc.“the critics of tenure who prefer to attack the faculty rather than the cowardice of administrations is at best a sign of ignorance and not of responsible critique.”
* No, they don’t attack “the faculty,” just some faculty and the system of tenure itself.“Tenure does not mean an unqualified job for life. It means the guarantee of due process by a jury of one’s peers.”
* If tenure meant only “due process by a jury of one’s peers,” then getting it or not getting it would not be quite so fraught. C’mon: in practical terms, getting tenure means you’ve got a job guaranteed until you decide to leave it, no matter how lazy and indifferent and ineffective your performance subsequent to getting tenure.“It would appear that the critics of tenure are having difficulty understanding not only the First Amendment but also the Fourteenth: a heritage that goes back to the Magna Carta.”
* It would also (allegedly) appear that anybody who is not a tenured faculty member has some kind of weird job that leaves him or her outside the purview of not only the First and Fourteenth Amendments but the Magna Carta (!) as well.“…all this faith in the divine right of kings…”
* As Tina Turner said (didn’t she?), “What’s rhetorical overkill got to do with it?”— LuckyJim · Apr 16, 11:01 PM · #
I state and restate my original post.
The abuser of tenure only has a job for life if the administration permits him/her to go unchallenged.
The Ward Churchill “episode” was not addressed in the due process mechanism at Colorado; the research abuses were. His controversial speech was protected but drew attention to the fact that the administration had not done its duty in leaving him “un-prosecuted” as it were, on his plagiarism, etc. Public opinion forced the university’s administration to initiate proceedings — or outrage the nation. They chose to “do the right thing” — at last.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
Yes, I personally know several tenured faculty who were bullied by their administrations into leaving.
The point is that administrative abuses are the source of the tenured faculty’s unchecked abuses. Period. The due process mechanisms are in place at every institution; blame the administration when they are not invoked and bullying or “dead wood” faculty continue on. This is so elementary that its dispute is quite simply laughable.
By the way, attacking the tenure system is an attack on “the faculty”.
As for the full day’s work for a full day’s pay, well, let’s see now, only in academia do people cut corners unless kept in line, eh? And as for those profs who become problematic as administrators, “power corrupts”, etc.
The CHE has been consistently reporting the appointment of presidents/chancellors from outside of academia. I have mentioned a few in my postings; the most recent one highlighted in the CHE was only a week or two ago. Please recall that the faculty do not select presidents; boards of trustees do. Boards of trustees rarely have more than one or two token faculty members, if at all. It is disappointing, though not surprising, that, given the rising costs of higher education, boards have been “tapping” what they consider to be the best “businessman” (and sometimes woman) for the job.
The number of tenured faculty earning six-figures can be found in the CHE or Academe. It is still not a majority of the tenured professoriate in this country. By contrast, the majority of upper-level administrators are in that category. Stay tuned for the salary of the new president of Hopkins; the outgoing president has the highest salary of a university president in the nation. The next appointment should break all records, including that one.
The easiest way to cut back on the tenured (and eliminate the tenure track) is and always will be by attrition and conversion of tenure-track lines to “at will” positions when there is a vacancy due to resignation or retirement. Basic bottom-line business procedure. “Early-retirement” incentives have also proven cost-effective over the long-run. Due process mechanisms, however, are a bit expensive — lawyers and all that. Ergo, the theory that it takes a long time to adjunctify the university workforce is not borne out by the statistics.
Those who do not know the history of academic freedom and its link to tenure in the courts will always accuse those who do of begging the question. A little research, please.
“Once more with feeling”: The only employees in this country who have First Amendment-protected speech in the workplace are those in government service. (“Congress shall make no law” not “The employer shall make no law”.)
Academic freedom, as a subset of the First Amendment, brings limited free speech rights in the form of academic freedom into the private academy — again, anchored in the legal history of tenure.
Tenured employment is enjoyed by the vast majority of government/civil service workers in this country — including those in public universities, faculty and non-faculty, full professors and janitors. They generally have due process rights in their employment from their unionized status, as do unionized workers in the private sector, except, of course, when they are “contracted out”.
The vast majority of Americans, however, are “at will” employees, with no workplace “due process” rights at all. They are, however, guaranteed the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment rights of “due process” in the courts under civil and criminal law.
It is not an exaggeration to state that those who seek to abandon academic freedom and tenure and to create contractual faculty employees who are firable “at the will” of the administration are latter-day “royalists”.
The “at-will” employer is the “king” of his/her (usually his) “castle” — or “ivory tower”, as the case may be.
“There are none so deaf as those who will not hear; there are none so blind as those who will not see.”
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 17, 01:41 AM · #
When I left my insecure and seriously underpaid adjunct arrangement for a relatively reasonably paid job in a nonprofit (where those I supervised were Teamsters), I asked about a contract. The President of the organization just laughed and said “Even I have no contract.” It was common for “management” employees to be asked to clear out their desks and be gone, with little or no notice. That insecurity led me to accept a better job when one was offered—but still with no contract nor job security. And, later, I left that job too, for a better job, but still one with no security. That job, in the private sector, led to advancement to VP and a six-figure income. When I finally left that job, at near retirement age, I returned to academia. This time was in a medical school, where I signed a contract, on which the university defaulted. Their action was not related to my performance, but was purely a vindictive gesture against the tenured senior scientist colleague with whom I worked. While I think we should probably all have fair employment contracts, rather than tenure, per se, it is clear that academia is often not a very friendly nor ideal place to work, tenured, or not.
— Joe Erwin · Apr 17, 05:01 AM · #
I just want to agree very strongly with #3. One of the very strong draws of academia is tenure. If that weren’t there, I know many people who would leave higher ed to work in the private sector and earn what we are worth monetarily. Colleges and Universiities would have to raise faculty salaries dramatically or drop dramatically in quality. Tenure is an economic benefit to higher education, and makes colleges and universities more affordable for everyone.
— Ray · Apr 17, 06:23 AM · #
That tenure protects academic freedom is obvious and I won’t belabor it. Let me add an additional point — who is going to do all the periodic reviews of their colleagues’ work? Think, my friends, of your precious time. At those schools that experimented with contracts instead of tenure, it turned out that people were usually getting de facto tenure as their colleagues were simply unable or unwilling to do intensive reviews and rationalized renewals on the grounds that they would take more care at the next contract renewal.
— Ellen Schrecker · Apr 17, 07:19 AM · #
If tenure is lost and replaced with short-term contracts, faculty can be certain that when they become too old and too expensive and too close to having a vested pension, they will be fired. No matter how effective their teaching is or how much they have contributed to their field, administrators can always find an excuse for firing them (without tenure, they won’t need due process anyway) and hiring someone younger and less expensive.
— Phil · Apr 17, 07:23 AM · #
I don’t think I have an opinion worth listening to about tenure, but I can’t help being touched by what seems to be gospel in certain quarters: that if it weren’t for the security “perk” of tenure, one would simply jump to the private sector, double one’s income, and live happily ever after. The apparent verdancy of ground cover increases with distance, particularly with an intervening boundary barrier. Plenty of us outside academia manage to get along without either tenure or that iconic “six-figure income.” There are other satisfactions besides counting the digits to the left of the decimal point, such as doing a job worth doing and doing it as well as one can.
If people go into teaching with the understanding that it’s a pretty slow way to get rich, that’s fine. Some other jobs are like that too, because the field is perceived—rightly or wrongly—as interesting, exciting, glamorous, or whatever.(Publishing comes to mind for some reason.) But it shouldn’t be hard for well-educated intelligent people inside academia to understand why folks outside are sometimes bemused by teachers’ wanting to minimize the amount of teaching they do, especially when that desire is justified by research, the immediate or longterm benefit of which to anyone is not invariably obvious.
— Dan · Apr 17, 07:57 AM · #
Interestingly and ironically, the corporatization of university management, with the adjunctitis and outsourced instruction that it brings, is creating a reason for tenure far stronger than freedom from work (academic freedom). A body of deadwood hard to remove, with long corporate memories and sneaky hands on hidden levers of obstruction is just the type of rock in the road of corporate managers capable of thwarting everything they try to do, eroding it to dust. In such stalemates, collaborative agendas can arise, depending on how dead the deadwood are and how brain-dead the managers are.
— Richard Tabor Greene · Apr 17, 08:10 AM · #
Great comments in response to this blog, but I just quickly wanted to say that Prof. Fendrich does not address the value of tenure providing the possibility of a professor exploring ideas imaginatively, as one commentator put it previously, I believe. I also still can’t see why anyone but a naive yet secure bully would think it is anything but perfectly reasonable to hang on to access to medical care for as long as one possibly can (Prof. Fendrich writes here and previously that one reason her Professors Deadwood sometimes refuse to leave is that they “like” the medical insurance. In the US right now, who wouldn’t like having medical insurance rather than being without it? Perhaps if we had universal health care socially provided, then . . . but we don’t.).
— Jesse · Apr 17, 08:15 AM · #
I agree with most of the posters above that tenure is an imperfect perk of the current university hiring system. However, I have seen in action at three different types of institutions (an R1 university, a large land-grant university, and a small religious college), how the issue of the “dead weight” becomes absolutely deadly. There is a distinct difference between lifetime employment and the actual capacity of the employee to do his/her job. At my last institution (the small college), we had two members of the faculty that had been there for 40+ years, and were so old and in such poor health that they taught crumpled up in a chair whilst the assistants (and sometimes, other younger profs), did all of the actual work. These men were still making top dollar, despite their incapacity, because they refused to retire. One of them passed away in the position, leaving the faculty scrambling to find a replacement.
I advocate a system wherein there is a type of tenure – with a retirement cap. If you hit 65, haven’t published in 10 years, are only capable of teaching one undergraduate class a semester, or cannot stand in front of that class for more than 30 minutes at a time – it’s time to force retirement. If the person in question is still vibrant and capable, then by all means, another review in another 5 to 10 years, with a final cap at 75. And definitely, when the senior faculty member hits 65, it’s time to bring in a junior in the same field to begin to fill the gap and create continuity. That way, there’s no scrambling when Prof the Elder keels over mid-semester (or at least, less scrambling).
If you figure that an academic making a decent wage, and saving for retirement beginning day one, gaining tenure with a retirement review and cap is 30 or so years of guaranteed employment.
— KAD · Apr 17, 08:26 AM · #
Congress eliminated mandatory retirement in this country in 1987, although it did not become effective for college/university faculty until 1994.
However, employees of any age who are not capable of fulfilling the requirements of their job, with or without reasonable accommodation, are generally not protected from dismissal by anti-discrimination laws (yeah, all right, there is such a thing as a “mixed motive”).
“Ah, that pesky Constitution, that darned Bill of Rights, those ridiculous anti-age-discrimination laws”. – The Academic Royalist
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 17, 09:23 AM · #
I suspect that Professor Fendrich’s entire series on the deadly effects of tenure was a piece of performance art, an experiment in provocation.
The idea that the free market nurtures efficiency and weeds out the dead wood is a myth. Look at any large corporation, and you will find the deadwood lodged in every corner, often with the ability to fire, abuse, marginalize, exploit, and take credit for the accomplishments of the up-and-coming. The latter have even less power than the untenured assistant professor, because they lack even a multi-year appointment.
On the other side is the myth that replacing deadwood with younger labor is less expensive. At many universities salary compression and inversion have ensured that many new hires make as much as, or more than, faculty who have worked at the institution for decades.
So perhaps one solution to our anxieties about tenure is to stop looking at corporate models of labor relationship altogether when thinking about the strength and health of the academic enterprise. Tenure, as imperfect as it may be, has social and organizational benefits that outweigh its costs, and helps preserve the notion that there are, in fact, multiple ways to organize productive institutions.
— Gregory Starrett · Apr 17, 09:30 AM · #
Re Zorro’s most recent comments:
“Yes, I personally know several tenured faculty who were bullied by their administrations into leaving.”
* I smell hedging here. “Bullied” (I thought bullying was part of the tenure problem), or actually compelled to leave through “due process”?“By the way, attacking the tenure system is an attack on ‘the faculty.’”
* No it’s not. One is a system, the other consists of people. If somebody attacks the Electoral College, it’s not an attack “on Americans.”“As for the full day’s work for a full day’s pay, well, let’s see now, only in academia do people cut corners unless kept in line, eh?”
* No, but only academe has such a long, drawn-out peer-review process for granting tenure and such resulting paeans (we’ve all seen the fulsome letters) to successful candidates. Those people shouldn’t be cutting corners unless they’re “kept in line.” Funny how Zorro loathes the power of administrators, but wants them to keep tenured faculty “in line.”“And as for those profs who become problematic as administrators, ‘power corrupts,’ etc.”
* Gee, a professor of, say, psychology, who’s good enough to be promoted to tenured full professor and then well-thought of enough to be made dean of humanities suddenly turns tyrant just because he or she has been granted some power. Since Zorro thinks that most administrations and administrators are villainous, and since most administrators are drawn from tenured faculty, it stands to reason that Zorro thinks that most—and not just some, or a few—“profs…become problematic as administrators.” Which means in turn that Zorro thinks that most tenured full professors possess the character flaw of turning villainous the moment they’re made deans or provosts.“The CHE has been consistently reporting the appointment of presidents/chancellors from outside of academia.”
*Fine, but the question was what percentage? Twenty or above would be significant, five or below unremarkable.“The number of tenured faculty earning six-figures can be found in the CHE or Academe. It is still not a majority of the tenured professoriate in this country.”
*Agreed, it’s not. But it’s closer than people think, and at bigtime research universities, it’s probably the majority. The point is that it’s not really a case of poverty-stricken tenured full professors versus rich administrators (by which I mean deans and provosts). Presidents—only one to a university, remember—are a separate category.“The easiest way to cut back on the tenured (and eliminate the tenure track) is and always will be by attrition and conversion of tenure-track lines to ‘at will’ positions when there is a vacancy due to resignation or retirement.”
* Zorro avoids the question: Why wait for attrition? A tenured faculty member promoted to full professor at age fifty, petrified into deadwood by age 55, and hanging on to his or her job until age 75, clogs up the department for two whole decades, while “due process” does nothing. And in many states, even bringing up the subject of early retirement incentives to a particular faculty member is actionable age discrimination. Early retirement incentives have to be offered across the board, with no indication whom the school would rather accept and whom would rather decline.“‘Once more with feeling‘”: The only employees in this country who have First Amendment-protected speech in the workplace are those in government service. (“Congress shall make no law” not “The employer shall make no law”.)
* Hello? “Congress shall make no law…” applies to more people than just government employees. The Constitution is not merely a contract for civil service employees.“Tenured employment is enjoyed by the vast majority of government/civil service workers in this country — including those in public universities, faculty and non-faculty, full professors and janitors.”
* Does anybody out there seriously contend that the “tenure” enjoyed by civil service workers and janitors is, in real terms, equal to that enjoyed by college professors?“It is not an exaggeration to state that those who seek to abandon academic freedom and tenure and to create contractual faculty employees who are firable ‘at the will’ of the administration are latter-day ‘royalists.’”
* Of course it is. It’s the geezer’s version (I can say that because I are one) of young lefties calling everybody who disagrees with them “fascists.” And it’s also the most low-ball form of argument: name-calling. (Note: If formerly tenured faculty instead have five- and ten-year contracts, and if there is a procedure for renewing or not renewing them that’s similar to what there is for reappointment now, then those faculty are not fireable “at the will of the administration.”)“‘There are none so deaf as those who will not hear; there are none so blind as those who will not see.’”
* Well, sure. But those opposed to tenure might say exactly the same thing about those who favor it.— LuckyJim · Apr 17, 10:06 AM · #
Although I never believed in having to have Tenure it was awarded to me. I can only presume that I fully met the requirements above and beyond what my job description called for. I think the problem lies with the administrative personnel, who used to be faculty members, to enforce each faculty member’s contractual duties. The “deadwood” I knew about met during their scheduled class times and nothing more. Some did not receive a raise in salary but nothing more was done. I believe the administrators should hold “all” faculty accountable to at least meet the responsibilities that were published when they were hired. Just look at the job postings and you’ll see responsibilities of advising, committee meetings, community outreach, grant writing, and on and on. I say hold everyone accountable. Ask yourself, if things are really that bad, in relation to “deadwood” where you are, do you really want to stay there? If the answer is yes, then maybe you should be the one to press the administration to hold the entire faculty accountable and perhaps reduce some of the “deadwood.”
As for the bullies in a department – yes they are a fact of life. However, at least for me, when one such member strongly suggested I not go up for Tenure the first year I was eligible I said I’ve surpassed the criteria so I’m applying. I got it. For another person in my department there were multiple “bullies” and that excellent teacher left the university. Partly because of this deterioration in collegiality, I left too. We all have a choice. What do you choose?
— NN · Apr 17, 10:14 AM · #
Doesn’t it matter that the tenure system systematically promotes actions that are simply bad—”bad” as in immoral, wrong, capricious, cruel, and unjust? When a system promotes—even insists on—behavior which, translated into another context of life and described in a novel, would revolt all decent readers, that system should be abolished or changed. Does fair treatment of people enter into this conversation anywhere? Why do almost all comments ignore the damaged, the perfectly competent and sometimes even superior teachers and scholars banished from their jobs and sometimes from their vocations? (If I seem cryptic, please see my posts on the first two installments of this argument.) If Professor Fendrich’s proposed alternatives are imperfect, at least they respond to moral issues and to her fine initial critique of a highly flawed and sometimes brutal system.
— Peter D. Grudin · Apr 17, 10:32 AM · #
On comment 23:
I state and restate my earlier postings.
My last comment was very carefully composed, especially those parts referring to the legal system. For example, I even put the word “employees” in italics when discussing the application of the First Amendment to “employment” only.
I do not wish to burden the readership with further reiterations of my answers to the questions repeated in 23. For those interested, a more careful reading of what has already been posted provides a reply to the obections in 23.
P.S. As the New York Times reported in its recent article on bullying, legislation prohibiting bullying activity in the work place (of the kind that is not already prohibited by various categories of discrimination law) is already being considered in several states as healthy work environment legislation.
Surely a more egalitarian approach….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 17, 10:44 AM · #
It doesn’t take a lot of brains to figure out that the best and the brightest among our young people do not give any thought to an academic career. To many of them, an academic career means low pay, no incentive to excel,
pettiness, and low prestige. Until the faculty world changes, our most talented young people will continue to enter law, medicine, business, and finance. Those professions also have their serious problems, of course, but at least those who excel are rewarded, and for the most part, those who become deadwood are fired.
— Carl · Apr 17, 10:54 AM · #
Why is not having a contract renewed less traumatic than not receiving tenure? I am still out of a job.
— E. G. · Apr 17, 11:34 AM · #
On comment 27 (concerning “law, medicine, business, and finance”):
Fired? Or sued by those they have harmed?
Often only the latter — and we are facing such an explosion of malpractice suits in some professions (e.g. medicine) that insurance premiums are sky-rocketing and the professions seek to enact legislation to “cap” the damages in such suits to avoid responsibility for the “deadwood” among their number.
It takes a lot for M.D.s to lose their license, or for lawyers to be disbarred, for example. And as for finance and business, there’s Enron, etc. and a whole host of legislation in their wake….
Choose your poison, I guess.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 17, 12:11 PM · #
Oh, and just off the top of my head: Colorado, Missouri, Nevada, New York, and North Carolina all have or have had a non-academic as system president/chancellor.
That’s at least one in ten states, ten percent.
And counting….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 17, 01:09 PM · #
As a former administrator, I see tenure as a totally dysfunctional custom that only serves tenured professors. The absurdity of the whole thing became apparent to me when I realized that even elementary school teachers in some urban districts receive tenure…clearly in their case it has nothing to do with academic freedom.
As currently practiced, tenure makes it difficult for universities to hire young faculty, puts inordinate pressure on them if they are hired, prevents universities from retaining talented teachers who have not been able to publish, and rewards inertia in senior faculty.
It is a totally unrealistic kind of job security. Clearly there is some middle ground between tenure and two-week notice, and there must be better ways to protect academic free in the rare instances when it is an issue.
I applaud Laurie Fendrich’s willingness to raise the issue.— Charles bouchard · Apr 17, 01:45 PM · #
Grad Student viewpoint, from what I have observed over the years:
I think an important issue is missing from this article, the ability of the administration to cancel positions if such a system was implemented. This might not happen at larger universities, but I know at the mid-level state university I attended for my masters this problem existed. If a faculty member left a tenure track or tenured position then often that position was removed from the department. This was almost like a punishment to the department for “not picking the right candidate that would see it through.” If we went to a 3-5-10-10-3-etc… year appointment that the article discussed, this would leave all the power in the hands of the administration when it came to deciding what quality of program, and which programs the university had. Instead of these professors leaving being the only reason departments were “punished,” with this system the administration decides when they want to punish the department, and to what extent. This year one position, next year three… Theoretically, the administration could just squash out a whole department, troublemaker or not, just because they wanted to. This would be without showing the university’s financial needs or even having a reason for doing so.
I also agree that the reason I am finishing a PhD and looking at the academe is because of the idea of job security and the freedom of expression it provides. I don’t believe nixing tenure is going to help the profession other than perhaps lowering the amount of PhDs produced as the profession becomes less glamorous.
A last point only briefly touched on it seems, as a grad student I want to work with someone I know will be there when I finish (well, of course unless they pass away or jump-ship, but both circumstances can be relatively hard to foresee most of the time). I think this system would hurt graduate students quite heavily, because if the position that a professor holds is controlled more by outside forces, and their peer’s opinions, their job in all likeliness could be cancelled. A potential grad student could look at the faculty webpage of an institution see Jane Doe was set to reapply for contract in three years and realize if they want to work with Jane Doe, then they will either have to wait three years for security, or risk jumping into an institution where they may be without advisor in three years. This could result in much heavier waves of grad students during a professors first three years of the 10 year contract, thus making it harder for everyone involved – or worse making grad studies more irregular.
— jack of some trades · Apr 17, 02:07 PM · #
College senior: “I want to go to graduate school and become a professor. Will you write a letter of recommendation for me?”
Senior’s adviser: “You’re a great student; of course! But ask yourself a question first. Suppose you spend three years taking courses—more if you don’t receive a scholarship and stipend—and another year preparing for your Ph.D. qualifying exam. A year for preparing you dissertation proposal, and then four or five years writing it. You are over thirty years old. You go out on the market and find that there is a glut in your field. You piece together adjunct positions and part-time “real-world” employment, or for a decade you take a series of temporary positions—all the time trying to do new research and do a little writing. Then you discover that there are no tenure-track positions anymore, just fire-at-will jobs, so that the vendetta of a half-dozen students, a one-year financial downturn, the bad mood of a chair, an incautious word in the classroom, the eager-beaver cost-cutting of a dean-on-the-make put you on the street. Would you really want to pursue such a ‘profession’? The only way you should consider this is if, even if all this happened, you were in your mid-40s, and no longer able to find another academic job, you could say to yourself: Learning everything I learned, the reading, the research, becoming a world’s expert on the topic that interested me most—all this was worth it for its own sake.”
Learning is not fungible; neither are teachers. But I confidently expect that the managerial-corporate market-driven university of the future will do for higher education in the U.S. what we have accomplished for primary and secondary education over the past decades.
— dionysos · Apr 17, 02:11 PM · #
“Oh, and just off the top of my head: Colorado, Missouri, Nevada, New York, and North Carolina all have or have had a non-academic as system president/chancellor…That’s at least one in ten states, ten percent.”
* Gotta hand it to Zorro; knows how to wriggle. The operative words in this case are “all have OR HAVE HAD” [emphasis mine] to arrive at “ten percent.” Betcha if you measure those presidents/chancellors against all those that Colorado, Missouri, Nevada, New York, and North Carolina “have OR HAVE HAD” it’s waaaay lower than ten percent. Plus, Zorro arbitrarily makes it winner-take-all by state: any state SYSTEM with a non-academic head puts that state totally in the non-academic column, and conveniently ignores the presidents/chancellors of the individual schools under the system. That’d probably take the percentage down into the fractions of one percent.
As Sylvester the cat might have thpfsaid, “Itpsth’s tpstho prthrustrating!”
— LuckyJim · Apr 17, 02:34 PM · #
I agree that there are grave problems with the tenure system as it is, but not the ones that Fendrich and other tenure critics note. I shared many of these assumptions about deadwood and about the silencing of untenured faculty. Granted, some people would fit the deadwood profile, but I believe the vast majority of tenured faculty do their jobs well and consciously, and contribute as much to the life of the institution as any young faculty member. It’s the height of foolishness and fantasy to base an argument for abolishing tenure on these mythological armies of deadwood professors.
When I got tenure, about four years ago, my first thought was not “Oh boy, deadwood time!” It was, “Wow, now I can work on projects that I’m passionate about, reboot my teaching by experimenting with new subjects and methods, and try to make a meaningful contribution to my institution.” I think there’s a myth of deadwood that clouds the more salient issues surrounding tenure. Namely, it limits departmental and institutional dialogue by making those without tenure feel intimidated, even if no intimidation actually exists (which it rarely does). Tenure also llimits career mobility for those who have it. For these reasons, I think the system is in need of some overhaul.
But if we’re going to argue to abolish or rethink it, let’s do so rationally and for the right reasons – not invent mythological beasts to be slain. The alternative to tenure proposed by Fendrich, having to reapply for your job every three or five or ten years, is surely not the answer. Such a system seems administratively cumbersome and personally demeaning to people who have been doing their job for years.
— Not interested in becoming deadwood · Apr 17, 04:02 PM · #
It is ridiculous to think that most faculty could move to the private sector and make a lot more money. Not all of us teach such lucrative subjects as business, the sciences, or economics. Hence the reason why some of us cling to tenure, with all its faults. I’m glad to work at a school with a union. Collective bargaining has its problems too, but it helps check the balance of power in today’s corporatized academic world.
— Look for the Union Label · Apr 17, 04:30 PM · #
On comment 34:
Starting alphabetically, I needed only to Google Alaska to get the fifth current state university system president/chancellor who was not an academic. I have not gone down the whole alphabet and the name of the newest non-academic system head featured in the CHE doesn’t immediately spring into mind.
Of the other five state systems previously mentioned, only the SUNY chancellorship is currently in the hands of an “interim” who was a college president and system administrator first — but that, directly from the world of Wall Street. Unlike the other named confreres, he has a Ph.D. We’ll have to just wait and see who becomes New York’s next full SUNY Chancellor. Two incumbents ago, the Chancellor was a lawyer, former director of the NYS budget, friend of the then governor.
My posting was clear: these are state system heads. No sleight of hand. The trend is the issue — as well as the fact that the heads of the public campuses in a state generally go through the hands of the system, so to speak, for appointment.
A system headed by a non-academic is likely to be more receptive to the appointment of non-academics to the heads of the campuses.
This “nit-picking” is rather boring, both to me and, I assume, the readership.
“Pace.”
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 17, 05:12 PM · #
- It is ridiculous to think that most faculty could move to the private sector and make a lot more money –
I think I was the first on this thread to make that statement so I should clarify; I didn’t say “most” would leave, I said “I” would leave, others just agreed with me. If there is one thing years of grad school, job hunting, teaching, and researching have taught me, it is that this is a job. We like to think of it in high-minded terms, as a calling or a positive contribution to society, whatever. It might be. But in the end, it is a job. Like any job, many of us weight the pros and cons in deciding the paths we will pursue. Sometimes when the pros change they become cons, and we rethink the whole thing.
Tenure is a perk, much like one person’s month long paid vacation or another’s larger (not always six figure) salary. Some of us are willing to sacrifice the glamour of teaching for the more mundane world of excessive surplus income.
— Marcus · Apr 17, 05:38 PM · #
T’weren’t nit-picking. Zorro’s claim about non-academics heading colleges and universities was suddenly limited to heads of whole university SYSTEMS when it started to collapse. Non-academic heads of whole systems, we are then told, will be much more likely to appoint non-academic heads of individual campuses. Maybe. But until they actually do, the “trend” of heads of college administrations (preponderantly individual schools) is a lot less than Zorro implies. Boring? Yep. I wish Zorro would make shaky claims about about administrators’ sex lives, or something.
— LuckyJim · Apr 17, 11:28 PM · #
As Ms. Mentor argues in the preface of her book, Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia,
“… Ms. Mentor prefers that women learn the fine arts of self-defense — and achieve the fine protection of tenure. A solitary woman, railing against injustice, has no power at all. But a team of women, all tenured, can speak with one voice and make changes that will stop sexual harassment, achieve equal pay, get respect and money for Women’s Studies, combat homophobia, and anti-Semitism and class and race prejudice, allow paid leaves for child care and elder care, support accessibility rights and disability rights — and all the other things that are called ‘women’s issues’ and should really be human rights, and human responsibilities.“But only tenured professors have the power in academia — and so women need to get tenure.”
Applying Ms. Mentor’s prose to the debate here, the more faculty who have tenure , the more faculty who can move our colleges and universities towards the adoption of employment and academic policies that respect employees and students as human beings.
The arguments made here and in other op-eds that tenure produces “many” faculty who are dead wood or bullies is just not persuasive because it’s not based on data. How many faculty with tenure become bullies and/or dead wood — because they have tenure?
Is this a big problem and is it caused by tenure?How many faculty remain active scholars and dedicated teachers because they love what they do?
The threat of firing a person is a very big stick to be swinging. Even in the private sector, managers use a variety of management tools to try to make unproductive employees productive. Firing someone really is a last resort.
Like private sector managers, Deans also have management tools (other than the threat of firing a person) to effectively deal with faculty who do become bullies or do become deadwood. You don’t need to eliminate tenure to get rid of the few (or many?) faculty who are bullies or dead wood.
Tenure has enormous benefits — and some costs. But, without data, you can’t cogently argue that the costs outweigh the benefits.
— Saranna Thornton · Apr 18, 12:16 AM · #
I really liked post #5. Thank you, Joseph Foster, you expressed exactly what I think about tenure. But has anyone ever noticed how different the pay scales are for tenured vs. non-tenured? Something like $40K per year. Perhaps, then, although the benefits that go along with tenure are significant, the sharp divide between tenured and non-tenured makes for a very fraught environment for junior faculty—it’s an all-or-nothing deal. That’s something that I think could be productively addressed and improved.
— madamesmartypants · Apr 18, 09:38 AM · #
For post #31: Tenure for elementary school teachers could be very valuable, if a teacher wanted to teach something crazy, like, in some school districts, phonics or the multiplication table, never mind something like the rudiment of the scientific method without reference divine motions.
— Jesse · Apr 18, 10:04 AM · #
“As Ms. Mentor argues in the preface of her book, Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia, ‘… Ms. Mentor prefers that women learn the fine arts of self-defense — and achieve the fine protection of tenure. A solitary woman, railing against injustice, has no power at all. But a team of women, all tenured, can speak with one voice and make changes that will stop sexual harassment, achieve equal pay, get respect and money for Women’s Studies, combat homophobia, and anti-Semitism and class and race prejudice, allow paid leaves for child care and elder care, support accessibility rights and disability rights — and all the other things that are called ‘women’s issues’ and should really be human rights, and human responsibilities…But only tenured professors have the power in academia — and so women need to get tenure.’…Applying Ms. Mentor’s prose to the debate here, the more faculty who have tenure , the more faculty who can move our colleges and universities towards the adoption of employment and academic policies that respect employees and students as human beings.”
* Kumbaya, but where’s the beef, er, DATA, in this one?
— LuckyJim · Apr 18, 10:37 AM · #
I believe that tenure is a huge problem in many ways, not the least of which is that it definitely limits the employment options of faculty. Sure, outstanding faculty in certain fields can leverage their successes into higher paying, more prestigious positions at other institutions, but that is not the case for the vast majority of faculty. One reason faculty pay is so low is once you are ‘awarded’ tenure, you are essentially a captive to that institution. Since you’re no longer marketable, why should the institution pay you any more than a measly 2-3% increase? Oh, that’s where merit pay becomes relevant, right? No, that’s where teacher’s pet (or in this case, administrator’s pet) comes into play. If you challenge the status quo in any way, it is unlikely you will see much in the way of merit pay. So much for the adage ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease’. As an untenured faculty member in a dysfunctional department with a dysfunctional administration, I was told repeatedly to keep my mouth shut, to put in more ‘face time’ at social events (even one that conflicted with one of my lecture courses), and to stop taking my teaching duties so seriously. (I was told by one senior faculty member that the only thing students wanted out of a degree was the degree: the content in my courses was irrelevant.)
But what happens if you realize that a given institution is not a good fit but you are close to tenure (e.g. you have served at the institution for more than 3 years)? Easy: your career is over. You are viewed as essentially an ‘untouchable’ by any other institution to which you apply. After all, if you were any good, why are you looking for another position so close to tenure? Obviously you must be a lousy instructor, colleague, researcher, mentor and possibly an all-around bad person. Sound ridiculous? It is. But I served on search committees in which those very pronouncements were made.
Tenure is a double-edged sword, but I believe it is cutting faculty much more deeply than they realize. It seems like such a great idea—job security for life! But it also means that you’ve lost all bargaining power, job mobility and are doomed to serve your entire career in a single place. For some—I suspect mostly the deadwood—this sounds ideal. But for the many dedicated, hard-working and intellectually involved faculty, I have a hard time believing that tenure is a good trade-off. I find it amusing that the predominant argument for the need to maintain the fossilized, antiquated policy of tenure is to protect academic freedom. How is being stuck at a low-paying job freedom?
— Jaded · Apr 18, 07:08 PM · #
On comment 39:
An excerpt from a 3/5/08 New York Times article on “A College President Whose Credentials Stress Taking Care of Business”
(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/nyregion/05face.html?_r=1&ref=education&oref=slogin):
“John Fry’s path to the presidency of Franklin & Marshall College fits none of the conventions of academic life. He did not earn a doctorate, did not teach or publish research and was never a department chairman or dean or provost.
Like a small but growing number of college and university presidents, Mr. Fry earned his stripes outside the classroom, on the business side of higher education.”
To my mind, the demographic that at least one in ten system heads in this country is from “outside” of the traditional academic career path is the truly alarming figure.
There are more students and faculty in public higher education institutions than in private ones and the reach of system administrations is long, indeed — directly into the classroom.
For example, the number of tenure-track positions at a given public institution is usually not exclusively under local control. And the apportioning of the campuses’ budgets into higher operating vs. personnel expenses can speed up adjunctification at an even faster rate. Adjuncts provide far more administrative “flexibility” than tenured faculty, do they not? Such “just in time” redesign of personnel and programs is a hallmark of the business world.
The business-oriented system president/chancellor has the motive, means, and opportunity to remake the face of higher education in his/her state — one policy decision (e.g. a hiring freeze or an across-the-board cut) can strike all public campuses of the state with a single, swift, non-negotiable blow. So much for shared governance.
Welcome to the increasing corporatization of the university.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 18, 10:03 PM · #
WANTED (from any reader out there):
• The total number of heads (presidents, chancellors, etc.) of both public university SYSTEMS and individual four-year public and private colleges and universities in the United States. (Remember, at least one state, California, has two such systems—UC and CSU.)
• The number of those heads who come from non-academic backgrounds. (A bit of judgment is called for here. A head whose academic background would qualify him or her to head a university or university system, but who also has an MBA or corporate experience, would not fall on the “non-academic” side of the ledger for me. But it’s your call.)
• The same two sets of stats from ten or fifteen years ago.
Whether to include two-year community colleges and non-for-profit private two year colleges is another question. Since many community colleges are part and parcel of state/county systems of secondary education and are run by non-Ph.D.s with masters degrees in education, I suspect they’d further reduce the percentage of “non-academic” heads in higher education. But that, too, is your call.
Thank you.
— LuckyJim · Apr 19, 09:41 AM · #
On comment 46:
Yes, please. However, for the sake of completeness, make that at least twenty-five to thirty years because the average tenure of a president/chancellor often spans a decade or more — and the adjunctification trend began around that period, as well.
Of course, I believe that the threat to the academic freedom and tenure of some of us is a threat to the academic freedom and tenure of all of us — and I’m not alone in that opinion.
In the early twentieth century, a certain Arthur Lovejoy criss-crossed the country defending faculty on that very premise.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 19, 11:06 AM · #
On “Time’s Up for Tenure”:
While the blog host is apparently, as her secretary would say, “getting a life”, “Anti-hypocrisy advocate” is busily reviewing a recent CHE article on academic freedom and grading. (Who gets paid to write these blogs? ;-))
The April 25, 2008 issue contains a commentary by Lawrence White on the recent Stronach v. Virginia State University grade change decision in the Fourth Circuit and contrasts it to the 1989 Parate v. Isibor case in the Sixth Circuit : “Does Academic Freedom Give a Professor the Final Say on Grades?” http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i33/33a03901.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
First of all, the article’s author appears to have missed the fact that the administration in Parate v. Isibor was told it couldn’t alter the expression of a grade by the professor. The ruling did not prevent the administration from putting a different grade on the student’s transcript: “The actions of the defendants, who failed to administratively change Student ‘Y’s’ grade themselves, unconstitutionally compelled Parate’s speech and precluded him from communicating his personal evaluation to Student ‘Y.’” — Parate v. Isibor, 868 F.2d 821. (Pyrrhic victory — the administration got the last word.)
Further, the article underplays the gravity of the situation in the Stronach decision as opposed to the Parate v. Isibor case when it comes to the issue of tenure and academic freedom. The Stronach case is one of first impression in that Circuit, as well, and was decided in a suit brought under Title VII for retaliation.
The district judge in the Stronach case did not consider the tenured status of the plaintiff to be of any legal consequence whatsoever in his definition of academic freedom — even when citing as evidence for his position a First Circuit decision which clearly did (“See Lovelace v. S.E. Mass. Univ., 793 F.2d 419, 425 (1st Cir. 1986) (“To accept plaintiff’s contention that an untenured teacher’s grading policy is constitutionally protected . . . would be to constrict the university in defining and performing its educational mission.”)).
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Parate v. Isibor, however, did find throughout the course of its ruling that sometimes tenure makes a difference. Some excerpts from the decision:
- “Arguing from their First Amendment right to academic freedom, the defendants [the university administration] assert an interest in supervising and reviewing the grading policies of their nontenured professors.”
- “… because Parate is a nontenured professor, he can allege no First Amendment right to teach a particular class or to be free from the supervision of university officials. See, e.g., Hetrick, 480 F.2d at 709.”
As to Fourteenth Amendment violations (due process liberty interest), more from Parate v. Isibor:
- “The district court rejected Parate’s claim and found that, as a nontenured professor, he was subject to discharge without cause and was justifiably terminated at the end of his one-year contract.”
- “In Sullivan v. Brown, 544 F.2d 279 (6th Cir. 1976), this Court held that the transfer of a tenured teacher did not implicate her liberty interest under the Fourteenth Amendment because no constitutional right to teach a specific class exists.”
ERGO: Until the Supreme Court weighs in directly, depending on the circuit of the Federal court system and the nature and scope of the claim, a tenured professor in a public institution may indeed have more academic freedom than an untenured one — but not necessarily in deterimining the grade which appears on the final transcript (as opposed to on his/her faculty “grade sheet”).
N.B. The Sixth Circuit case dismissed the application of the Tennessee Board of Regents’ academic freedom clause (which Parate had also invoked) as advisory rather than “mandatory”.
However, such a dismissal would not be achieved in a state like New York where the SUNY Board of Trustees’ Policies: 1) are incorporated into Education Law in the state (as are the individual campus handbooks, by reference in the Policies);
2) contain an academic freedom clause without restriction as to tenure status; and
3) offer both state law and collective bargaining contract protection via concurrent language.
Notwithstandinng the above-outlined lacunae, the CHE article by Lawrence White does indeed do a great service in drawing attention to the increasing tendency of courts to place the constitutionally-based institutional definition of academic freedom above that of the individual’s academic freedom in the matter of grading (as the grade appears on the students’ transcripts, at least) — and thus grants further support to AHA’s contention elsewhere on this blog’s comment section that the changing of grades by administrations may indeed be proceeding apace in higher education.
“More power to the university administration” once all tenure is eliminated, eh?
AHA-Erlebnis
(cross-posted from http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/fendrich/the-secretary-to-the-rescue)
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 21, 12:42 PM · #
Interesting. Benson is absolutely right about tenure, and that’s not its only value. Like democracy, it may be a lousy system but it’s far better than any other.
I’m told that at the relatively new Florida Gulf Coast University, which does not have tenure, the percent of faculty who are being non-renewed is considerably lower than the percent denied tenure at most universities.
Finally, most of the presidents of Florida’s public universities are not traditional academics.
— Ken · Apr 21, 01:28 PM · #
I guess my appeal to ethics wasn’t relevant. Am I really talking to human beings here? Or rather, by distinction, to academics? Is there no way I can make you see the pain this system inflicts on people? How can I suceed in making you sensitive to injustice? Do I have to hire J. M. Coetzee to do my writing for me? Most of your responses remind me of Richard Russo’s description of English professors reacting to being in a room on fire. Shame. Disgrace.
— Peter D. Grudin · Apr 22, 07:29 PM · #
A code of ethics is also required of the life-time tenured Federal court judges and Supreme Court justices. Yet they often gravely disappoint us with their rulings, their decisions, their failure to seek justice — with either a capital or a small j. And in matters literally of life and death, at that.
Yet, few would say that the liftetime tenure system for the Federal courts should be done away with. Indeed, most who compare some state elected judicial systems to the tenured ones find the elected systems are fraught with even more ethical dilemmas and disappointments.
Let’s dot the i’s and cross the t’s: the only thing wrong with tenure is that it has been abused. Horribly, shamelessly, and senselessly at times. Those who abuse the system must be opposed — and redress sought through due process.
But, as with the Federal court judges, the ability of the faculty to seek the truth wherever the search may lead, and to speak that truth as well, is only truly possible within a system of academic freedom guaranteed by tenure.
Anything less is coercive to one degree or another — and corruptible in the extreme.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 22, 11:13 PM · #
I am not the first comment-poster nor the first non-academic thinker to note the analogies between academic tenure and the lifetime tenure afforded federal judges by Article III of the constitution, though I will add that it took one really great judge, Chief Justice John Marshall, to figure out what federal judges and justices were supposed to do within a system riven by vertical (separation of powers) and horizontal (federal, state and local) divisions.
The complaints are similar. Federal judges report to no one and thus have an anti-democratic power to reject the will of the people and all sorts of dolts are appointed for political reasons. The counter-arguments are equally familiar. Life tenure allows these judges to act without fear of retribution by a coordinate branch of government or the public at large. Further, without life tenure, no one would take these underpaid jobs. Often overlooked, however, are the structural and functional constraints which do impose a rough order and discipline upon tenured judges and professors.
First and foremost is the professional aspect. No judge wants to be regarded as a dim bulb, just as no professor wants to be regarded as never-published, a purely political or affirmative action appointee or some other type of lowlight in her discipline.
Second, both are subject to oversight and rejection of their work. At the trial and appellate level, federal judges are not unmindful of the fact that their decisions can be reversed. While the Supreme Court’s decisions cannot be reversed by higher courts, they can be reversed by legislative fiat and the group decisionmaking of nine constantly changing minds grounds every decision on shifting sands. Similarly, in my non-academic perception, professors’ classroom decisions can be revised and their article and publications can be rejected by publishers and refuted by colleagues.
And then there are market forces. Anyone who wants to avoid a particular judge or bench can elect to sue somewhere else, pursue a non-judicial proceeding such as arbitration or, god forbid, settle the claim. (Don’t let anyone tell you that forum-shopping can’t happen). Similarly, students can choose alternate courses and schools thereby avoiding the professors they cannot abide. No, it’s not so easy, but if you think it’s one of the harder things you’ll confront during a lifetime, then you need to talk to someone twenty years older.
Finally, we are all human and it is difficult to imagine that a life-appointment is sweet in the face of social rejection. Federal judges find that their appointment makes all attorneys into their friends and reduces all their attorney-friends to attorneys. Tenured professors face colleagues and students on a daily basis. The slings and arrows of outrageous fate in the form of peer, party and student critiques are not without power to humble even the hardest sociopath.
Of course, this is not to say that either academia or the federal bench is not without whackos, psychos and the developmentally challenged….
— Tom Wilinsky · Apr 25, 11:50 AM · #