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About the Author
Stan Katz teaches public and international affairs and directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History. He comments frequently on policy issues relating to higher education, particularly liberal education, and on the humanities and social sciences, philanthropy, scholarly relations with Cuba, and the interplay of civil society, constitutionalism, and democracy. And on his beloved Cubs.
About Brainstorm
Mark Bauerlein
Marc Bousquet
Laurie Fendrich
Dan Greenberg
John L. Jackson Jr.
Stan Katz
Michael Nelson, guest blogger
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
Brainstorm Alumni
Marty Nemko, guest bloggerBob Zemsky
Recent Posts
The Higher Education Act and the Education Industry | Comment [2]
A Good Day for History Teaching | Comment [4]
Good Luck, President Simon and MSU! | Comment [7]
A Curious Pair of Obituaries | Comment [5]
Bronislaw Geremek: Scholar-Statesman | Comment
Featured Articles By the Author
Tenure and Teaching
I am a passionate defender of the tenure system, although in fact I have not been its beneficiary since 1986, when I resigned my professorship at Princeton to take a job at the American Council of Learned Societies. I returned to full-time teaching after retiring from my ACLS job in 1997 on the basis of annual lecturer appointments, and I am both happy and secure here.
But I have had an unusual career, and Princeton is an unusually faithful university. Most academics would not and should not feel secure without tenure — and of course the dramatic decline in the percentage of tenured faculty should be a source of concern to all of us. Tenure remains crucial for “tenure track” faculty, and it is especially important to defend the system.
That is not to say that the tenure system is without problems, even in distinguished universities such as my own. On May 16, Matt Westmoreland, a very capable undergraduate investigative reporter for the Daily Princetonian published a fine piece entitled “Tenure Road Rough for Professors.” He focused on the recent denial of tenure to one of our assistant professors of chemistry, a man with what sound like excellent credentials both as a scholar and a teacher. Tenure is tough to come by at Princeton. Sixty to 70 percent of assistant professors here fail to receive tenure (or decline it). No assistant professor of chemistry has been tenured since 1996. Westmoreland quotes a couple of college seniors who are very upset that such a brilliant teacher will be forced to leave, though I am not aware that there was a widespread student concern about his denial. Of course chemistry is a small undergraduate department here.
When a popular young American historian (the winner of a teaching prize) was denied tenure in 2003, however, there was a very loud protest to the president, who pledged to review the tenure system the next year. She deferred the review at that time, since a new Dean of the Faculty and Provost had just been appointed. But last month she told Westmoreland that “I have become less and less persuaded that there is a better way to do [tenure]. . . . I actually think our system is as good as any.”
Well, that is perhaps true, but that is not the same thing as saying that the system is the best one possible — or the best for us. The problem, as the Prince piece points out, is that the system primarily evaluates scholarship. And almost no one at a university like this buys into Ernest Boyer’s notion of “the scholarship of teaching.” One chemist interviewed by Westmoreland opined that “average teachers become much better with time . . . Average researchers become worse with time.” Perhaps, but we are not talking about giving tenure to the average assistant professor, and there are in fact many researchers (especially in the humanities) who become better over time.
The reality is that we do not take teaching sufficiently seriously partly because in the end we in research universities do not give much of a damn about it, and partly because even when we do care, we do not know how to evaluate teaching effectively. Until we have better and more systematic measures of teaching success (among them, objective measures of student learning), the case for taking teaching seriously in tenure decisions will remain weak. To leave matters as they are is to do a disservice to our students — and to some very dedicated and talented assistant professors.
Posted at 03:46:00 PM on May 23, 2008 | All postings by Stan KatzComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
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It is always both astonishing and amusing that tenured faculty who retire/resign from their positions and then return to a university on “annual lecturer appointments” after retirement do not acknowledge their complicity in the erosion of the tenure system.
The very fact of accepting such untenured teaching appointments (generally at somewhat or significantly reduced salary from the usual tenured positions) ratifies the notion that “teaching” is “contingent” and “research” is “tenured”. Further, the practice reduces the number of full positions available to the next generation of professors.
The statement, “Of course chemistry is a small undergraduate department here” only underscores what many do not know about Princeton: that it is not a “full” university but a residential college with doctoral programs, fewer than at many, if not, most universities (chemistry, however, is one of them), and with no medical, nursing, business, education, divinity, etc. schools.
That such an institution does not value teaching in its tenure process more than it does is a scandal of even greater proportion than at, for example, Yale – where, incidentally, the tenure system has just recently undergone a complete overhaul. Yale tenure candidates may opt between the “old” and the “new” review systems: the “old” one in which they competed with an “open search” for the best qualified person in the world, or the “new” one where there are “tracked” positions in the more traditional sense. It remains to be seen what role teaching will effectively play in the new system, however.
The Ivies, let us recall, brought us that quaint expression “the gentleman’s C” which, however, has been replaced by even more rampant grade inflation so that admission is virtually a guarantee of graduation with at least a B average. Not to worry, students. Even though Princeton claims to be determined to defeat grade inflation, its failure to respect teaching in the tenure process (together with the nearly universal reliance in academe upon “student evaluations” wherein the “customers” protest against too demanding a work load) will ensure that the fact of the “gentleman’s/lady’s B” will not be moribund any time soon.
And one wonders why alumni organize themselves to lobby for change in their alma mater institutions, often precisely in the direction of support for undergraduate teaching and liberal education?
Why, because there are no college/university administrations so deaf as those that will not hear.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 23, 07:51 PM · #
To harp once again on what one might call the ongoing “augustness problem” with three of “Brainstorm’s” bloggers—Mssrs Katz, Trachtenberg and Zemsky: If each of them didn’t feel so compelled to recite parts of their c.v.‘s at the beginning of each post, perhaps they wouldn’t end up seeming so diluted and lame in making their subsequent points. To wit: immediately after his usual obseisances to the wonderfulness of Princeton (“I am both happy and secure here…Princeton is an unusually faithful university”), Mr. Katz cites what seem to be two recent unfair denials of tenure to assistant professors who deserved tenure (so much for “unusually faithful”), a president who deferred a review of Princeton’s heavily criticized tenure system because a new dean and provost had just been appointed (wouldn’t want their outside perspective while it was still fresh, would we?), and a president who subsequently decided (apparently on her own) that the status quo is quite all right, thank you. That plus the 60 – 70 percent denial rate in tenure cases, seem to say right out loud that Princeton is especially lousy in encouraging/crediting/tenuring good teachers. Why can’t Mr. Katz say that?
— LuckyJim · May 24, 02:14 PM · #
I’ve never understood why there is a dichotomy between “research” and “teaching”. In order for the research enterprise to maintain itself and progress, doesn’t it need to ensure effective transmission of research skills and knowledge to the next generation? Good research would seem to depend heavily on good, effective teaching. But if research universities feel they have bigger fish to fry than preparing the next generation of scholars and researchers, there are other institutions—e.g., community colleges—that seem well-equipped to fill the void. Yet in my state, anyway, the public universities often seem at war with the community colleges (e.g., they recently banded together to defeat a Proposition to increase community college funding) rather than finding ways to make them part of the whole teaching-research continuum. Meanwhile, they complain that their undergraduates are under-prepared and unwilling to submit to the rigors of a research university (e.g., lots of reading). I personally think we need to redefine the role of community colleges as a necessary first step in the development of undergraduates. Instead of belittling and attempting to divert funds from community colleges, public universities ought to be finding ways to extend linkages and partnerships between the two types of institutions. We can’t force research universities to focus more on teaching, but we can, it seems to me, find ways for community colleges to lay much pedagogical groundwork before students move on to the rigors of a university.
— Marc · May 24, 03:57 PM · #