The granting of tenure -- in the normal case -- assures a faculty member of complete job security. A professor cannot be released by a university unless (1) the university can establish extreme financial need, (2) abolishes the professor's department, or (3) determines that the professor is guilty of some massive personal delinquency. The number of personal failings and foibles for which one can be canned has been decreasing over the years, though, so this third possibility is a remote one. If the university wants to be rid of a tenured faculty member nowadays, it will generally try to buy him/her out rather than resort to firing.
There are good reasons for faculty tenure. Faculty must be protected from capricious behavior on the part of administrators, trustees, alumni. The situation at Bennington is a case in point. Professors who thought their jobs secure, who had no reason to believe their performance anything less than satisfactory, were suddently released when a new president came into office. If a professor is hired to teach in one way and under one set of assumptions and methods, that professor must be protected against future administrators and colleagues who do not share his assumptions and methods.
It is often held that faculty are engaged in the "disinterested search for truth." This is of course not always the case, but probably more faculty are so engaged than are people who are engaged in the interested search for profit. Whatever the phraseology, faculty must be allowed to hold unpopular or unconvenional views without danger of being fired. It is the rare person who can introduce or maintain views out of step with the common herd if doing so mean's losing one's job.
Institutions benefit as well. Tenured faculty are more apt to remain at an institution, and tenure is thus a means of building a stable and reliable faculty. The faculty member has job security, the university has a loyal member on whom it can rely: the university is spared the need to be constantly hiring new faculty to replace others that have moved on. It may prove difficult for Bennington to attract a long-term faculty, and it may therefore spend a great deal of time in seeking and hiring new, temporary, faculty.
It is sometimes objected that tenured faculty are apt to rest on their oars and not produce as much research or teach as enthusiastically as those without. This may be true in some cases, but such is rare. Often enough allegations of faculty sloth amount to no more than an excuse: some new administrator wants to make curricular changes and is prevented by the presence of older faculty in more traditional disciplines.
My own objection to tenure is not the institution itself but the means of granting it. The standards for granting tenure are elastic and constantly changing, and accomplishments which would have brought tenure years ago are today deemed inadequate. Good teaching is not enough; one or two good articles are not enough; the candidate must now have produced a book (at least). This situation has put nearly intolerable demands on younger faculty to produce, and in turn has resulted in the publication of a good deal of unneeded scholarship. And worse, it has stunted the growth of otherwise enthusiastic teachers by directing their attention away from their field as a whole and into ever smaller areas of specialization.
But I am not here to defend -- or attack -- tenure. It exists, and is the law of the academic land. If it is abolished, the current university system will have to change radically. One immediate result will probably be the unionization of still more faculties. Down the line fewer people will want to enter the academic world. We in universities made a compact early on that we would sacrifice material gain for job security and the freedom to pursue learning as we saw best. Most of my college cohort make a great deal more money than I do, while I have a great deal more free time to purusue my interests than do they. I regard this as a fair trade.
I also agreed, in exchange for a possible future faculty position, to postpone my entry into the academic marketplace for a number of years: because of military service and graduate school, I began teaching at the age of 28. Most of my contemporaries began their business careers between 21 and 25. Not only do I make less, I have fewer years in which to earn the less I make. I venture to predict that fewer college graduates will opt for a teaching career if tenure is abolished, and will instead enter the workforce shortly after leaving school or college. Or they will pursue activities that allow them to enter and leave academia at will: less trendy and less popular subjects may vanish from the curriculum.
Universities will have to start paying real salaries in order to keep their faculty. Faculty salaries will begin to improve and to be comparable to those of other professionals. As the supply of trained professors diminishes, demand for them will increase, and universities which had thought to save money by retaining the freedom to dismiss professors with or without cause will find that they are paying more to keep their faculty. Professors in turn will always be on the look-out for a better job elsewhere. Tenure turns out to be a bargain, not only for the professors, but for the institutions that employ them.
It would be unseemly of me, a tenured professor of some thirty years standing and about to retire, either to attack or defend tenure. Instead I offer two predictions: 1) tenure as we know it will be abolished within ten years; and 2) tenure, perhaps in a new form, will be reintroduced within twenty years.
Tenure will be abolished primarily because the public is against it. Reasons for this are probably numerous, but also probably include frustration with public school teachers who are believed to be inadequate or out of touch. State universitites will respond to popular pressure as soon as they can, and private universities will follow behind after a decorous lapse of time. There is also the down-sizing model adopted by business in accordance with which many people -- often senior and highly-paid -- are let go: if business can shed employees more or less at will, should not universities be able to do the same?
There are more serious threats of a more theoretical nature, however, and these from within the universitities themselves. One derives from the fact that there are currently two classes of university and college instructor: those that are part-time or temporary, who will never attain tenure; and those who are either now tenured or will be so in future. A two-tier system is unten(ur)able, and will result either in extending tenure to those not now eligible or abolishing the system altogether. I predict the latter. It is therefore all the more imperative that faculties -- if they wish to preserve tenure -- resist administrative attempts to hire part-time people and lecturers without tenure. Such hiring is an indirect but powerful attack on tenure itself, since these people have -- or should have -- the same rights and expectations of freedom of speech, etc., as those extended to the tenured.
Another threat to tenure stems from the fact that the young will not attain it unless they conform to standards which, though elastic over time, nonetheless force them to conform to certain ways of behavior. Those "on the tenure track" often enough, while being socialized into the academy, are forced to publish prematurely; to abandon lines of research that might prove interesting, but also might not pan out; to devote more time to research and less to teaching than they might like; to ignore the university as a whole in favor of their small segment in it. They cannot explore, they cannot experiment, and as a result the university becomes ossified into baronies that are jealous of an every-decreasing patch of turf. Academic conformity threatens the academy and with it the system of tenure just as much as does the introduction into it of those who will never attain its privileged freedom.
Legimate reasons for abolishing or revising tenure therefore do exist, though the ones I instance are usually not cited. They are not, however, the real reason that tenure is under attack. Universities find themselves unable to respond to student and societal demands for newer and more fashionable subjects; they are stuck with people teaching older things in older ways and not keeping up with the times. In the old days professors would be tenured at age 35 or so and could be counted on to retire at 65. The curriculum was more or less stable, and there was no need to add faculty in newer areas of inquiry. Universities could go on as usual with teaching the western, European and American world to the same kind of student they had always taught. Imagine their surprise when the real lesson of the second world war was finally revealed (about 1970): the world had grown a good deal larger both geographically and socially. Universities were not prepared for the need of coverage of Asia, Africa, South America; were not prepared for the needs of students of non-traditional white American backgrounds; were not prepared for the increased assertiveness of women. Nor were they prepared for swift advances in technology. Now it turns out that there are many faculty about teaching older subjects and no room to hire younger faculty in response to newer societal demands.
The problem is not with tenure, however, but rather with the way universities have adapted to changing times. University administrators administer, they have not in the past been in the habit of managing. I do not fault them for this, particularly because the above-cited trends could not really be predicted any more than could vagaries of Washington politics. Nor do I absolve faculty from a dogged insistance on maintaining the status quo. The lesson is there to be learned. Universities, whether or not they abolish tenure, must develop new personnel policies that will allow their valued faculty to change and adapt to changed circumstances.
I forebear to provide examples from the real world, and cite Brown’s legendary and fictitious professor of psychoceramics ("cracked pots"), Josiah Carberry. Let us imagine that when Carberry was hired in 1950 psychoceramics was a hot area. Students flocked to his classes. He taught well enough and published modestly in his field, sufficiently to attain tenure at age 33. He is now 70, ceased publishing some time back, and his classes attract at most 10 a term: he watches with a mixture of envy and relief as his would-be students enroll across the hall in computer science and biology. He is minded to retire some day soon, but the life is not too bad, even with constant requests from deans to justify expenditures, to develop syllabuses, to have teaching evaluations, to serve on committtees. He thinks he may stay on for perhaps three more years so as to complete a full 40 at his institution. What is to be done?
In Carberry’s case either nothing or a strong financial incentive to pack it in. Back a few years, though, when enrollments began to drop in his specialty and increase in other fields, his university might well have taken him aside and offered him an oppportunity to shift fields, if only slightly, to retool -- they’ll probably call it -- and develop new skills. An enlightened sabbatical policy would be required for this so that he could prepare new courses and lines of research. If Carberry responded favorably, then he could participate in newer developments. If he did not, then his progress would be halted, and though he might remain, his future would be less than glowing -- unless he could find a place in administration or transfer to another institution.
The problem with faculty is that once they have arrived at tenure or the rank of professor there is no place further for them to go within their own institution and no incentive for them to develop new specialties: their salaries rise, but generally modestly, and if greatly, because they publish widely and are desired at other institutions. It is at this point that analogies with business break down. Universities are not hierarchical in their structure but are collegial: faculty and administration endeavor work together towards a common goal without friction and without intrusive incentives. It is held, and correctly, that knowledge cannot be pumped out in the same way that transistors or gasoline can. Tenure allows for leisurely thought and reflection, and allows also for the leisurely intercourse and discussion of teacher and student.
Let us, then, imagine a different set-up, one without tenure. The university would have to develop a system whereby the successful -- however defined -- would move up a ladder in both pay and responsibility. Those less successful would be relegated to lesser tasks and lower pay. In order to compensate for the loss of job security, faculty pay would have to be increased, and standards of performance would have to be developed. There would be a ladder which everyone would climb, moving perhaps form one field to another in response to student or societal interest. Professors would be constantly looking for better deals at other institutions in a way they are not now, and would not develop any feeling of institutional loyalty. They would probably demand -- and in many cases get -- agreements that if let go they would receive a golden parachute.
It is for these reasons that I feel that tenure will be back after its abolition, probably refined, probably in a more satisfactory form. A newer form of tenure must both protect faculty from threats of reprisal and also allow universities curricular flexibility.
It is difficult to be temperate on the subject of tenure when people like James Carlin, a millionaire insurance executive in Massachusetts, attack tenure and are applauded—again in intemperate language—by a columnist in the Boston Globe (reprinted in The Providence Journal 1/21/98). The columnist, David Nyhan, holds that: “less tenure mean lower tuitions.” Tenure, then, is a financial matter, not intellectual or moral—though he does refer to “aging, lazy, academic goof-offs who sponge off the taxpayer by shirking classroom chores, dishing off the teaching load to hungry graduate assistants.” Some might take this language to be at least a bit intemperate and inflammatory.
Let us examine the economics of the matter and leave the morality and rhetoric till another time. First, the lack of faculty tenure would mean higher tuition. There would initially be the inevitable buy-outs of senior faculty and suits against the colleges for breach of contract. That aside, more faculty will be needed in order to staff the classes: a $20,000 investment will be replaced by a $60,000 one. I fail to see how students—not all—are excellent and enthusiastic teachers who gain their apprenticeship while in graduate school. Without teaching while there, as new professors they will require training and tutelage when they undertake teaching responsibilities at a college or university.
Secondly, if tenure is abolished, faculty will require higher compensation. Without some form of job security they will demand and get higher salaries. They will also be ready to jump ship and go to that institution that offers the highest salary. It is not often recognized that tenure is a compact between universities and their faculties by which faculty accept lower salaries in exchange for guaranteed employment.
Faculties were willing to accept this compact in order to obtain the freedom to speak their mind without threat of dismissal. This meant that they gained protection against arbitrary behavior on the part of university administrators, government officials and the public. Without such protection, faculty will demand and get better salaries and a form of golden parachute should their contracts be terminated.
Thirdly, without tenure, the current check on the size of university administrations will be removed. With more frequent faculty hiring, with more checks on faculty behavior, there will be a “need” for more administrators. I estimate that administrations will increase by at least 10% across the land, and these people will be expensive. They will also be powerful and able to act in arbitrary and unfair manners, and will in turn provide still more law suits against the university. They will also stifle criticism both of themselves and of the state in which they teach and of society at large: students will be taught to conform and accept whatever party line is on offer at the time.
My guess is that the increased cost to an institution of abolishing tenure will be something on the order 15%. Universities (and state governments) would be well advised to look into the costs before abolishing tenure.
Efficiencies will be introduced, it may be held, and this I cannot argue. They may be or may not, but it is likely that such efficiencies will be false ones. It is extremely difficult to assess the value of a college education, but there is general agreement that there is value added by such education. Would there be greater value added if the faculty were to be more mobile, less committed to the institution, with less time to spend in conversation and discussion with students? Possibly, but I doubt it. Abolishing tenure is a popular notion, but it will not get at the root of the problem—if there is a problem. It is to me exceedingly strange that neither Mr. Carlin nor the Globe columnist Mr. Nyhan thought of positive business practices in connection with faculty performance. They are evidently thinking in the downsizing mode of business management, a currently popular device for increasing profits if not efficiency. Could they not think rather of an incentive system? With the proper incentives tenure would be—as it is now—a false issue, and faculty would behave more in accordance with what these men want. In a New York Times article (in Education Life, 1/4/98) a Claude Hendon is quoting as observing: “It is Friday morning. The rest of us are headed for a day’s toil at the shop or the office. But the professor is out there mowing his lawn.” Perhaps it has not occurred to Mr. Hendon that the professor is doing that because he cannot afford to have others cut his grass. Incentives, not penalties, are required.
Faculties salaries are either adequate or they are not—I do not argue this. But professors invest many years of their of their lives in becoming prepared for their profession, and many enter the ranks of professor in debt. It is at least slightly repugnant to me that a millionaire businessman with a working life of some 43 years chooses to criticize professors who have a working life of only 35 years and a vastly lower salary.
There are temperate response questions of academic matters, but they will not come in response to screeds like those instanced here. The academic world is no more free of fault than is the insurance business. Let us endeavor to address real faults creatively and not through the shibboleth of tenure.
Society for A Return to Academic Standards
Last Updated: September 19, 2018
