Academic Tenure: Time’s Up?

~ Laura

Does academic tenure really protect radical thought? Does it create barriers for employment? There are two good blog posts about the downsides of giving professors a job for life.

Megan McArdle writes,

Most scholars in their sixties are not producing path-breaking new
research, but they are precisely the people that tenure protects. 
Scholars in their twenties and thirties, on the other hand, have no
academic freedom at all.  Indeed, because tenure raises the stakes so
high, the vetting of future employees is much more careful–and the
candidates, who know this, are almost certainly more careful than they
would be if they were on more ordinary employment contracts.  As a
result, the process of getting a degree, getting a job, and getting
tenure has stretched out to cover one's whole youth. So tenure makes
young scholars–the kind most likely to attack a dominant
paradigm–probably more careful than they would be under more normal
employment process.

Dean Dad questions the usefulness of tenure from an administrator's point of view. He talks about the enormous costs of supporting tenured faculty.

The cost of tenure goes far beyond the salary of the tenured. It
includes the opportunity cost of more productive uses that had to be
skipped to pay for a decision made decades earlier in a different
context. (We actually have people for whom staff jobs were created when
their tenured speciality went away. That’s a direct cost of tenure.)
It also includes the cost of the various bribes that have to be paid to
the tenured to get them to step up to acknowledge institutional needs:
course releases (a direct cause of adjunct hiring), preferential
scheduling (whether it makes sense for students or not), and even cash
stipends (which have to be paid for somehow). 

It's liberating to be done with academia (well, I'm 90 percent sure that I'm done). I'm going to APSA this year, but it's mostly as a tourist. The word on the street is that academia's employment woes should continue for the next few years. I'm moving on. So, I can freely say that these guys speak the truth.

The only positive aspect of the tenure system is the relief on my friends' faces once they get tenure. Grad school and the tenure process is grueling and unstable. People put off buying homes and starting families. Tenure marks an end of torture and the beginning of a normal life that other people enjoy in their 20's. I worry that without tenure, the hazing from peers would continue forever.

Published by Laura

54 thoughts on “Academic Tenure: Time’s Up?”

  1. I think dean dad is failing to include some of the financial benefits of tenure. One is that tenure is a non-pecuniary benefit, that many people are willing to give up salary for. The same talent pool would be more expensive without tenure. Another is that without tenure, either there would be de facto tenure, or college administators would have to establish fair and effective procedures for evaluating employees. I think that would be a good thing, but it would be costly.
    The fundamental cost of tenure is that it enables holders to act like monopolists. And that’s what they do. Some extraordinary goods come from this, but it makes managing in times of change almost impossible, and I feel for administrators who are trying to turn these institutions in new directions. And I feel for students who have no real recourse against bad behaviour.
    Megan has been reading Louis Menand, no?

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  2. The rise of soft money is going to push out tenure from the parts of the university where soft money rules (to the extent it already hasn’t). The advantages that accrue to being a big name probably provide nearly as much job security as tenure (and probably higher income), but they extend the insecurity well past the age at which a typical Poli Sci prof would have tenure (or not).

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  4. As far as McCardle’s point about innovation:

    So tenure makes young scholars–the kind most likely to attack a dominant paradigm–probably more careful than they would be under more normal employment process.

    That is probably overdetermined because the huge costs for many types of research.

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  5. I can’t imagine what would happen to research expectations if tenure were dismantled.
    If I were in a five year contract that demanded a book and several articles every five year cycle, lest some just out of grad school with a newly written diss bump me out of my job, I’d experience a severe life crisis.

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  7. Yes, there are problems with tenure…but two things:
    1) What does Dean Dad mean when he says “We actually have people for whom staff jobs were created when their tenured specialty went away.” Are they axing classicists and making them secretaries? Sounds rather odd to me.
    2) It would be naive to ignore the likelihood of a much more successful right-wing assault on the academy in the absence of tenure. Glenn Beck’s “university” might just be the model of the future….

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  9. As the daughter of a tenured prof I think one other downside to tenure is how much long-term stress, churn, and unprofessional behaviour it imposes on all the departmental work.
    My father taught with the same 8 or so people for 35 years. In that time the number of grudges and arguments and fusses over sabbaticals and what-have-you became an amazing drag on committee and curriculum work. It was kind of sad to see how much energy went into that – like everyone was trapped in this terrible bad group marriage that outlasted most of the actual marriages. It did impact on what the collective group was able to offer students. (Perhaps not so much scholarship, but maybe.)
    The potential to be fired sometimes does make people put on their grown-up pants in meetings and behave professionally and get things done on reasonable timelines. I’m not saying that never happened. But I did observe it happen (filtered through my dad’s accounts, of course.)
    That said, I wish I could have tenure in my job. 🙂

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  11. “What does Dean Dad mean when he says “We actually have people for whom staff jobs were created when their tenured specialty went away.” Are they axing classicists and making them secretaries? Sounds rather odd to me.”
    You guys aren’t listening to me. 🙂 There are many positions involving academic advising/academic support that have been created over the last 20 years. There are also professional development positions (Center for Teaching and Learning, Center for Academic Excellence, yadda yadda).

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  13. Ben, Oops.
    Wendy, those are actually the types of positions that I was thinking of. I didn’t say anything because I don’t really know much about the part of the university that has any connection with students.

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  14. “…like everyone was trapped in this terrible bad group marriage that outlasted most of the actual marriages.”
    That’s exactly the analogy I use–the multi-decade group marriage. I suppose that’s partly what all the talk of “collegiality” is code for.
    On reflection, I think tenure itself (just bare job security) is not the problem. I’d argue that the salary structure connected to the tenure system, where salaries for senior faculty escalate up and up, rather than being based mostly on current performance, is much more problematic. (Of course, reputation is also backward looking, and the university does benefit from the past work of faculty who no longer do much but republish new versions of their previous work.) My husband is a very productive guy, and has been since graduate school when he was pulling down a $15,000 fellowship from the Canadian government. Over the years, his salary has gone up quite a bit, but he’s not increased his publications or the quality of his work by anything like the same multiple. Likewise, my husband has a new untenured colleague who is very bright and even more productive, and makes what I gather to be about 2/3 what my husband does, just because he’s junior. There’s some psychological benefit in knowing that one’s salary will grow with time, but maybe it would make more sense to pay a base salary (maybe half of current salary level), and then add bonuses for different things. There’d certainly be potential for contentiousness, but it would make life much less comfortable for $100,000 a year deadwood, which is what we’re going for.

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  16. but it would make life much less comfortable for $100,000 a year deadwood, which is what we’re going for.
    But the goal is to be $100,000 a year deadwood. That’s what is called “living the dream.”

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  17. “But the goal is to be $100,000 a year deadwood. That’s what is called “living the dream.””
    Based on a few examples that have come my way, not really. The ones I have known complain a lot about not being appreciated, not being paid enough, not being read, and they wonder why graduate students don’t want to work with them.

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  18. Russell, that would be great. I’m going w/Steve and the boys, so I might have to split after a short while. The Air and Space Museum beckons. If we can’t set up anything formally, I’ll give you my cell phone number and you can ring me when you have a break in your schedule.
    The tenure system has been very bad for me. I needed PT work, when the kids were young, not a full time tenure track job. But few opportunities like that exist. I think I have enough publications to get tenure at many schools, but I needed, and probably still need, a certain flexibility and freedom from that stress of the tenure review committee. And, honestly, I could have used the positions held by a few 70+ professors out there, who are too deaf to hear students’ questions.
    Actually, I think this tenure thing is going to fade away on its own, except at a few elite institutions. Online education and more adjunctification is in the immediate future.

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  19. Gosh, we don’t have much $100,000 deadwood.
    Matt is right that the discussion of tenure is only meaningful in the light of feasible alternatives. My guess is that most of these would replicate many of the features of tenure that people don’t like, absent some major restructuring of the markets in which these institutions operate, which I do not think is going to happen (eg, GSLs are never going to go away, politically unfeasible, and parents with money are going to continue to purchase prestige over quality).

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  20. No one is asking me questions, probably because you don’t want to hear the answers, but the question you should be asking is whether lack of tenure prevents $100K deadwood. The answer is NO, it does not prevent it.
    But keep on dreaming, folks, if it makes you happy.

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  21. I’m still asking how I could get to be $100k deadwood. I think I should have stayed in state government.

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  23. Wendy — I think you’re pointing out the effect of the theoretical replacement harry b mentions: that removing tenure means that you have to spend time and money on evaluating and removing people.
    Are you saying that doesn’t really happen, even without tenure? If so, why not?
    This is the issue I’ve seen in our teacher evaluation battles as well, that evaluating teachers to remove the “deadwood” will have significant cost. Deadwood teachers may do real damage, but if there are ways to limit their damage without spending the extensive resources required to remove them, I often think that keeping a certain amount of deadwood around is the less intrusive/expensive option.
    I also agree that tenure is a big perk of academia, a significant attraction that makes up for potentially lower salaries in some fields. It’s absence, once generally recognized, will change the pool of applicants aiming for academics.

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  25. I’m in a large department (38 faculty members) and we do have one deadwood guy who long since stopped doing research. However, he doesn’t make 100K. He actually makes less than most of our assistant professors. Our raises are determined by “merit” (which mostly means research productivity), and we have to make a report of what we’ve done each year. So this one unproductive guy does have his job security, but he has a very low salary. (He is an outstanding teacher and devotes a lot of energy to that, and I know that determining merit only on research productivity is flawed, but that is the reality at our R1 unfortunately).
    I am going up for tenure in a year. There are research projects I would like to do but haven’t done yet because I am pre-tenure. One of them is risky and politically volatile, and the other one is a longitudinal study. I agree that there are a lot of problems with the tenure system, especially as it has ruled my life for the past 6 years. But I’m not sure what a good alternative would be that would protect a person’s ability to, say, engage in a very long-term longitudinal study that might not yield meaningful results for 5 years. Or to try a risky idea that could have enormous benefits should it pan out, but has a lower chance of actually working.
    I mean, tenured people in their 40s can do creative and innovative research, right? Personally, I hope so!

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  26. “I think you’re pointing out the effect of the theoretical replacement harry b mentions: that removing tenure means that you have to spend time and money on evaluating and removing people. ”
    I am saying that in institutions without tenure, there is still deadwood. There is no magic competition with survival of the best. Tenure gets replaced with something just as inert.
    I’m actually getting a little uncomfortable posting more. That’s the downside about not having tenure, of course. If I do make the university look bad, I could be fired, even if all I’m doing is having a discussion about tenure.
    In a related matter, here’s an example of how tenure is important, especially in this age of Breitbart/Beck/O’Reilly non-journalism. I’ve been toying around with a paper idea I call “The Pedagogy of Glenn Beck.” But I don’t write it. Why? I don’t want to invite the wrath of Beck. I don’t want to end up a poster child on his show because I said something he didn’t like. Hell, I’ve written on the Tragic Mulatta, and I’m sure that could be ginned up to prove my racism because I used the word “Mulatta,” which is offensive, and lots of wingnuts would love to latch on any excuse to denounce a Leftist Liberal Intellectual even if they don’t have a fucking clue what they’re talking about. My university could decide, like Vilsack did with Sherrod, that the mere appearance of racism could be detrimental to the image of the university and that I should be fired.
    Not having tenure is the reality I live in, and I have made my peace with it. But I am *quite* aware of how the lack of tenure affects what subjects I write/present on. I’d take tenure in a second, not because it would offer me job security but because it would let me do my job better.

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  28. I’ve been toying around with a paper idea I call “The Pedagogy of Glenn Beck.” But I don’t write it. Why? I don’t want to invite the wrath of Beck.
    If that happened, at least your paper would get read.

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  30. Wendy’s going back to the theoretical justification for tenure (rather than the job security one that I think actually does play the biggest role in people’s seeking of it). But, are academics really more vulnerable than other people? for example, journalists and writers. Must the work of academia be protected by tenure in the form of life-time job security?
    I think tenure started it’s path to dying when the mandatory retirement age was declared unconstitutional in the U.S. It meant that deadwood no longer had an expiration date.
    A replacement, if we’re really talking about this, would be long term contracts of different durations. They don’t all have to be 5 year contracts. People engaged in long term research, or risky research that we still think is valuable could have 10, 20, 30 year contracts.

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  31. “Hell, I’ve written on the Tragic Mulatta, and I’m sure that could be ginned up to prove my racism because I used the word “Mulatta,” which is offensive, and lots of wingnuts would love to latch on any excuse to denounce a Leftist Liberal Intellectual even if they don’t have a fucking clue what they’re talking about.”
    You could equally well become the victim of a friendly fire incident.
    There’s a Flannery O’Connor title that could get you fired pretty fast. In fact, you could nearly put together a whole syllabus of risky titles.

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  32. I think part of the problem, bj, is tied up into “risky research that we still think is valuable.”
    Part of the scholarly mission is to be insulated from the market forces that drive and determine writing by, for example, journalists and writers. Things that 20 years ago seemed like crackpot/radical notions (like, for example, studying the internal dynamics of the Soviet “monolith”) are much more valuable today than what was then considered cutting edge.
    Tenure might not be the most efficient way of protecting a scholarly pursuit for knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but one of its purposes is to permit that.

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  33. Tenure does help the guy who wants to do research that might be unpopular with the general public, but it does not help the guy who wants to do research that might be unpopular among other academics. In fact, the tenure system works against rebels.

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  34. In fact, the tenure system works against rebels.
    Yes, though most of the people I’ve known who were seeking tenure are convinced that whatever minor tweak they are proposing is a fundamental overhaul of a sub-field. They don’t get out much.

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  35. Just to be perfectly clear. I wasn’t saying that the tenure system discourages rebellious political beliefs. I just meant that the tenure system discourages bold, new research or big ideas.

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  36. Hmm. I’m clinging to my self-image of being a smart, interesting person rather than Thumper. Even though I just went through tenure.

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  37. I have tenure, and I am expected to produce x articles every three years. I need to publish if I want a promotion, but the full professors have the same requirement. It would take longer to get rid of me than someone who was denied tenure and gone, but it is not impossible to get rid of deadwood.
    I don’t know the numbers on how many institutions with tenure do / do not have post-tenure review.

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  38. “It takes smart, interesting people and turns them into scared, little bunnies.”
    That’s funny–“scared, little bunnies” is exactly the term that I use in this context.

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  40. Journalists as a group tend to deal with the issue by making getting fired part of the profession, or at least, part of the apocryphal stories in the profession.
    My favourite was a journalist who resigned with a furious email saying she would rather “write cr@p for X publication” — which she was doing — and which of course was promptly forwarded to the editor of X publication. She’s still working and doing quite well.
    But journalists are rarely dreaming up ideas and publishing them in a vacuum anyway – mostly they are vetted by editors, who in turn are overseen by publishers and so on.
    Which kind of leads me to the thought that since publication is the gold standard, academic editors or peer review or whatever must be functioning in the same kind of role at least some of the time. So where is the academic freedom actually taking place? In the research prior to publication?

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  41. So where is the academic freedom actually taking place?
    Peer review and academic editors don’t really stand in the way of much. They will force you to say things certain ways, but that is about it. Persistence and a willingness to shop around (assuming you don’t worry about hitting a high impact journal) will get you around peer review.

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  42. “Persistence and a willingness to shop around (assuming you don’t worry about hitting a high impact journal) will get you around peer review.”
    There’s the spirit!
    Now I’m wondering what Laura’s hasty comment was.

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  43. Now I’m wondering what Laura’s hasty comment was.
    She suggested firing a Dept. of Ag bureaucrat after viewing an edited videotape from an untrustworthy source.

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  45. What percentage of university faculty are actually tenured/tenure-track these days, anyway? I seem to recall that it’s on the order of 35-40% It’s fun to talk about because it concerns the highest-profile people, but for both students and faculty it’s a decreasing part of the reality.

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  48. “Yeah. I agree, Doug. Tenure, for good or for bad, is only a concern to a shrinking percentage of academic personnel.”
    Yes, and, I think, on the route to continued shrinkage (though people are still being hired/tenured on the tenure track, so it’s not on a path to complete extinction yet).
    The problem with this method of decreasing relevancy is the 2-tiered system it’s creating at universities. In the case of the professor/adjunct, one could argue that the two tier system is actually separating two jobs that used to be shared: the adjunct produces teaching & the professor produces scholarship. In the case of biomed science faculty, though, I think there are many instances where there are people whoa re doing the same job. Of course, there too, there’s a pretense that the soft money faculty is only engaging in research & the professor is both teaching and doing research. In practice though, at many of the institutions, the soft money faculty member is teaching (at the graduate level, as part of their research) and the professor is not teaching (very much).
    I think that creation of second class citizens (since they are second class, rather than, for example, people who are being paid to give up the security of tenure) is undermining the institutions (but, maybe I’m wrong, and it’s just all that more efficient).

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  49. I would have loved a part-time academic job with decent wages and part-time-level benefits, but no university offers that type of job to a historian, not that I encountered. But they’re not hiring tenured faculty to teach their courses, either — they’re hiring adjuncts, in droves, at $1800 a course.
    In the absence of any proof that abolishing tenure would get rid of adjunct labor — and I have yet to read an argument for abolishing tenure that reassures me even a little that labor conditions for the non-tenured masses would improve — I will persist in thinking that tenure is not the biggest, or even one of the top five biggest, problems with the academic labor market right now.
    As for the non-productive scholar in his or her sixties earning so much money, I have heard from many people that the problem in history and English, at least, is not crazy post-tenure wage increases but rather wage compression. Once a historian gets tenure, one is offered mostly COL raises, unless one is a high flier with outside offers. Is someone suggesting that getting rid of tenure would alleviate this problem to any extent? From whence will historians derive their bargaining power over raises when they go up for their five-year reviews?
    Meanwhile, professors’ salaries have been falling since the 1960s, relative to the other professions with which they used to be compared (doctors and lawyers in particular). Is someone making an argument that abolishing tenure would reverse this trend?
    And finally, do we know how likely people in most professions are to be fired for cause after, say, seven or ten years’ experience at a company? I know many folks who’ve been fired because of downsizing, but few who’ve been fired for cause. My dad used to complain about the lazy older guys in various computer departments around the Twin Cities, who held their jobs through multiple layoffs thanks to seniority. Does tenure distort the academic job market so much more than in other fields? By how much?

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  50. And yeah, the lack of proper PT work and the continued abuse of adjuncts are much bigger problems than tenure.
    Megan makes a connection between adjuncts and tenure. She says that tenure is such a HUGE job perk that it helps to attract too many people to grad school, who ultimately become adjunct slaves. Not sure what I think about that. Maybe.
    You know some schools have union rules that PT faculty can only be employed for three years and after that, their employment must be terminated, because if they stay too long they might have the right to sue for tenure.

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  51. Once a historian gets tenure, one is offered mostly COL raises, unless one is a high flier with outside offers.
    Yes, that does happen in other fields. I was once a fly on the wall (or rather a research assistant who happened to be in the room) during a conversation in which a seniorish guy kept repeating, “If you aren’t actually willing to go, you’ll never get a raise.”

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  52. “”If you aren’t actually willing to go, you’ll never get a raise.””
    Or at least look like you’re willing to go. There’s also a bump for full professor, I believe. And then aside from actual salary, there are other opportunities: summer institutes for this and that. (I know of a college with a teaching institute that pays 20% of yearly salary for young faculty to go and learn about teaching for a month during the summer.) As my husband and I quote to each other, “A married man will do anything for money.”
    To generalize grossly, graduate students talk about ideas. Faculty talk about salaries and college politics.

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  53. I completely second jodys comment. Tenure did not create the rise of adjunctification, inadequate funding and a lack of commitment by administrators to the Academic side of institutions did. And getting rid of tenure won’t solve the problem. Colleges and universities could offer all kinds of attractive part time or full time non tenured contract positions. Instead they offer crappy adjunct jobs because they can. The decline of tenure is the canary in the coalmine. It signals a problem in the system. But killing the canary (tenure) won’t make the coalmine safe or the mining company create nice safe jobs for it’s employees. It just means everyone will be equally screwed.

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