I've been thinking about tenure this morning. I have fifteen minutes until my chiropractor appointment, which isn't enough time to write a careful post. Let the bombs explode.
What would happen if we got rid of academic tenure?
Would there be mass firings of radical thinkers? Honestly, I just don't see it happening. There is no evidence that tenured academics are more radical than untenured faculty. There is no evidence that once a person is protect by tenure, they become more progressive.
Would it get rid of the "deadwood"? I don't think so. Those individuals are also protected by the union and senior administrators, so they wouldn't be fired.
Actually, I think the effect would be much more subtle and have huge benefits for untraditional academics like myself. Without tenure, there wouldn't be the two class system of academic teaching. The untouchables and the Brahmans would merge. It would probably mean the end of 2-2 teaching loads and conference junkets for the tenure faculty. I can't see how they could lower the salaries of teachers any more, so I doubt that would change much. Without the terror of a tenure review committee, there would be less pressure to produce papers. Without the tenure distinction, they would have to increase they pay and the working conditions of the temporary workers — those who are increasingly carrying the academic teaching load.
I'm not really sure why someone without tenure should care about tenure.
Apt. 11d 
Without the tenure distinction, they would have to increase they pay and the working conditions of the temporary workers…
That’s probably true for two reasons. First, without the tenured/untenured distinction, the salaries would tend to converge within a field. Second, without the potential of a tenure track job, the temporary workers would have less incentive to work for low wages.
But, there would still probably be some downside as there must be some deans who are evil and have had to hold their tendencies in check because they don’t have that much power over hiring.
LikeLike
I tend to agree.
I also think that the permanent jobs would be easier to come by… because people would leave them, either for other jobs or other fields — because they could come back — but, with tenure track jobs so difficult to come by, nobody wants to leave them.
Also, tenure has advantages for the university — in that it will keep ‘superstars’ in less than ideal conditions, because of the job market.
I also think that — long term — without tenure there would be fewer grad students, so less very cheap labor for the university.
I agree with you that those without tenure, once they’ve figured out that they’re unlikely to get tenure, probably shouldn’t care for it… the thing is, the reason they still support it is because they want it for themselves and the system is very good at being, in effect, a tenure tease…
LikeLike
I agree with you that those without tenure, once they’ve figured out that they’re unlikely to get tenure, probably shouldn’t care for it… the thing is, the reason they still support it is because they want it for themselves and the system is very good at being, in effect, a tenure tease…
Kind of like the estate tax and people below the top 1% in terms of household wealth.
LikeLike
I think you should think more about the really unpleasant things happening to academics in the UK right now, where there’s no tenure, before thinking that the downside won’t be very serious.
LikeLike
I’ve heard that they’ve hacked whole departments, but tenure in the U.S. has never stopped that either. Is there something else?
LikeLike
Mr. Geeky doesn’t want to get rid of tenure. He feels that he would lose his ability to tell the administration what he really thinks, do work in areas they might disapprove of or that the public might disapprove of, etc. He doesn’t think a contract could have strong enough wording to provide the same protections that tenure offers, plus contracts can be renegotiated. Tenure can’t.
I, on the other hand, feel that tenure causes a lot of problems in the market, most of which have to do with the way people think of academic work, which means that they won’t think outside the box when it comes to positions–you’re either tenured, tenure track or adjunct. There’s no 1/2 time, 3/4 time, or yearly contracts. In K-12 eduction, even where they have tenure, there are more permanent non-tenured positions. Part-time with longevity and benefits is not uncommon.
If schools can get beyond the idea that it’s tenure or nothing and provide some stability for workers who don’t want to be part of the tenure system, I think tenure can stay, but to me, right now, it’s created a mind set that isn’t good for anyone.
LikeLike
Without the terror of a tenure review committee, there would be less pressure to produce papers.
Not necessarily, if publishing papers were a condition of the contract. In fact, the requirement to be incredibly productive could probably last forever under this kind of system.
LikeLike
We ARE getting rid of tenure, in many universities already. We’re just not doing it “officially”. In the last year in my department, FIVE TT people have resigned/retired, and ALL of them have replaced by some new bizarre constellation of adjuncts. And no, it’s not raising wages or leading to new respect for adjuncts at my university.
LikeLike
You’re absolutely right. People who don’t have tenure shouldn’t give a crap about the tenure system. After all, academic freedom and the freedom to take intellectual risks are not at all important to the development of a civil society.
LikeLike
After all, academic freedom and the freedom to take intellectual risks are not at all important to the development of a civil society.
Everybody thinks their little privileged is somehow saving the world from whatever. But, really, in a modern society there are few types of “freedom” that protected a narrower class.
LikeLike
Evidence A as to how tenure reduces intellectual freedom. Chris Lawrence, a long time blogger, quits blogging, because he’s afraid that his ideas will be used against him when he goes up for 3rd year review.
Again, why should I care about tenure?
LikeLike
Chris didn’t *have* tenure when he quit blogging.
LikeLike
And he may not have any ideas left once he gets tenure.
LikeLike
Or at least, not any ideas different from the people who granted him tenure.
LikeLike
He blogged for many years, but stopped because he was going up for tenure.
LikeLike
I agree with ianqui. WIthout tenure, I foresee an increased demand to demonstrate “productivity” by publishing 1,2,3 articles a year. Without tenure, I also foresee even less time spent focusing on students and curriculum because of the upward spiral of publication requirements. Without tenure, I foresee faculty from professional schools having too much sway over the output (research and curricular) of their liberal arts colleagues, coercing them to generate only research for business-model “real-world” or “for profit” application. Without tenure, it’s harder to fight the corporatization of the university. I don’t interpret the academic freedom argument in terms of radical hypotheses but rather freedom to challenge a hierarchical administration without fear of reprisal as well as freedom to select one’s objects of study.
And no, I don’t have tenure.
LikeLike
The post assumes contracts or powerful unions to protect faculty. But this does not consider places, like much of the south, where unionizing by state employees is forbidden and employment contracts are tenuous if not entirely meaningless. Without tenure many public universities in more conservative states would be free to summarily fire radicals, free thinkers, and people who are just perceived as troublemakers.
I do not support the elimination of tenure, but rather the implementation of similar protections for those who are hired exclusively to teach, as opposed to teach and do research only, which is the current arrangement in most research universities.
LikeLike
I work in a place where there are permanent non-tenured jobs, part-time tenured jobs, and the traditional kind of tenured and untenured positions as well. No unions and no chance of them. Tenure doesn’t only protect the tenured–where I teach, the only people advocating for higher pay for adjuncts, for non-traditional teaching contracts, for curbs on administrators’ power, and for students, are tenured (and tenure-track) faculty. It’s not a perfect system–I’d like to see better protections of academic freedom for the untenured, better pay for teaching, better recognition of non-traditional work, etc. But I, like Christiana, above, think that without tenure we’d actually move further away from valuing teaching and to a more “outcome-based” system of evaluation. There are reasons the university is not like business–I think we should do what we can to advocate for our difference and to continue to protect and promote the things we do best which are not always the things “the world” (or the business world) values. We need tenure–or something very like it–to keep ourselves from being totally corporatized, as the for-profit universities are.
LikeLike
I’m with Christiana and Jana. (And I just got tenure.) I think that publication requirements will continue to rise to maintain a job. It is common that current tenure files contain vastly more publications than tenure files a decade ago. Some graduate students finishing have enough publications to get tenure at research institutions ten years ago.
And while there might be some grumbling about why we need all that research clogging up the works, we must also recognize that it is administrations who are demanding more and more scholarship in order to compete with other institutions. That emphasis shows no sign of changing. I’m not sure how getting rid of tenure will empower faculty already encumbered by increasing administrative demands. (In the CUNY system, for example, it is not uncommon for tenure expectations to include books and peer reviewed articles AS WELL AS a teaching load of 4 classes per semester.)
In fields like mine, Comparative Politics, where sabbaticals and research money are required for research continuation, the more traveled graduate students will continually supplant scholars that need spatial flexibility. (I was constantly in the field in my last three years of grad school. Now, I’m lucky to get to my country of specialty every two years.)
If anything, professor bloggers will be more subject to administrative scrutiny than less.
Faculty members will be more contingent and more expendable. Salaries will go down. I don’t understand how the eradicate tenure argument means less contingency rather than more, especially given the outcry about the terrible experiences of adjuncts or even full-time lecturers in academia.
Ultimately, I think that if one considers many of the anti-tenure arguments — that it promotes fear among faculty, it is a vestige of a previous political era, that it incentivizes certain types of research at the expense of others, and leads to poor classroom experiences of students — one might conclude that eradicating tenure will make these problems even worse rather than better.
LikeLike
I’m sorry, but this is a crazy day and I only have time for a short comment.
Yeah, getting rid of tenure might lead to constant demands on faculty to constantly produce. I said that in my previous post on tenure. However, I’m not sure that’s a good reason to keep tenure in place. It’s not exactly tenure=intellectual freedom. Also, tenure itself could be intensifying the pressure to publish.
Meanwhile, tenure causes all sorts of other problems, including the two caste system and the over production of PhDs. Libby, I’ve honestly never heard of a situation where tenured faculty refused to teach, until the administrators paid the non-tenure track faculty better. Any protests of treatment of adjuncts seem half-hearted at best. So, why should I support the system of tenure?
Honestly, I’m thinking this issue through and could go either way on this. Not convinced yet that tenure makes the world a better place.
LikeLike
I don’t think it’s the tenure system that causes the overproduction of PhDs. I understand the logic, but I’ve not seen much evidence that PhD graduate students are motivated by the job market, much less aware of it.
LikeLike
And moreover, about the two-tiered system. Is it the two tiers that bother you or the contingency that affects the second tier? For it might be that eradicating tenure could indeed eradicate the two-tiered system in favor of making EVERYONE contingent.
And I imagine that there will continue to be multiple-tiers in academia. Tenure admittedly helps solidify the ins and outs and keep the contingent faculty exploited — but I don’t think it’s the CAUSE of that. Tenure does limit the ability of universities to make EVERYONE contingent.
If tenure is going to be dismantled — not something I would value, but I have respected colleagues who believe that it should — then we need to reflect upon why the numbers of contingent faculty are increasing while TT positions are declining. Why profs are watering down course content to assuage student complaints.
Colleges and universities are cutting costs. Consumerism is high. Dismantling tenure without figuring out how to address these unmistakable trends will only increase contingency, not decrease it. I understand the plight of adjuncts, but I’m not sure getting rid of tenure will help them or get rid of the scholarly caste system.
LikeLike
Tenure admittedly helps solidify the ins and outs and keep the contingent faculty exploited — but I don’t think it’s the CAUSE of that.
Generally speaking, tenured faculty in a department do all of the hiring and know what is in the pie as far as resources. While you can’t prove “tenure” caused the exploitation, you can prove “the tenured” did.
The argument that cost controls are imposed externally on departments and universities is certainly true, but sort of beside the point because the argument is still, “There’s a big problem, somebody else must pay to fix it.”
The argument for tenure from the tenured and those who expect to be tenured is simply a standard defense of status. Nothing wrong with that, but the added-on stuff about the fate of the university or free inquiry or whatever do grate.
LikeLike
Laura’s theme in the post was, I think, what a world without tenure would look like. I think the argument that tenure protects academic freedom and intellectual risk taking is mostly bogus. The very fact that there are huge numbers of contingent faculty doing the same and similar jobs to tenured faculty means that we’ve accepted that a large number of people who work in academia won’t have that protection (and I’m not even including the graduate students & post-docs). Does having a minority of protected faculty somehow protect intellectual freedom generally? I’m fairly unconvinced.
I think what tenure does do is provide a huge perk that has a huge impact on the economics of the job market for academics. It keeps people in places they might leave, as well as allowing them to accept lower salaries for security. It’s a social contract — you pick me when I’m as yet unproven; I prove myself, and then we agree that we’ll stick together in the long run, even if I have a few bad years or a few spectacular years. I won’t demand my true worth when I have a spectacular year, you won’t eliminate me when I don’t. If you get rid of that long term contract, both the university & the employee could demand that you be compensated at exactly the level you deserve in any given year (or couple of years, or whatever).
I think that will effectively create a free-lance professoriate. Is that good or bad? Well it would allow people to enter/leave, negotiate non-standard contracts more freely. But, it would also require everyone to take on the full risk of their scholarship.
But then, I think that’s the end result of all the efficiency reforms we’re seeing in free market economies. I think we’re seeing the effect of right-sizing/right-skilling workforces continuously, and that the effect is that everyone becomes a free-lancer, responsible for their own employment.
LikeLike
I do think that without tenure all faculty would become contingent. I don’t see that as worse than the two-tiered system. My opinion might be different if the system wasn’t so robustly two-tiered (and I imagine it not having been so in the past, though I don’t have the numbers).
LikeLike
Everyone’s been talking about academic university tenure. The rest of the tenured world is elementary and high school teachers and civil servants.
In my wife’s civil service office (Federal) there were a bunch of guys who had been overpromoted, weren’t very productive, had no better options outside, and the new management had put them in a row of offices along the basement wall. The rest of the people in the office called them the ‘over the hill gang’.
Academic tenure – some of the most spectacular examples of folks who have survived for decades even after others wanted them out of the way are Arthur Jensen and Harvey Mansfield. Law faculties had unending battles between the critters and the right. EO Wilson was safe even after the whole left wing declared war against him. Louis Agassiz stayed on at Harvard for a very long time, warring against Darwin/Mendelism, after most of the rest of the world had bought in. We’ve seen some recent attempts in Europe to say that folks who aren’t adequately pro-Palestinian don’t deserve to stay employed among decent academics. Ward Churchill – Churchill was fired over plagiarism, right? The crap quality of his scholarship did not do him in, nor his rejoicing over 9/11, but those things brought him scrutiny. There’s been some attempt to say that folks who don’t buy into anthropogenic climate change are beyond the pale. The Duke Group of 88 who rushed in to trash the lacrosse players were mostly tenured, and have suffered little consequence for their actions. My father was a TA at Berkeley when the loyalty oaths were demanded – a lot of lovely people got driven out of academia then, tenure did not protect. The University Diaries blog has a lot of stories of brave academics calling out their sports-mad administrations.
So it does seem to me that unpopular opinions are often being protected, but there is always a temptation to go after really unpopular folks. YMMD on whether these are the right ones to privilege, but there they are. Is this getting our kids a better chemistry class? Sociology with all points of view presented? Probably not very much.
The over-the-hill gang? Your tax dollars at play, they read the newspaper and did crosswords. My kids’ school, the teachers are remarkably energetic and caring for not having to be, but I read a lot about districts where that is by no means the norm. DMV – those guys are tenured. Damn! I’ll never get THOSE hours back waiting for license plates.
LikeLike
“Laura’s theme in the post was, I think, what a world without tenure would look like.”
I agree with this, and I think that this is why eliminating tenure has to be thought through not only on the basis of the employer-employee relationship, but also how it will affect the organization and interrelationship of departments and schools, how it will affect universities’ offerings and areas of specialization, and, especially, how it will affect students.
There are larger issues than individual scholarship. I am skeptical, at best, about the ability of the liberal arts programs to withstand competition from the professional schools and programs without protection from a tenured faculty.
I can’t imagine, for example, that a freelance faculty member could successfully challenge a cap of 25 students in a language class — a class size that is pedagogically irresponsible given the principles of second-language skills acquisition.
Any acceptance of the elimination of tenure must be predicated on the creation of faculty unions.
LikeLike
Yes, let’s keep on the topic of “a World Without Tenure”.
I do think that there would be less suckers going to grad school. While grad students are unaware of job realities, they do know about this tenure thing. Take away the Holy Grail and I bet grad school admissions would drop.
Interesting point about liberal arts departments withering without tenured muscle to hold the line, Christiana. Maybe. I think that’s going to happen anyway, but just more slowly.
Like bj and MH, I don’t believe that tenure protects intellectual inquiry or anything.
A couple of days ago, I was cruising through the job adverts at local colleges. Sort of like Nicholas Cage in Raising Arizona who started driving by convenient stores that weren’t even on the way back from work. Steve told me to stop it, because there aren’t any permanent T-T positions. I’m going to get stuck teaching 50 kids for 2 grand a semester and get condescension from a 30 year old who has fewer publications and less teaching experience and gets paid six times my rate to do exactly the same work.
LikeLike
Now, it’s not true that there are no tenure track positions. There just are an incredibly small number. And like for actresses the number gets really small when you’re not the ingenue any more.
I think the the significant unviability of re-entry after a hiccup is one of the adverse consequences of tenure.
I still think politics is the answer for you, perhaps as an advisor, rather than the one trying to get elected.
LikeLike
I second Julie G’s and Christiana’s points. The elimination of tenure, at least for the liberal arts, won’t raise salaries, won’t stop the corporatization of the university, and it won’t reduce the need for contingent faculty.
I teach for a third-tier SLAC, so intellectual freedom for scholarship isn’t a major issue, but boy, do we need tenured people to speak up about curricular issues. When the VPAA and the registrar suggested that intro composition classes be capped at 24, only a tenured person was willing to challenge it. The person who actually felt most strongly about the policy was a full-time contract person (on a 6 year renewable contract), but she really holds her fire and her opinions close to the vest _because_ she is contract. She didn’t feel she had the freedom to advocate fully for the best academic standards. It’s just too easy to replace her. Ultimately, the policy was not implemented because a forceful case was made by the chair, but who is going to hold the administration’s feet to the fire on things like this if not tenured people?
I know that my tenure has allowed me to be a more forceful and passionate advocate for academic rigor and policies that help students rather than help the college’s bottom line.
Also, many of the current major problems with higher education–funding issues, corporatization, grade inflation, a lack of commitment to the academic side, an ever growing administrative bureaucracy, disengaged and disadvantaged students who need larger and larger amounts of remediation–are not CAUSED by tenure. And I think that erasing tenure may seriously reduce the number of people who can call attention to these issues.
Everyone should check out this story about Eva von Dassow and her speech to the regents at Minnesota about many of these problems.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/07/27/vondassow#Comments
She is using her tenure to advocate passionately for the liberal arts.
LikeLike
Here in the UK we don’t have tenure but we do have pretty good job security – to get sacked you’d have to abuse students / fail to teach your classes / or have the whole dept eliminated. There are also some ‘adjunct’ positions for 1 year but at least at my university (Russell Gp), those are used to cover maternity leave / short term gaps in teaching. The university can’t keep using adjuncts because after 3 years they convert to a permanent job.
I think if tenure in the US went to a similar system, not much would change. If there was a more radical change (e.g. everyone’s job was only a 5 year contract), then there would be BIG changes and maybe a university teaching/research job would be much less appealing to the next generation.
LikeLike
I’m always uncomfortable when we talk of eliminating something that’s good for some people because it’s not good for others. How about we focus on making it good for everyone? One of the ways we do this at my university is by having adjuncts as part of our union – same one as tenure-track and tenured faculty. It can cause some conflicts, but generally speaking, I think it has improved conditions for adjuncts. Starting salaries for a class are around 4K. That salary increases as you get more experience. If you teach 2 classes per semester for a set number of years (I think three), you are eligible for health care (and the university pays the same amount for adjuncts’ health care as it does for tenure track) – at that point, you become a half-time or full-time lecturer. These adjuncts can also get paid for doing service work and are eligible for internal grants and travel money. Is it the same as being on the tenure track? No, but I think the union has gone a long way to making sure that the conditions for adjuncts are not total crap and that they are much more integrated into the life of the university if they choose to stick around for a while.
LikeLike
The conversation is over, so I can say this without worrying about the fact that I won’t be back online to contribute further (I’ve been taking days off a lot lately): I think what would happen if we eliminated tenure would vary radically by department and by type of institution. My almost-entirely-anecdotal sense is that the healthy departments (the ones with lots of overseas students spending big bucks to get US master’s degrees, for example) and the healthy schools (private universities who controlled their worst impulses during the 90s/00s — not very many of those) could take or leave tenure, because they’re not relying on adjuncts that much anyway and can already afford to pay their people pretty well. Humanities departments as well as many second- and most third-tier universities (especially the ones who’ve been eeking by on their night programs but are being outpriced by Pheonix et al.) are in such a crisis that they’ve already started eliminating tenure by default. Formally doing away with it, which might involve a type of collusion that would run afoul of the Justice Department anyway, is sort of beside the point for those folks.
I don’t think eliminating tenure would close the gaps between transient workers and those with solid employment within universities (especially not given the corresponding gaps between different types of departments), nor the gaps between healthy institutions and the ones in crisis. I almost wish I did believe it, because it’s nice to think there’d be some solution to the unbelievably dysfunctional equilibrium that higher ed has managed to achieve.
LikeLike