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Through dishwater darkly
Slate compares academia to a restaurant (oh, the horror of the corporate analogy!) in order to highlight the absurdity of tenure:
Imagine you ran a restaurant. A very prestigious, exclusive restaurant. To attract top talent, you guarantee all cooks and waiters job security for life. Not only that, because you value honesty and candor, you allow them to say anything they want about you and your cuisine, publicly and without fear of retribution. The only catch is that all cooks or waiters would have to start out as dishwashers or busboys, for at least 10 years, when none of these protections would apply.
It sounds absurd in the context of the food-service industry—for both you and your staff. But this system has governed academia for decades. Tenure—the ability to teach and conduct research without fear of being fired—is still the holy grail of higher education, to which all junior professors aspire.
I know, odd analogy. Chefs aren’t dealing in ideas — or are they? Anyone who watches Top Chef might disagree. And the analogy between restaurant employees freely criticizing (and implicitly damaging) their employer and academics doing the same may seem far-fetched — until you consider how the courts have been thinking about that very issue in the wake of Garcetti v. Ceballos.
But the analogy does frame in another aspect of the tenure system — one that has for too long not been a central feature of arguments about whether to keep it: That fewer and fewer people actually ever get tenure, and that the whole rationale for the system — always a tenuous one, from my vantage point — has thus disappeared. “The proportion of full-time college professors with tenure has fallen from 57 percent in 1975 to 31 percent in 2007,” the article notes. “The numbers for 2009, soon to be released by the Department of Education, are expected to dip even lower.” As I have argued here many times, there is no point in arguing about whether we should keep or abolish tenure, since tenure has already been abolished. This is something those few who have tenure need to grapple with, as a matter of personal ethics as well as practical institutional governance. They are doing neither. In most cases, if they engage with issues of academic ethics at all, it’s at a distance. They remind me of Mrs. Jellyby, who was obsessed with the welfare of an obscure African tribe while utterly neglecting her children, her husband, and her home. In his descriptions of her “telescopic philanthropy,” Dickens depicts Mrs. Jellyby as wearing a far-sighted squint — one that looks past the filthy rooms, grubby hungry kids, and domestic chaos swirling around her.
Is it a tragedy that tenure is dying? I don’t think so and neither does Slate. Tenure was an experiment born of a particular era; it has a history and a context, and it made sense, as unions once made sense, as a means of protecting a class of professionals from intrusions that interfered with their ability to do work that was essential to our democracy’s well-being. But tenure, like many social experiments, didn’t work. It has produced damaging distortions within the profession it was designed to protect. It has backfired; there have been unintended consequences. It encourages conformity and intellectual parochialism. It destroys career mobility and earning capacity for those who have it. It prevents institutions from responding swiftly and capably to their teaching and research needs. It is paid for on the backs of grossly underpaid untenured faculty who, in doing faculty work for a fraction of faculty pay, undermine the validity of the concept of the faculty itself. And so on. Increasingly, tenure is revealed to be (to have become) an unsustainable system of privilege whose time has passed. When the AAUP and the AFT and others demand the restoration of tenure, they reveal themselves as impractical, anachronistic dinosaurs. Tenure as we have known it is done. There’s no going back. And that is not a bad thing.
Slate sketches out the alternative:
So what’s the alternative model? Renewable contracts. Some suggest seven years. Others say 10. The goal would be to give professors enough security to make them comfortable but not enough to breed complacency and lock the university into a deal that no longer makes sense.
Don’t abolish tenure altogether, says [Cathy] Trower. Just rework it. Create a tenure track that explicitly rewards teaching. Give interdisciplinary centers the authority to produce tenured professors. Allow for breaks in the tenure track if a professor needs to take time off. Offer the option of part-time tenure, a lower-cost alternative for professors who want to hold other jobs. In other words, make tenure flexible rather than a monolithic, in-or-out club.
Some universities have already made the leap. Evergreen State College in Washington implemented renewable contracts back in 1971. Florida Gulf Coast University scrapped tenure when it was established in 1991. Boston University now offers salary premiums to professors who decide not to take tenure. Market forces will drive other universities to follow suit, whether they want to or not. But it wouldn’t hurt to get a head start.
Basically, we’re talking about mini-tenure. We are talking about creating enough job security to enable intellectuals to comfortably take on the long-term teaching and research projects that yield great value for all of us, but can’t be completed, or even adequately tracked, on a year-to-year basis. We’re also talking about not having so much job security that accountability, incentives, and flexibility go out the window. We don’t want an academic employment model that is hostile to serious, important research. But we do need to get real, stop allowing the debate to be centered on a lost unicorn, and start focussing on pragmatic solutions that, if they are done well, will yield a stronger, better academy.
Here’s where the naysayers come in. Who will decide whose contracts get renewed? How will this not be a rubber-stamp process run by faculty and handled as irresponsibly as post-tenure review is at most schools? Alternatively, how will this not empower administrators to exercise McCarthyite levels of control over faculty, and so damage academic freedom? My answer: Academia is accustomed to resisting calls to reform by arguing that no reform can possibly be well implemented, that mistakes will be made. It’s been a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good — and so of justifying heads in sand. Those sorts of deflections don’t work any more. And the whole point of shared governance is that it’s up to academics themselves to work out the how of it all — and to get it right — in order not to have it done for them.
“It has produced damaging distortions within the profession it was designed to protect.”
There is certainly a huge amount of crap being taught at Universities, but how in heaven’s name can this be blamed on tenure? The people teaching the crap are in the political majority, and they are the last people who would be fired in the absence of tenure. Ward Churchill is a good example. He was teaching total crap for years, and there were even accusations of academic misconduct, but the university had no problem with him at all and even made him chairman of his bizarre department. Only after there was national pressure brought upon the university did they have any interest in firing him. And then, the only reason they had any trouble in firing him was because of (true) accusations that they didn’t really care about his crap scholarship and his academic misconduct (which no one really denies), but only about his unpopular speech.
“It encourages conformity and intellectual parochialism.”
There’s plenty of conformity and intellectual parochialism, but most of this is caused by a lack of freedom of speech. Tenure has failed to ameliorate this sufficiently, but it certainly hasn’t caused it.
Yet fewer and fewer professors are attaining it. The proportion of full-time college professors with tenure has fallen from 57 percent in 1975 to 31 percent in 2007.
Note the slippage from raw numbers (“fewer and fewer professors”) to percentages (“proportion…with tenure”). The second sentence does not at all bear out the first. Pretty sloppy work.
Actual numbers of T/TT faculty may well have gone *up* over the last few decades. See this table from the 2009 NCES Digest of Education Statistics (http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_249.asp?referrer=list), which shows a doubling of FT faculty since 1980. The table doesn’t indicate how many of these full-timers are T/TT vs. non-T/TT, but the figures suggest at least the possibility that the former has increased in absolute terms. They don’t at all suggest that tenure is “dying.”
Percentages have gone down for a variety of reasons–primarily the gradual extension of higher-ed opportunities, in a variety of venues, to less and less privileged/traditional students–having little to do with the future of tenure. My guess is that tenure is still quite strong in the haunts of the academic/financial elite.
Forget restaurants. Think about MDs and physician assistants. What has happened to the percentage of patients whose routine clinic visits are handled by MDs rather than PAs? I’ll bet the percentage has dropped over the last decade or so. Ergo, the once-pampered MD is doomed! They must give up their perks before those perks are taken away by an outraged public! The MD as we know it is done! Wednesday afternoon golf? A lost unicorn!
ES…The problem with the PA-MD analogy is that PAs, unless I’m confused, don’t usually become MDs…they are alternative career tracks rather than different points on the same track.
The suggestion that universities might grant part-time tenure is interesting, but it shows just how strained the restaurant analogy is. Following the reasoning here, we’re supposed to believe that while giving full-time waitstaff lifetime job security is absurd, giving *part*-timers the same benefit… well that’s really *innovative*. Tenure “as we know it” may be done, and that may or may not be a bad thing, but this strikes me as silly. Universities should be accountable to students, parents, alumni, and legislators, they should be reasonable affordable, they should promote sound and responsible research, but they aren’t restaurants (Top Chef notwithstanding).
ES: Are you seriously trying to argue that tenure is not on the decline? Have you read the AAUP and the AFT’s own reports on this? Have you read the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s article on the forthcoming Dept. of Ed figures? http://chronicle.com/article/Tenure-RIP/66114/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Interesting that you defend tenure as something that “is still quite strong in the haunts of the academic/financial elite” and, in your analogy to medicine, talk about giving up “perks before those perks are taken away by an outraged public.” The first comment confirms what I say in my post about tenure not being a norm, but an exploitative and outdated system of privilege. The second confirms what Neil Hamilton has long been arguing about tenure–that when academics define it in terms of “perks,” they render it indefensible, trivial, and obsolete.
FWIW, I come from a family of physicians. Parents, siblings, in-laws. Not one of them has ever enjoyed Wednesday afternoon golf. All of them have enjoyed decades of 100 weeks. Unicorns indeed.
LTEC — You make a leap between my statement and your assumption that it was about teaching. You are arguing with yourself on that one. As for parochialism, I totally disagree with you. See: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/forum/2010/08/the_safe_and_secure_professori.html
Peter: Of course.
Peter, I’m not sure what “tenure as we know it” even means. Tenure as I’ve known it, for example, has always included post-tenure review. (After it was adopted in my state in, I believe, the late 90s, tenure pretty much dropped off the radar screen as an issue.) Where I teach, tenure has certainly never conferred on anyone anything like the Godlike status of the proverbial Lord Herr Doctor Professor, or even of a Professor Kingsfield. (I wish!) I doubt that such a status has ever existed at community colleges–yet they too have tenure. Tenure has presumably always meant different things at different times and institutions.
Erin, in speaking of tenure’s “perks” I was deliberately adopting, beginning with the word “Ergo” and signaled by the goofy exclamation points, the voice of tenure’s sillier critics. Ditto for the references to Wednesday afternoon golf and an outraged public. (The larger public couldn’t care less; this is very much an in-house debate.) I’m perfectly aware that most physicians work hard, and that Wednesday afternoon golf is an unfair canard. The point is that the same is true of certain ideas about tenured professors.
I’m glad to see that you’re walking back your central claim, from “tenure is dying” to “tenure is on the decline.” I deny the former and concede the latter. And I think that the latter might mean several things. My guess is it means a decline in status for faculty at non-elite institutions, not that tenure is disappearing across the board.
And yes, I did read the Chronicle article. And that article’s apocalyptic tone (“vanishing,” “death of tenure”) is simply not supported by the figures it cites, all of which are percentages rather than absolutes, and none of which are contextualized in light of the tremendous increase in the numbers and kinds of students served today compared to 30-40 years ago.
Did *you* by any chance look at the NCES figures?
As for tenure and elitism: my sense is that if tenure really is “dying,” it is largely doing so at institutions serving the non-elite. Quite possibly the end result of the anti-tenure crusade will be a system that preserves a powerful incentive for the best faculty to teach the elites, while removing that incentive for good faculty who might otherwise teach the non-elites. That would be too bad, and I’m guessing it would not be the result you intend, but hey, I’m sure you know the conservative drill about the unintended consequences of well-meaning reforms.
The tenure system pre-dates its American implementation, so the local political issues at the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries are coincidental. It is a system to find those that can successfully do frontier research. It is a very expensive system, and it must be so.
In this day and age, very, very little of what goes on in colleges and universities is frontier research. Rather, there is education for masses of people. This can be accomplished efficiently by essentially the same governance structures as in High School, but without unions.
Tenure does not protect freedom of speech–in the sense of “Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters”–even today. I doubt it ever did. The only protection for freedom of speech is the competing Dean.
The loss of tenure would not have an immediate negative impact, but the longer term effect would be serious. How much more would a professor have to be paid to be willing to forego years of income preparing for positions which they could be eliminated easily? I know colleagues who did not begin to earn a middle-class income until they were in their mid-thirties. Tenure crystalizes the hope of a reasonable life possibility after a decade of peonage and possibly debt in graduate school. Take it away and gifted people will find other paths to follow. Tenure breeds conformity? In comparison to what? Eliminate tenure and you’ll see conformity. And mediocrity. Who would support hiring more more promising colleagues without tenure? Some people may not as it is, but this would make the situation worse. Why is it that people who are most conservative are so quick to attack these institutions that have been successful for centuries?
“Miserable decade of peonage”? Prospect of tenure being the only thing that makes that palatable? Sounds like you are in the wrong job. I LOVED grad school, and was out in five years flat, job in hand. No peonage, no decade, no misery.
As for pay, I think you are wrong on this one. Job security, if you read my post, would actually get *greater* for the vast majority of academics if fixed contracts were implemented to create multi-year periods of mini-tenure. So there would remain an incentive to work for less than one could earn in other non-academic fields, for those who are actually there for the love of the work. If they are there for the love of the prospect of lifetime job security, they are in the wrong field anyhow and should move on.
And yes, tenure breeds conformity. I don’t know you or your background, I don’t know what your basis for comment is. There is quite a bit written on the tenure-creating-conformity subject, and you might want to check it out. Start with the links in my earlier comment. Apart from that, if personal experience is worth anything, I can say from experience–as someone who went to grad school in the humanities, completed an assistant professorship, got tenure, and carried on as an associate professor for seven years before leaving academia–that yes, indeed, it produces intellectual, and I would also say political, conformity. I am not alone, by a long stretch, in perceiving that and in having lived that.
You say “eliminate tenure and you’ll see conformity.” Dude, tenure has already been eliminated for the vast majority of college teachers. And yes, with no job security, they are cowed in their teaching and they have no time for research. I write about that endlessly on this blog. You are thinking anachronistically. Address the situation with the mini-tenure of fixed contracts, as I note above, and you restore academic freedom while balancing it with accountability. You will also create career mobility that allows academics to move among institutions and also allows folks to move back and forth between college teaching/ research and posts outside academia. Movement + new blood = *much* more intellectual vitality = a strike against stultifying conformity.
You ask, “Why is it that people who are most conservative are so quick to attack these institutions that have been successful for centuries?” I would suggest you submit that “successful for for centuries” bit to the test. I would also suggest that you re-think your use of the concept of conservative here. It’s done in an ad hominem way and it’s not grounded in fact or logic. You might want to read Virginia Postrel’s The Future and its Enemies. Her categories of dynamist and stasist are much more apropos.
ES: On post-tenure review’s effectiveness, see: http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2008/SO/Feat/neal.htm
The bottom line: At most schools and in most states, no one is tracking whether PTR is actually effective as an accountability measure. As you note, in some states it has been effective in getting legislators off academics’ backs on the tenure issue. But that’s a very different thing.
In some states [PTR] has been effective in getting legislators off academics’ backs on the tenure issue. But that’s a very different thing.
And, I would add, a very good thing. The last thing I want is to have legislators like Gerald Allen, Karen Johnson, Scott Renfrow, or Chris Buttars on my back. One of the reasons we have quasi-independent boards of trustees is to insulate colleges and universities from the fits of insanity that periodically plague state legislatures.
re “thinking anachronistically”: this whole debate is anachronistic in the sense that it ignores what strikes me as the most radical transformation currently going on in higher ed, namely the economics-driven shift toward online teaching and learning, with its “unbundling” of what hitherto has been a comparatively unified educational experience and its accelerating movement toward depersonalization and commodification. I just read the program for an online-teaching conference I’m attending next week, and one of the panels concerns the “best practices” for creating “canned courses,” the latter phrase used without a trace of irony or regret. (For a rather too-rapturous vision of this higher-ed future, see Anya Kamenetz’s DIY U.) Me, I’m thinking that tenure simply cannot survive under this coming regime. Of course, the canned courses and virtual campuses will only be for the hoi polloi; the elites will continue to be taught on real campuses by tenured professors.
So yes, the decline of tenure is very real, but the death of tenure is not. What we’re seeing is a retrenchment from the post-WWII democratic-socialist vision of high-quality higher education for the masses, a vision of which tenure for people like me was a part. I think our society is now backing off from that vision and (under the cover of a techno-utopian fantasy that holds online education to be just as good as the face-to-face variety) deciding that, after all, a second-class education is good enough for most.
Erin O’Connor,
I think separating the aspects of “career” and life prospects from aspects of “the work” is dishonest. I loved most aspects of my grad school years. But I did not love sleeping in a homeless shelter for 4 days, or living with an abscessed tooth for a month while I awaited a loan from family. I worked as an adjunct for 7 years for an average of 13K per year until I got a position paying 36K just after I turned 39. I am happy now with the career aspects of my life, but I gave up the idea of having a family in part because I did not have more than hope of ever being able to provide security for them until I was over 50.
Our disagreement on pay is an is/ought matter. You are right that a lot of “professors” are paid miserably as adjuncts and the overall situation for them would probably be improved markedly if tenure were eliminated. From that perspective, you are absolutely correct. But I would rather hope that my colleagues would recognize the shamefulness of collaborating with this exploitation of so many of our younger colleagues and refuse to go along. I find it just another aspect of the outrage of professors aiding and abetting adjunctification that tenure may be eliminated. But of course, it won’t be the tenure of the collaborators, but of those still hoping they may get it that will be eliminated.
I serve at a school that has not resorted to a reliance on adjunct faculty, and we do have a tenure system. The outgoing President took to spouting the mantras of a business guru part of whose prescription was making sure your work force, “the people on the bus,” were strongly “with” the program. According to this guy’s formula, it’s a waste to have to persuade and motivate people: ‘if they’re not with you, get ‘em off the bus and find people who are to replace them.’ Given that sort of thinking, thank God for tenure. Between tenure and our union contract that defines the parameters of our work obligations, faculty were not afraid to criticize and wrestle with reform ideas, not just negatively. Get rid of tenure as spelled out in our contract and we’d become “Guru U.” saying what the pres. wants and how for fear of non-renewal. Academic freedom is not just about my freedom to argue that a particular manuscript contains the earliest and most reliable exemplar of some 14th-century author’s work, but also that Division I Football is not the best place to focus the university’s resources. That could easily cease to be true without tenure.
I don’t want to surrender a system that has worked well because it has allowed serious corruption to creep in. I want to fight the corruption.
“I don’t want to surrender a system that has worked well because it has allowed serious corruption to creep in. I want to fight the corruption.”
Great — good for you. What are you planning to do?
As for tenure protecting you when you wish to critique the governance structure of your school — think again. See http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/comm/rep/A/postgarcettireport.htm
As I said, we’ve defended against adjunctification here. I take the view that grad programs have some culpability and have opined against that in various venues. Through an odd set of circumstances, a rather extreme statement of mine to that point appeared in the Washington Post about ten years ago (and about 5 years after I made it). One of my colleagues said I might rue the day …
Wow, heavy sigh…. from the cases discussed at the link, academic freedom is mortally wounded already. Amazing. I’ve been living in the Middle Ages …. (but in a good way). I am despondent now. (not at all facetious.)
Erin — Regarding the issue of whether tenure causes parochialism, you cited
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/forum/2010/08/the_safe_and_secure_professori.html
The argument there is that tenure causes a lack of turnover, so that a faculty has too many old people and not enough fresh blood. A system of mini-tenures would only fix this if sufficiently many people were fired — either for cause, or just for being around for too long. In effect, what you really want is not a new kind of tenure but rather its opposite: term limits.
LTEC: Not at all. My thinking is that having regular review would keep people on their toes and keep them working hard — kind of like the workplace in the private sector. Also that mini-tenure would make it easier to move from one institution to the next, and to move in and out of academia. As I noted in a comment above — mobility and fresh blood are themselves incentives and invigorating. There are a lot of people out there who want to see tenure eliminated because then you can fire people. My outlook on it sees that as a very secondary, perhaps even tertiary, concern. I think people will perform much better without tenure and the current felt sense that there is lots of deadwood that tenure protects would take care of itself. Case in point: in places where post-tenure review actually works (and in most places it’s just a rubber stamp), it doesn’t lead to many firings. But it does lead to overdue retirings. It also can be a strong motivator and inspirer for faculty if it’s attached to rewards.
BrendanM: Agreed, Garcetti v Ceballos is having chilling repercussions for faculty. It’s *vital* for faculty to be able to speak out on matters of governance. But, as with tenure, that’s being killed through the back door while nobody pays attention. The two are connected, of course. Now do you a little bit of where I’m coming from? You might also read Off-Track Profs: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2009/06/review_of_john_c_cross.html.
Here’s what you and your colleagues need to do to protect yourselves. Follow the lead of faculty in Minnesota and Wisconsin:
http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/protectvoice/howto/Minnesota.htm
http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/protectvoice/howto/Wisconsin.htm
“having regular review would keep people on their toes and keep them working hard — kind of like the workplace in the private sector”…it’s interesting that there’s lately been a reaction *against* formal periodic performance reviews in companies…someone even wrote a book on the subject recently.
I don’t agree with this: I think regular formal performance reviews are very valuable when done properly, although evidently there are a lot of people who feel that “done properly” is more the exception than the rule. And the regular (typically annual) review should not substitute for more immediate feedback: better to say, “Hey, I wish you’d warned me that the Gerbilator project was in trouble” when you become aware of it than to passive-aggressively wait 6 months and slam the guy on his review.
[...] anxious not to rock the boat before they attain the holy grail of tenure. As Erin O’Connor puts it on one of my favourite blogs, Critical Mass: Increasingly, tenure is revealed to be (to have [...]