Tenure: Threat or Menace?

My feeling on tenure is that there's no way I'd go through this shit if there weren't that carrot hanging at the end.

The argument for tenure has never been an economic one, though. It's always, in the forms I've heard it, been about a protection of academic freedom for professors against easily spooked and stampeded university officials and state-level politicians.

Okay, I can accept that, even as a free market sort of guy. The market works on a lot of levels-- one level is by throwng gobs of money at corporate researchers to come up with timely solutions to problems that other people prioritize; another is to throw small amounts of money at people in exchange for greater freedom.

That does not mean, however, that the tenure system does not produce its own abuses and problems, nor that the tenure system is graven in stone as a fundamental academic right, nor that it shouldn't be poked and prodded and made to defend itself every once in a while.

(And then there's tenure in non-college markets, which concept just baffles me, and I hope it is a case of the same word being used for vastly dissimilar purposes.)

Are schools merely another type of business, to be run in accordance with the latest corporate management fad, or are they doing someting fundamentally different, that isn't particularly well suited to the corporate model?

It'd help immensely if you could draw a distinction between "corporate" and "market-based." They're not the same thing.

I get a bit tired of this whole 'free market is great for everything' attitude. One of the biggest problems I see at the university level these days is the treatment of students like customers whose satisfaction and happiness is the first and foremost priority. Unfortunately, really learning a difficult subject is hard, and can feel genuinely painful, so happiness and intellectual achievement are often at odds.

Treating tenure as some sort of anti-capitalistic measure misses the point that getting tenure is a difficult process, and ideally the faculty members who are planning to 'just coast' post-tenure will never make it that far. The process is not perfect, of course, but nothing in the business world is either.

One of the most important things about tenure is that it does free a faculty member from the economic and political issues and lets them work on things that are not part of the mainstream. This is how progress is made; if science were purely dictated by what people considered to be the most important economic issues of the time, today we'd probably all be riding around town in the most efficient horse-drawn carriages one could imagine, and living to the ripe old age of 30.

Two things always strike me when this conversation happens.

First, there are plenty of professional service organizations that use similar systems; accountants, lawyers, management consultants, etc. It seems like that, just maybe, there is a reason for this system.

Second, tenure is expensive, but is a way of rewarding people without paying cash. Because Levitt is at Chicago, he is pretty clueless about what life is like at, say, Chicago State or Roosevelt University. These places hire as few permanent people as they can get away with. Most of the teaching is done by adjuncts, who run on one semster contracts. Voila! The system that the usual libertarian wants is happening already and they don't even see it, being as focused as they are on the 20-30 big name universities.

(Oh, and Chicago State has a great end-run for the process of salary increases. If you want one, you need an offer from somewhere else. Let the market decide what you are worth! What I miss by not having tenure, or any sort of permanent position whatsoever)

Don't those in the sciences already go through a grueling process of showing the "value" of their work even after getting tenure ever few years (i.e. getting grant money)? Obtaining those grants is not easy, it is highly competitive. You have to demonstrate you are productive and have good ideas going forward. The grant money helps pay the faculty members salary. No grant money, no research and a much smaller paycheck. Would adding another layer of competition really make things better in the sciences? I would say not. What tenure provides is cover for faculty to challenge administrators/board of trustees and speak up against those in power. What it does is give some of the labor at universities a greater say in how the place is run. In other words, tenure nurtures an environment for a free market of ideas between faculty, administrators and boards of trustees.

Another place where market pressures are not conducive to making a system run in the way it is supposed to: the mainstream media:

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/02/26/gibson-iraq-media/

Evidently the role of journalists is to tell us things we find entertaining, not to tell us things that are newsworthy...

So, at least in research-oriented departments/universities, the student isn't the customer; while a tenured professor may be required to teach classes, their primary job is still going to be to produce research.

Even at research-oriented universities, mollishka, a significant fraction of income can come from tuition; it depends on the university. Also, professors at those places are only paid about 9 months a year and have to bring in research funds in (or teach) if they are to get Summer salary; at least part of the reason for that, I believe, is that they aren't timetabled for teaching for those three months unless they seek it out.

As for the tenure question, I don't think that it comes down to whether or not a school is a business. Of course it's a business. Whether it is a business that has to offer tenured positions to get the best people and get the best work, is the question.

Dean Dad has an interesting rant about related issues today. I would suggest checking out today's Confessions of a Community College Dean. The comments are particularly interesting.

It'd help immensely if you could draw a distinction between "corporate" and "market-based." They're not the same thing.

Without going into too much deatil, let me say that the use of "corporate" was deliberate, and intended to encompass a whole raft of stupid stuff-- mission statements, vision statements, strategic planning, focus groups, assessment, assessment of assesment, annual performance evaluations, motivational seminars, training seminars, consulting groups, students as customers, etc.-- that has been imported from the world of pointy-haired bosses. None of these are particularly well suited to academia, but we get stuck with them because they're all the rage in the business world.

Second, tenure is expensive, but is a way of rewarding people without paying cash. Because Levitt is at Chicago, he is pretty clueless about what life is like at, say, Chicago State or Roosevelt University.

I forgot to mention it in the post, but my favorite part of the article is where he blithely asserts that getting rid of tenure would simply require giving the faculty a modest raise of $12-15,000 as compensation.

There are roughly 200 faculty on my campus, so an across-the-board raise of $15K would require an extra three million dollars in operating funds. That's not exactly pocket change, even for a relatively elite school with a sizable endowment. Maybe it's trivial in the Chicago economics department, where you need a Bank of Sweden Prize in Honor of Alfred Nobel to get tenure, but a three million dollar hike in the payroll is out of the question for most colleges and universities.

It makes me very sad to see how little people understand the role of a university. We must be doing something wrong since we have a captive audience for four years but we fail to teach them even the most basic concepts of academia and its value to society.

Tenure is absolutely essential in order to protect academic freedom. Anyone who is willing to sacrifice academic freedom might just as well announce that they want to destroy universities. The fact that so many would be willing to do this is very, very scary.

Without going into too much deatil, let me say that the use of "corporate" was deliberate,

I'm sure it was, but you still tend to flip between market-complaints and business model-complaints too lightly and without sufficient explanation or justification.

and intended to encompass a whole raft of stupid stuff-- mission statements, vision statements, strategic planning, focus groups, assessment, assessment of assesment, annual performance evaluations, motivational seminars, training seminars, consulting groups, students as customers, etc.-- that has been imported from the world of pointy-haired bosses. None of these are particularly well suited to academia, but we get stuck with them because they're all the rage in the business world.

Many of those are stupid in the corporate world, too. Those that aren't, particularly strategic planning and annual performance evaluations, aren't stupid in an academic context either. (Unless you honestly believe that the act of teaching is too special to have its performance evaluated, in which case it's all special pleading for teachers.)

I guess that the interesting question would be as to how much it really would cost to match and then improve current research quality if tenure were gone. The only saving I can see is that you'd be able to compulsorily retire professors, if you felt that some of them kept hanging on past the point where they were doing any research of merit.

I think that you're over-reacting, Larry #11; don't be scared. A university really is a business, as you know. One of the reasons that research universities are research universities is because it brings in money (and the overhead that the university takes is pretty significant). Indeed, one of the factors affecting whether you get tenure at a research university is whether or not you have been attracting money (you want to do that for personal reasons too, of course, as without it, no Summer Salary).

Larry, if people have been through university and don't value tenure that highly then perhaps, rather than them not having been properly indoctrinated with the basic concepts of academia and its value to society, they just weren't as impressed with their (tenured) professors as their professors were impressed with themselves. That's an opinion they are entitled to hold; indeed, sometimes it's an eminently defensible one, although hopefully only a minority of the time.

The interaction of most college graduates with their professors was mostly through being taught by them (rather than research collaborations, which are normally restricted to an undergrad research project or two) and it's no secret that there are some horrible teachers at universities, particularly research universities. That's no surprise; good researchers are harder to come by than good teachers, there's no reason why good researchers should be good teachers (particularly if they see teaching as a chore), and good researchers are more valuable to a research university than good teachers are.

For those people who see university as primarily learning from teachers and who aren't themselves going to go on to do research, being taught by a bad teacher who has tenure for doing good research probably doesn't seem like a strong argument for tenure. Their problem is not that they don't understand academia's role in society but that they don't appreciate the wider demands of the business; furthermore, as they and many of their cohort apply for university based on its reputation (driven in large part, for research universities, by the quality of the research that it does) rather than its reputation for teaching excellence, they are actually part of the problem.

I don't have a problem with the tenure arrangement for researchers, particularly not those employed by private universities, who can write whatever contract they want to and to whom taxpayer-funded research funds only flow when the proposed work is sufficiently interesting and valuable. I do have a problem with tenure for schoolteachers on the public dime (as I said in another thread) but that's a different, and much more important, issue. Private institutions can do what they want without justifying it to outsiders; public institutions do have to make the case to the taxpayers but for public universities doing a lot of research (such, to pick a random example, Penn State), I agree that they aren't going to get the staff required to bring in the research bucks in competition with private institutions unless they also offer a comparable package to researchers, for whom tenure is (understandably) a big deal. If teaching universities are in the same situation, the same argument can, of course, be made for them, all without referring to the need to preserve the value of universities to society.

As for the tenure question, I don't think that it comes down to whether or not a school is a business. Of course it's a business....

Of course it's not -- unless you're talking about those schools specifically founded as for-profit businesses. There are such, of course; but many universities, including most if not all of the dominant research universities, were not founded as businesses. Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, for example, were all originally founded to train ministers (as, of course, were their English models, Oxford and Cambridge). The land-grant universities were established with the original aim of providing education in agriculture, mechanical arts, and military tactics, and of disseminating agricultural knowledge to the people of their states.

Saying that universities are "of course" businesses implies either an act of (possibly cynical) description -- a description which may or may not be true, but which says nothing about how universities should act or be run[*] -- or a severe poverty of institutional imagination, in which one cannot conceive of any social institutions other than businesses.

[*] Someone could claim that the Catholic Church is, in practice, run rather like a business -- but it doesn't follow, even if one accepts the description, that the Church should be run like a business.

It's a business. It takes money for a service, in competition with other universities. What it was founded as is utterly irrelevant; they function as businesses. Clearly, some institutions (such as Princeton and Harvard) could probably operate without any external money coming in at all thanks to their endowments but, nevertheless, they still operate as businesses, they compete with other institution for research funds, they charge tuition to students, etc. You may feel that they operate in a more touchy-feely way than other businesses (although I think that varies from university to university and also with the businesses to which you which to compare them), but I don't see how you'd claim that they are not operating as businesses.

I'd also accept the position that the Catholic Church is, to some extent, a business, although the service model is somewhat unclear (because mediation with God, which is the really essential service that the church provides it customers in at least, say, the provision of the Mass, which doctrinally has to be performed by a priest, is hard to account for). With Universities, particularly in the US, the cashflow is rather easier to account for; people pay to attend as undergraduates, governments and private organisations pay in exchange for research being carried out.

In fact, while we're on the subject of the Catholic Church, it seems to me that a significant part of its continued success is that it has a great marketing hook, that only it can provide the One True Path to salvation. That it adopted that position (rather than a 'believe in God, do what Christ said, you'll be OK') position, that it asserts that only its own ordained priests (plus those of Sister churches, which is clearly not including nearly all protestant churches) can perform certain essential duties (chief amongst them the Mass), that's a business decision. There's not much in the Bible to suggest the need for one monolithic Church (the claim to the apostolic succession from Peter, 'the rock' on whom Christ would build his church, is a large part of it).

Much of the political power and, therefore, the military power that the Catholic Church wielded was predicated on the idea that they were pretty much the only gateway to Heaven, something which they asserted fiercely time and again until nearly the present day.

For other evidence that churches are business, regardless of why they were founded, look to the churches in this country (the US). They compete, they make marketing claims, they rake the money in from their customers, which they re-invest in more and bigger churches (they do make charitable donations too, of course, but there is nothing that precludes a business from doing that and many do). Adopting a business model is, I think, pretty important if you want your church to survive a competitive environment. God helps those that sell themselves.

Re "some of the people making confident assertions about the effects of tenure on academia-- both pro and con-- sound like they've never been to college, let alone worked in an academic position":

I've spent a lot of time in various aspects of academia, and I have to say that the two viewpoints are pretty much diametrically opposite.

Students, as a general thing, detest tenure. The reason is that whenever they ask why a lousy professor is teaching classes when everybody knows they're rotten at it, they get the response "well, they can't be fired because they have tenure, and so they get put to teaching the intro courses where they don't do much harm." Once you hear this three or four times, you really start saying "wait, what's the purported value of tenure again?"

People inside academia, on the other hand, in general like tenure-- at least the ones who have it like it; who wouldn't like being fire-proof? And the department heads and deans have it, because it means their newly-hired assistant professors will work like frenzied robots for the first five years, at lousy pay.

The bad part of tenure, from an outside point of view, is that it inhibits mobility. Academics tend to be move around until they find a spot, then setttle down and grow roots. They really can't move unless they can bring their tenure with them, and it takes some serious negotiation to get a tenure slot in another university-- universities would much prefer to hire untenured ("tenure track") people where they can get a "try before you buy" trial (and as a bonus, get that "work like frenzied robots" too).

I agree with Dr. Geoffrey A. Landis, except for the invention in the previous recession of the apparently legal anti-tenure maneuver. Cash-strapped universities and colleges discovered that they could eliminate an entire department. The tenured faculty in that department were suddenly unemployed. But they had not had their tenure revoked; there was simply no longer a slot for them. On the face of it, this was nondiscriminatory and, given the proven financial need, clearly not a disciplinary action that could be appealed in court.

There is a connection between tenure and academic freedom. To oversimplify what I don't fully know anyway, all universities in Europe used to be religious universities. After a few centuries, the royal but nominally nondenominational university was invented. When universities spread to the nascent USA, they followed the European models. Mrs. Stanford herself ordered the firing of one of the professors at the university that she and Mr. Leland Stanford had founded, on political grounds. The ousted professor sued -- and won. That established a precedent, early in the 20th century, for a modern form of academic free speech.

The argument for tenure has never been an economic one, though. It's always, in the forms I've heard it, been about a protection of academic freedom for professors against easily spooked and stampeded university officials and state-level politicians.

For what it's worth (WARNING: anecdotal evidence): a cousin of mine was a tenured professor in the medical school of a large midwestern university. There was at one point (in the 70s or 80s, if I recall correctly) when a prominent state legislator was making a lot of noise about the "benefits" of vitamin megadoses. My cousin felt free to comment on this (e.g., pointing out that there wasn't any credible medical evidence for this, and overdoses of certain vitamins could actually be harmful in some cases) without fear of retaliation, because he had tenure.

And if one is skeptical of the idea that state-level politicians may want to muzzle professors, just consider what's afoot in Arizona...

That arizona dealy is bad. I wouldn't have a problem with professors at a state school (who are funded in significant part by the state taxpayer) not being able to spout off on political issues in class when they are pretty unconnected to the matters at hand; that's just enforcing sensible and professional behaviour, although it should be done through contract rather than legislation. The idea that they can't take any position that's controversial politically, though, is crazy (tenure won't stop it though, I imagine, any more than it protects from breaking and law, whether or not it was the law at the time of appointment). At least some of that law would presumably be unconstitutional in any case.

It is not enough to say tenure is about protecting free speech. Do some research if you don't know the history behind free speech and tenure...how did it come about and why.

I wouldn't have a problem with professors at a state school (who are funded in significant part by the state taxpayer) not being able to spout off on political issues in class when they are pretty unconnected to the matters at hand; that's just enforcing sensible and professional behaviour, although it should be done through contract rather than legislation.

Hmm... and how would you enforce this? Who decides which issues are "political" and whether they are or are not "unrelated"? University administrators would almost inevitably lean towards broad interpretations, to forestall criticism for being lax, and most teachers would broadly self-censor themselves for fear of overstepping some vague line. This would also seem to require an additional, commissar-like bureaucracy to monitor and classify what professors are saying.

(Now, if you are arguing that professors spouting off on unrelated issues are spending valuable classtime not teaching, then I'd agree you have a point; but politics doesn't come into it. From the standpoint of lost classtime, it doesn't matter whether the professor spends half the period talking politics or just recounting old fishing trips.)

As has been pointed out elsewhere, the Arizona law would apply to, for example, any economics professor asked to comment on pending financial or business-related legislation, or a science professor commenting on pending rules for science education, or an engineer commenting on proposed bridge-building or flood-control regulations. (They'd all be prevented from commenting on anything being consided as a law, regulation, or rule; I mentioned those specific cases since those are obvious things people, including journalists, might want to ask those professors about.) It's a good starting point for expanded restrictions, of course, since once it's in place, professors could no longer argue against any further limitations proposed later.

No, tenure offers no protection against that proposed law. I brought it up as a concrete example of state officials wanting to punish academics for things they say; tenure offers protection against one of the most common and effective techniqes for suppressing dissent or unpopular views, which is threatening people with losing their job.

As with most contractual matters, they are potentially decided in court, based on apparently vague criteria such as 'reasonableness'. Civilization hasn't ended yet, though, so maybe that sort of system pretty much works. Contracts often have stuff about public behaviour, etc, that looks pretty vague and yet when it comes down to it, it's not that difficult to judge what it means.

I was a schoolteacher for a while (which is more restrictive than being a university teacher) and it's really not hard at all to know where the line is, particularly in subjects like science. In history, sure, there is more potential for veering off on a political diatribe but adjudging what's appropriate isn't brain surgery (the Arizona law, see later, is clearly restricting appropriate speech).

In any case, those people (at state universities) are paid in part with public money and work at public institutions. If people don't want to conform with the desires of the people that pay a significant part of their wages, whose representatives set up the institutions at which they are employed, they should work elsewhere or use their famed communications skills to make their case. Private universities can do whatever they want, of course, but they can't whine either if donors, including governmental organisations, apply restrictions to funds; this includes the title IX restrictions that so many conservatives whine about. Frankly, if the government is going to take my money and give it to other organisations, I damn well support the idea that they can put restrictions and conditions on that funding.

The 'wasted time' point you make is entirely relevant; the students are not paying to be taught what that professor thinks is appropriate, really, they are paying to learn what wider communities think are relevant (the community in that field, the community of employers, for example). If a teacher/professor is tenured, their employer loses a significant of the leverage with which to insist that the professor respects the interests of the customer (the students, possibly their parents, the state and everyone else that kicks in money). That's by design, but it's not all good (although I'm not calling for the end of college tenure on account of it).

Although it's a seperate point to the tenure discussion, the Arizona law, as I said, deranged. And sure, the world is full of people trying to shut other people up. That proposed law, if constitutional (which I doubt, at least in its entirity), can be enforced because it's a public university and thus under the direct jurisdiction and oversight of that state legislature. If people don't like it, hey, work somewhere else. There are plenty of private universities.

Fred # 21. Thanks, that's really helpful.

No, wait.