The New York Times has a forum debating the institution of academic tenure. Economics blogger Megan McArdle recently criticized the institution in this blog post.
One of the interesting aspects of the tenure system is that even many of its principal beneficiaries – tenured professors – agree that it is a severely flawed institution that should be scrapped. Several academics make that case in the NYT forum, and I gave other examples here and here; although I am now tenured myself, I still think the institution’s costs outweigh its very modest benefits. The fact that these people are arguing against interest doesn’t mean they’re right. But it is at least a reason for nonacademics to take their views seriously.
Tyler Cowen makes some interesting points in defense of tenure in this post. I remain unpersuaded, however. Tyler notes that “the schools which have done away with it — the for-profits — have carved out a big niche but they have not displaced traditional non-profit, tenure-driven higher education in most fields. Few parents dream of sending their kids there.” However, for-profit universities have many other differences from traditional colleges. They compete with the latter primarily on price rather than quality. Does anyone seriously contend that the University of Phoenix would be more competitive if it adopted tenure?
Tyler also makes the reasonable point that before we abolish tenure, we need to think carefully about what the alternative system would look like. There may not be any one system that would be best for all institutions. Competition and experimentation could lead to useful innovations. However, the basic outline of a superior alternative is well-known. As Mark Taylor describes it in the NYT forum:
It is a mistake to pose this question in all-or-nothing terms – either you have permanent tenured faculty or itinerant adjuncts. A middle ground will address most of the problems. After a trial period of three to five years, faculty members who merit promotion should be given seven-year renewable contracts. For this system to work effectively, these reviews must be rigorous and responsible.
The standard argument for tenure is is the need to protect academic freedom. Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, restates it in the NYT debate. I remain skeptical for reasons that I outlined here:
[T]he institution of tenure is not enough to prevent ideological discrimination in academic hiring. A faculty that wants to discriminate can still do so in entry level hiring or at the point when it is decides whether or not an assistant professor gets promoted to tenure. If the faculty or administration is intent on enforcing ideological conformity, it can usually do so quite effectively even without having the ability to fire tenured professors. If it is not, then tenure is probably not needed to protect academic freedom at that particular institution.
At most, therefore, tenure will only protect the academic freedom of professors who either 1) manage to keep their unpopular views hidden from their colleagues until after they get tenure, or 2) have a road to Damascus conversion to unpopular views after getting tenured status. Such cases are not unheard of, but they are likely to be extremely rare….
There is no way of perfectly protecting professors who convert to political views unpopular with their colleagues or make controversial remarks. However, perfect protection is probably unnecessary, because cases of firing for such reasons are likely to be rare. Moreover, universities can take steps to further reduce their likelihood. For example, they can sign professors to multiyear contracts that include provisions forbidding the school to fire the person (or refuse to renew his contract) for political or ideological reasons. Such contracts won’t be perfect; a crafty administration could fire a professor for ideological reasons while concocting a plausible cover story showing that they “really” did it for a legitimate cause. However, I doubt that universities will often do this, especially given the threat that the professor in question could sue the university for breach of contract and create adverse publicity for it.
The institution of tenure gives us a possible slight increase in academic freedom at a huge cost. In the NYT debate, economist Richard Vedder points out that tenure may lead to a net reduction in intellectual diversity:
While tenure has undoubtedly protected some good people from losing their jobs, it actually may on balance reduce intellectual diversity. Many ideologically driven tenured professors use their job security to aggressively thwart efforts to increase alternative viewpoints being taught…..
The fact is that tenured faculty members often use their power to stifle innovation and change.
UPDATE: I have revised this post to fix the flawed link to my 2007 post on why tenure isn’t needed to protect academic freedom.
Herb Spencer says:
Does Zasloff have tenure at UCLA Law? Inquiring CA taxpayers want to know.
July 23, 2010, 5:00 pmSteve says:
Isn’t this kind of a moot point? Even if we thought it was a good idea to get rid of tenure, how precisely would we do so? Anyway, I’m not sure why the free market can’t settle this one, with non-tenure institutions routinely trouncing hidebound tenure-based ones.
July 23, 2010, 5:05 pmChris Travers says:
Question:
What would replace tenure? Would we start firing professors for making controversial comments?
July 23, 2010, 5:10 pmIlya Somin says:
What would replace tenure? Would we start firing professors for making controversial comments?
I discuss this at some length in the post.
July 23, 2010, 5:12 pmIlya Somin says:
I’m not sure why the free market can’t settle this one, with non-tenure institutions routinely trouncing hidebound tenure-based ones.
As I have often pointed out in the past, academia is a “market” dominated by nonprofit institutions with massive government subsidies (or even government ownership). So market incentives in this industry are weak.
July 23, 2010, 5:13 pmMatt Davis says:
Professor Brian Leiter, as usual, said it best on Mark Taylor’s original nonsense masquerading as insight:
Professor Taylor–whom we’ve encountered previously arguing for “transforming” universities by destroying them and cheerleading for Derrida, has now weighed in, with his characteristic lack of insight and knowledge, on the subject of tenure. Put aside the absurdity of a postmodernist religion professor peddling the “tough talk” of the marketplace; let’s overlook too that salaries are not paid out of endowment (as he bizarrely suggests), but a combination of tuition, endowments, and research grants; and let’s even grant him his make-believe numbers about what a professor costs over 35 years; the facts remain that:
1. Tenure does not mean “lifetime employment, no possibility of dismissal,” it means only dismissal for cause, with associated procedural safeguards;
2. Dismissal only for cause is a less common employment arrangement in the United States than it used to be (though is still enjoyed by significant numbers of school teachers, police, firemen, and by many civil service employees, among others), but is far more common in other Western industrialized nations with stronger labor movements and established civil service systems; that it is not the norm in the U.S. is one of the pathologies of American society, to be lamented, not lauded;
3. Tenure is an important part of the non-economic compensation for academics, and its abolition would raise the costs of hiring faculty astronomically;
4. At the best research universities, the percentage of senior faculty who remain research-active 30 years after tenure is extremely high, which puts the lie to Taylor’s absurd claim that “it is impossible to know whether a person’s research is going to be relevant in five years let alone 35 years”;
5. Taylor’s claim that “in almost 40 years of teaching, I have not known a single pereson who has been more willing to speak out after tenure than before” is such obvious bullshit, it’s hard to believe he had the audacity to say this in public; in 17 years of teaching, I can think of at least a half-dozen cases of faculty who, after tenure, became markedly more outspoken and undertook more controversial research. And bear in mind that the biggest threats to academic freedom are likely to come not from, e.g., state legislators pissed off by dumb or controversial reilgion professors (though without tenure there will certainly be more cases like that, as we have noted previously), but from powerful economic interests adversely affected by work on health and safety issues by scientists. (One might also think that the recent experience in the U.K. without out-of-control administrative bureaucrats would give even Taylor some pause.)
There are two real problems with the current tenure system: first, that universities are often too reluctant to seek dismissal for cause; second, that the academic freedom rights of untenured and non-tenure-stream faculty are insufficiently protected in the current system. The AAUP could take the lead on the first issue, including by standing on the side of universities that terminate tenured faculty for cause and following proper procedures. The AAUP might also help with the second, by being more aggressive about calling out universities that trample on the academic freedom of the non-tenured.
Taylor himself should be glad for tenure, since judging from the reaction to his piece I have heard, I imagine a majority of his Columbia colleagues would be glad to be rid of someone who embarrasses and endangers his institution this way.
July 23, 2010, 5:19 pmVlad Konings says:
Don’t for-profit colleges that don’t give tenure also have an accreditation problem? In part because granting of tenure is effectively if not formally a requirement for accreditation?
Please correct me if I’m mistaken; I don’t know much about the for-profits. But if my impression is correct, it kind of blows the comparison.
July 23, 2010, 5:22 pmUrso says:
Brian Leiter’s argument is, as usual, a collection of bitter invective, ruthless ad hominem, and assuming his conclusions.
July 23, 2010, 5:25 pmSMD says:
“I imagine a majority of his Columbia colleagues would be glad to be rid of someone who embarrasses and endangers his institution this way.”
Replace “Columbia” with “Chicago” and Taylor could turn that little barb around, and much more accurately.
July 23, 2010, 5:31 pmChris Travers says:
What I see you saying is that such protections aren’t necessary. I’m not sure I buy that. Certainly there are some bloggers on this site who take delight when their enemies or the enemies of their pet causes are denied tenure. So the question is what would replace it.
I think there are ways to replace tenure. One would be for states to pass academic freedom laws, allowing professors who have lost their jobs due to ideological reasons to sue. This would limit bias to the hiring end and essentially allow for-cause firing while allowing questionable cases to go before a court. This would seem to extend tenure benefits to all professors while reducing the downsides.
Another option would be aggressive unionization on the part of professors so that collective bargaining power could be brought to bear. But this would almost certainly have the effect of requiring professors to join such unions.
I’m not settled on the tenure issue one way or the other. I think the question is what would replace it.
In short the question I’m asking is not tenure vs no tenure, but rather tenure vs what alternatives. Would we prefer a tort-based system? A union-and-contract-based system? Both of these would be arguably better than what we have now.
July 23, 2010, 5:33 pmMatt Davis says:
“ruthless” ad hominem? i didn’t know ad hominem had degrees of intensity. and which conclusions, exactly, does leiter assume?
right, right. i’m sure leiter’s tenured colleagues are just up in arms over leiter’s relatively tame defense of tenure.
July 23, 2010, 5:40 pmJosh says:
Is there any particular reason Leiter writes (or rants, rather) like a recent divorcee talking to their ex when anyone disagrees with him? There’s nothing wrong with liking tenure; but treating anyone who dares to question it as if they are motivated by bad faith and/or dishonesty is ridiculous. Thou doth protest too much; the rhetorical table-pounding hurts his case, if he is writing to persuade rather than throw a verbal temper tantrum. He displays the intellectual maturity of a two-year old in these debates; it’s very distracting for anyone interested in the arguments.
July 23, 2010, 5:42 pmRobert B says:
@Vlad Konings:
I was curious about this, so I looked up the for profit school in the original post and found their accreditation here: Higher Learning Commission
July 23, 2010, 5:44 pmI haven’t looked at other for-profits (since I don’t know any, perhaps Ilya can point us in the right direction for this?) I didn’t find anything on point on SSRN.
Matt Davis says:
Maybe it’s because Taylor, in Leiter’s mind, has a track record of repugnance. Check out the link to Leiter’s post in my original comment; he cites to two other Taylor pieces of recent note.
July 23, 2010, 5:46 pmmichael livingston says:
I think Leiter just writes like a philosopher, nothing more or less.
I think there are also many arguments for tenure beyond the academic freedom bit, including the question of long and short timeframes. I got tenure as a tax professor and gradually became more interested in comparative law, a transition that required me to invest many years in background work that wasn’t immediately productive but, in the long run, will probably make both my tax and nontax work better. Sure, I could have done this on a seven-year contract: but wouldn’t I have been somewhat less likely to, and isn’t freedom to experiment part of what we want from experienced scholars?
July 23, 2010, 5:52 pmGreg says:
This post is probably the only reason to justify tenure. I feel some sympathy to it because it does promote free thought. As much an idiot as Zasloff is (and believe me, he’s a grade-A moron), his position shouldn’t be threatened based on his political beliefs (however unsupported and illogical they may be).
That said, there’s virtually no other reason to keep tenure… and I’m inclined to agree with Ilya’s point that the costs outweigh the benefits.
July 23, 2010, 5:55 pmJosh says:
3. Tenure is an important part of the non-economic compensation for academics, and its abolition would raise the costs of hiring faculty astronomically;
Tenure is hardly ‘non-economic compensation’. A virtually guaranteed stream of income and health benefits is pretty valuable. Removing tenure likely would raise hiring costs, but it would significantly reduce other costs (for instance, expensive and unproductive senior faculty could be more easily removed). Leiter doesn’t really take the time to address the arguments seriously; he makes a couple assertions and lets invective do most of the work.
July 23, 2010, 5:57 pmwm13 says:
Leiter pretty much always writes that way. I certainly don’t think it’s characteristic of philosophers (i.e., philosophy professors) generally: John Rawls didn’t write that way. Leiter seems to be very bitter about something. I usually figure that for most professors, the availability of casual sex with coeds makes up for the low pay, but not for Leiter, I guess.
July 23, 2010, 6:01 pmJosh says:
makes up for the low pay, but not for Leiter, I guess.
Well, law professor salaries really aren’t that low…
July 23, 2010, 6:05 pmfrankcross says:
I don’t know why the market wouldn’t work here. College is heavily subsidized but that is neutral vis a vis tenure. If eliminating tenure would make a school better, and it would therefore attract better students, rise in the rankings, etc., then a school would surely do it. Schools spend a lot of money to achieve those ends.
July 23, 2010, 6:28 pmCJColucci says:
Perhaps what tenure gives you is the ability to pursue ambitious research projects carrying a higher risk of not being convertible into three or four published articles in a short time-frame. You can’t really take that chance like that if you have 6 or 7 years to build up a tenure file.
July 23, 2010, 6:29 pmThen again, maybe you shouldn’t take a chance like that until you really know what you’re doing.
PersonFromPorlock says:
Why not require all dismissals to be for cause? Not just for academics, but for all workers? If I fire factory worker Smith – or for that matter, supermarket bagger Smith – for an unstated reason, his employability is clouded by the question mark I’ve put beside his name. Shouldn’t his reputation be protected, as much as any professor’s? Conversely, shouldn’t potential employers be warned if Smith earned his dismissal?
July 23, 2010, 6:39 pmA non says:
This is almost a straw man. “Academic freedom” matters for a small proportion of the humanities and social sciences where political controversies exist. It is a non-issue in science and engineering, and in most of the rest of academia as well
Far more significant issues are the salary gap, the chilling effect repeated review has on risk-taking in research and the difficulty in evaluating productivity.
First of all, academic salaries in the sciences are low for the level of skill and effort compared to non-academic jobs. It’s not an accident that industrial research positions (say at Microsoft or IBM Research) where the teaching load is zero pay far more than comparable academic positions with a non-trivial teaching load. The pay for skilled programmers is comparable to the pay at top public schools, even though getting academic position is far more competitive. Offering tenure is cheaper than offering pay comparable to non-academic positions.
Regarding risk-taking, the current system has a clear divide, where high-risk, high-reward projects are taken up by tenured faculty, while non-tenured faculty go for more certain results. If everyone is subject to continuous review no-one will be willing to take risks.
Would a non-tenured faculty member work for 10 years designing detectors for a future particle accelerator or trying to prove a big conjecture? There would be little intermediate results, and the researcher could be fired for lack of productivity after 3 years.
Next, repeated review requires repeated jumping through hoops set by non-expert administrators.
Such hoop are usually based on counting of papers and citations, numerical comparison of teaching evaluations and the like. This is because nearly all members of a “senior appointments committee” cannot actually read the research in question. Often a committee member (in whose field everyone publishes 15 papers a year) will express negative opinion on a tenure candidate with only 8 papers since his PhD, simply because he has no idea how work translates to papers in the relevant field. Repeated review encourages inflating one’s paper totals by breaking up results, going for minor but “publishable” results just for the count, giving talks for “CV padding” and so on. Do you prefer that everyone does this all the time just to keep their job?
You may want to read Jordan Ellenberg’s blog post, where some of these ideas are taken from.
July 23, 2010, 6:40 pmPerseus says:
1. Tenure does not mean “lifetime employment, no possibility of dismissal,” it means only dismissal for cause, with associated procedural safeguards;
But are those procedural safeguards similar to those found in, say, the California public school system, which have the effect of rendering such dismissals negligible?
2. Dismissal only for cause is a less common employment arrangement in the United States than it used to be… that it is not the norm in the U.S. is one of the pathologies of American society, to be lamented, not lauded;
Why? Because a thug like Brian Leiter says so?
3. Tenure is an important part of the non-economic compensation for academics, and its abolition would raise the costs of hiring faculty astronomically;
Prove it.
July 23, 2010, 6:41 pmyankee says:
There are very strong incentives though; schools care a lot about maximizing their U.S. News ranking.
July 23, 2010, 6:45 pmBruce Hayden says:
I have two words in response: “Ward Churchill”. The guy lied about his Indian heritage to get his faculty job, and then to get tenure. But the school couldn’t fire him for that. Or, for saying outrageous things that embarrassed the University. The only thing that they could use was academic misconduct, and even then, he appealed.
Pretty much the entire laundry list of professions (maybe excluding law enforcement) would likely work better if they were under “at will” employment. Part of the problem with the operation of our government today, and one of the reasons that it is so wasteful and inefficient is that it is so hard to fire anyone.
Decades ago, when I worked for the federal government as a computer programmer, I asked why they couldn’t fire the GS-12 programmers who had taken on-the-job retirement. This was in response to one such having spent most of a year working on a program, then going on vacation when the software was to go into production. It bombed and was unfixable. So, two of us GS-9 programmers rewrote it from scratch in two days.
The answer was that they would have to document the inability to do the work, and that would require assigning that person GS-12 work. But they couldn’t do that because then they would miss deadlines (it was the Decennial Census, so the deadlines were very hard deadlines). And, it would take a year or so of documenting this to have a chance of working.
So, what they ended up doing was assigning all those GS-12 and GS-13 programmers who had taken on-the-job retirement or just couldn’t make the transition away from assembler coding, to a “deadwood” branch. That worked fine until the end of the Census, when that division was downsized. Everyone in the “deadwood” branch had effective bumping rights, putting the lower level programmers who had actually done the work out of jobs.
July 23, 2010, 6:52 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
I love how Leiter argues that tenure doesn’t really mean lifetime employment, because you can still be fired for cause, and then he laments that schools are too reluctant to seek dismissal for cause… and he never bothers to consider whether there’s any contradiction here. If I were one-tenth as snide as Leiter, I’d point out that if he had actually practiced law for more than five minutes of document review before moving on to philosophy, he might understand why schools are “reluctant” to fire “for cause,” and then he might understand what tenure really is, legally.
July 23, 2010, 7:31 pmGallileo says:
Given the massive oversupply of PhD’s shooting for faculty positions, especially in the humanities, it seems unlikely that getting rid of tenure would do anything to raise the cost of hiring. People are already beating down your door, that isn’t going to change.
It also implies that whatever the compensation model is, it has created an enormous over supply and is probably therefore too high–just thinking purely in supply-vs-demand terms.
July 23, 2010, 7:35 pmJeff S. says:
Is it an enforceable contract provision that one must take action past the expiration of it? It seems strange that you can demand a contract renewal in this way and too clever by half though IANAL.
July 23, 2010, 7:36 pmNon-tenured Assistant Professor says:
I agree with the post of “a non”. The tenure system gives an opportunity for scientists to work on very hard and challenging projects that may require years of research before they give any measurable results. It’s almost impossible to predict in advance whether these projects succeed or not. It took Andrew Wiles more than 10 years to prove the Great Fermat Theorem. Could any committee predict that he would succeed? Probably, not. If not the tenure system, the Great Fermat Theorem and many other problems would still be open.
July 23, 2010, 8:48 pmLTEC says:
This makes no sense to me. If the ideologically driven tenured professor is in the minority, then his attempts at aggressively thwarting will not be successful. If he is not in the minority, then tenure is not protecting him since his colleagues support his ideology anyway.
One argument for tenure is that it protects (to some extent, and yes, even in the sciences) an ideological minority which is otherwise powerless and not a threat to anyone’s freedom of speech. Of course, it is not obvious that this argument is strong enough to counter the arguments against tenure, but let’s not imagine that tenure is protecting the pitchfork wielding mob — it is protecting (sometimes) their chosen victim.
July 23, 2010, 9:35 pmElliot says:
The schools already have an employment system for the exempt non-academic staff. Just move the academic employees onto that system.
July 23, 2010, 9:44 pmneurodoc says:
What would happen if a school offered one or more of its departments a fixed sum of money to dangle in front of its tenured faculty for those willing to give their tenure rights?
Pick a sum, say for example $250K, and make a reverse auction of it. The faculty member who bids the least would give up tenure in return for a 5- or 7-year contract going forward and a one-time payment in return for the amount they bid. Then the same deal for the faculty member who came in second in this auction, that is a fix-term contract with the possibility of renewals and a one-time payment equal to their bid. This would continue until the pot of money the school put up was exhausted. What would be the likely outcome?
Would the best of the faculty be the most likely to go for the monetary inducement because they would have the most self-confidence in retaining their jobs or finding another at the end of those fixed-term contracts? Would there be many bidders at sum that weren’t exceedingly great? Would it take much more/less money in some departments than in others to get takers?
July 23, 2010, 9:44 pmscvbwsbi5 says:
Tenure is an especially institution when granted to economics professors. As with all people, economists are subject to the effects of personal bias in their professional work. If economics professors lacked job security and faced the possibility of layoffs, just like the rest of society does, their advice on economic matters that effect employment and the job market would be more appropriate, realistic, and rational.
July 23, 2010, 9:59 pmStephen Lathrop says:
Institutionally, American private universities are important bulwarks of conservatism. That is so because they provide an independent source for authority—in principle, a source beyond the reach of government. University critics who concentrate too closely on curricula, or who object to the political preferences of individual faculty, tend to overlook this abiding institutional virtue.
The system of tenure for senior faculty is an important part of that conservative enterprise, because it frees a substantial number of thoughtful private individuals to speak freely, not just within their own expertise, but about anything at all. That is not something we normally expect from the corporate world, or, indeed, from anyone looking over his shoulder and worrying about the boss.
It would be a mistake to undermine such a valuable social resource by subjecting it to the same pressures which typically enforce reticence and conformity in the world of commerce, or, even worse, to the pressures of bureaucratic supervision by government.
July 23, 2010, 10:00 pmAllan Walstad says:
Speaking as a faculty member at an undergraduate college, the way I see it, we faculty aren’t just employees of the college, we ARE the college. All other positions, including administrative, exist pretty much to facilitate our work in educating students. You can’t run a college out of the Faculty Senate, but the faculty need to exercise their moral authority as the locus of expertise regarding the mission. That means being willing to stand up and challenge administrators, even to the point of making it clear that no-confidence votes are within the realm of possibility, and a no-confidence vote will be followed up on if necessary with a determined effort to drive them out. I don’t see how that’s remotely possible without tenure. It my not be perfect, but a cadre of tenured faculty has the power to stand up to administrators, while flexibility can be maintained with a complement of non-tenure-stream positions. If there’s a case to be made against tenure, and no doubt there is, then as others have suggested, we need to think very carefully about what will replace it.
July 23, 2010, 10:06 pmjeff says:
This seems to imply salaries would be astronomically higher. Wouldn’t many jump at a chance for so much more money?
July 23, 2010, 10:10 pmneurodoc says:
As between administrators and faculty, I would agree that faculty have a much stronger claim to “ownership” of the enterprise than those who oversee its operations. Furthermore, it is my impression that if one were after more bang for the education buck, they would start by paring the administrative superstructure, which in most schools has grown disproportionately to the faculty and student body. But do you think that the faculty are the sole claimants to “ownership,” or if you will the sole “stakeholders”? I don’t. I think that current students and those who earned degrees from the institution (alumni) are no lesser, and perhaps even greater, stakeholders. And for that reason, I admire Todd Zywicki for his efforts at his alma mater, Dartmouth, to shape the school’s direction, not leaving all control to the administration.
July 23, 2010, 10:26 pmPetep says:
Wander over to Commondreams.org. Read some of the posts there. The wackier, more ludicrous they are, they more likely the by-line at the bottom will be a tenured college professor. The most insane are often from Hofstra staff for some reason.
“What would replace tenure?”
Like any other job – performance reviews. If you do your job and do it well – you keep it. If you don’t, or if you use / abuse your job to go off on your own personal tangents at work, you lose it.
Teaching is supposed to be about imparting / transferring knowledge, not the teacher’s personal opinions and obsessions.
” Would we start firing professors for making controversial comments?”
Outside of school ? No. During class / at work ? Yes. Just like any other job.
If you want to see the results of tenure – look at what our school system puts out as ‘graduates’ these days, both K-12, secondary, and post-secondary. That’s what tenure gets you. And it’s pretty sad, both for the students, and for society.
July 23, 2010, 10:33 pmPerseus says:
Depending on how a department operates (e.g., path of least resistance), a determined minority can in fact effectively kill the appointment/tenure of someone they regard as undesirable.
Many of my fellow faculty members like to think such vainglorious thoughts about themselves, but they would be wrong.
July 23, 2010, 10:46 pmArthur Kirkland says:
Those who believe a tenure-free institution would be better than its tenure-laden competitors should build such an institution and, when they have overtaken Harvard and Penn and Berkeley, claim an impressive victory. Until then — or emergence of a persuasive excuse for failing to do so — I see little merit to their arguments.
July 23, 2010, 11:03 pmLTEC says:
True, but if a determined minority has that much power, they are hardly in danger of being fired for lack of tenure. My point is that tenure does not serve to protect the powerful.
July 23, 2010, 11:15 pmA non says:
I think people here are confused by the function of tenure.
Most readers of this blog mostly learn about speech by university faculty when they make the kind of controversial statements that reach national headlines, but in fact it is exceedingly rare for a faculty member to make statements that anyone outside their field cares about. There is simply no political aspect to nearly all of what a university does.
Let me give a routine use of tenure, one that comes up many times a day as opposed to once a few years: it takes an average of 5-6 years to get a PhD in many universities; during that time the student conducts research under the guidance of a faculty advisor. While in some fields it is common for non-tenured faculty to advise students, in most fields it is the senior faculty who do so. There are many reasons for this, but a non-trivial one is that it is utterly devastating for a graduate student to have their advisor denied tenure.
Here’s another: no-one will sign up for a university position where you have to do the kind of research that makes the administrators happy just to avoid being fired. That’s what an industry job is about. Again, the problem is not the rare person that wants to conduct controversial research, but the common person who wants to conduct mundane research without having to justify his technical choices to review boards who aren’t specialists.
So yes, controversy makes for good headlines, but while making policy based on extreme outliers is a hallmark of the political system, it is not generally believed to be a positive aspect of the political system or a good approach to decision-making.
(PS: I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor)
July 23, 2010, 11:45 pmAllan Walstad says:
If you have anything more to offer than a sneer, Perseus, let’s hear it.
Neurodoc: I don’t think we’re all that far apart. The whole point is to serve the students with an academic education. Yes, there are things we can learn by listening to the students, but what we can learn is limited. Alumni feedback should be welcome, and where alumni take a serious, constructive interest, their involvement in the college can be valuable. Nevertheless, I don’t see where they have any obligation to do more than get on with their own lives. The expertise and responsibility lie with the faculty first and foremost.
July 24, 2010, 12:01 amRicardo says:
I don’t see why the burden of proof is on the supporters of tenure. If you think abolishing tenure would not raise the cost of hiring faculty, it should be easy to convince at least one university somewhere in the U.S. to do so. Then we look at what happens to salaries and the quality of people they attract and compare.
My friends who are assistant professors in econ departments tend to think tenure is compensation for working 7 days a week pretty much non-stop on research projects while getting paid less than a similarly demanding private sector job. McKinsey might offer an econ PhD as much as twice what a mid-ranked research university offers and yet many take the latter option. Again, by anecdote, job security and the possibility of tenure down the line is a big consideration for a lot of people although being your own boss, having flexible hours and not having to wear a suit help as well. Maybe it is different in other departments.
July 24, 2010, 12:07 amPerseus says:
But only a minority of institutions award doctorates.
No one? The vast oversupply of people seeking academic positions would suggest that many of them would be willing.
July 24, 2010, 12:13 amChris Travers says:
That’s not an improvement. And I think it would kill academic freedom.
To what extent is this mostly applicable to the sciences? I mean in law (and in history, etc), it’s a bit different isn’t it?
July 24, 2010, 12:16 amPerseus says:
Professor Leiter claimed that eliminating tenure would increase costs “astronomically.” A claim like that warrants an argument in support of it. I can only assume that the absence of one reflects Leiter’s own “characteristic lack of insight and knowledge.”
July 24, 2010, 12:37 amA non says:
@Perseus:
I didn’t say otherwise. I merely noted that a faculty member taking up a new graduate student is something that happens many times every day across North America, while a faculty member getting in political hot water for making controversial statements is something that happens a few times every year.
@Perseus:
Why would you sign up to do directed research at the university level of pay where you can get paid 50% more doing directed research for a hedge fund or kernel hacking for a software business?
Yes, if top people left academia for better paying industry jobs there would be many takers for the vacant faculty positions — but the number of people willing to do a job isn’t an indicator of the number of good people who want the job. Tenure (i.e. job security and research independence) is the way in which universities compete with industry for talent. Certainly as you say universities could fill faculty rosters even if the employment terms were worse, but I insist that hardly any (“no one”) of the current faculty would be willing to stay under such terms.
July 24, 2010, 12:38 amPerseus says:
But there are plenty of people in academic disciplines where there are no such comparable industry equivalents like hedge funds or kernal hacking. I’m also guessing that other benefits found in academia (flexible hours, sartorial slobbishness, long vacations, etc.) might be enough to prevent a complete exodus.
July 24, 2010, 1:00 amneurodoc says:
Exceedingly few current faculty were around when the schools that employ them began, and most schools will continue long after current faculty are gone. The fact that faculty members were once hired by the institution from a pool of job seekers, and may sojourn at a particular institution for some part or all of their professional careers, doesn’t make them “owners” any more than the fact that students were once chosen for admission from an applicant pool makes them “owners” of the enterprise. Nor does the faculty’s time in the school’s employ give them clearly superior, let alone exclusive, claim to “ownership” over those of others, including students, alumni, and the wider community which in various ways supports the institution.
You don’t like Perseus‘s take (“Many of my fellow faculty members like to think such vainglorious thoughts about themselves, but they would be wrong.”), but your own self-regarding one is most ineffective as rebuttal to his…
The faculty’s interests are not identical to those of other “shareholders,” e.g., students, and there is no good reason why they should be given greater weight. Alumni usually elect some number of a school’s trustees, and the trustees have authority not vested the faculty senate. So alumni, who contribute so much to many school’s financial well-being, something I trust you don’t view as trivial, might thank you for the permission you would give them to “get on with their own lives,” if they didn’t take offense at your presumption. And they might tell you and your colleagues to attend to your teaching and research undertakings consistent with the terms of your employment, while they will play their part in influencing the school’s direction.
July 24, 2010, 1:15 amElliot says:
I’d add that at public universities the tax payers are significant owners and stakeholders.
July 24, 2010, 2:07 amAnonEngineeringProf says:
1. Tenure is non-financial compensation. When I interviewed after receiving my PhD, I got job offers from universities and from industry research labs. The industry salaries were 40% higher than the academic ones, even though they were both research-focused. I viewed the job security associated with tenure as compensation for the lower salary. Without tenure, the universities would have had to have offered me a 30-40% higher salary to compete with industry — and that’s true even if the university had used rolling contracts. (It may be relevant that I am in an engineering discipline where specialists are in high demand among industry.)
2. Tenure enables faculty to hire faculty. The folks best qualified to hire new faculty in my department are others in the same department. With tenure, we don’t have to worry that the new hire is competing with us. Without tenure, those considerations would make it impossible to have hiring performed by other faculty. As a result, faculty hiring decisions would suffer significantly, because administrators do not have the knowledge or expertise to make good hiring decisions. This would be a dramatic change to academia, and a major cost of eliminating tenure that I rarely see discussed.
3. I’m a tenured prof. I have personally seen the benefits of tenure: I believe tenure is vital to some of my own research. I do research in a politically charged area. My colleagues have been publicly attacked, threatened with lawsuits, some of my colleages have even had their college presidents pressured to fire them — all because of our research. There’s no way I’d touch this if I didn’t have my institution’s support and the protections of tenure. Because of this, no industry researcher does research in this area, because no company wants to be associated with the “hot potato”; the area is dominated by academics. While there are some untenured profs who do research in this area, the untenured ones tend to work on lower-profile problems. Keep in mind, this is research that is in the public interest: if no one worked in this area, our society would be worse off.
July 24, 2010, 5:39 amPerseus says:
I do think the discipline is quite relevant as well as whether you’re at a major research institution.
I haven’t seen that argument before. Could you elaborate why you think it would be so difficult to hire someone? Why would faculty necessarily regard news hires as competition, particularly if their sub-field or research interests are different? Does the private sector suffer from the similar problems?
July 24, 2010, 6:46 amPetep says:
“it would kill academic freedom”
Where did this idea of ‘academic freedom’ come from, anyway ? What does it mean ? Does it mean ‘say anything, do anything, no matter what’ ?
Gee – in most jobs, you have duties, assignments, and responsibilities, along with expectations to be met.
I’ve had several jobs where, after having been employed there a few years, I was basically on a basis of ‘Do whatever I want, and do it in what ways I felt best’, but that meant ‘Work on whatever projects I felt were most cost-effective for the company to have me working on’, and that ‘freedom’ came from having developed a long record of making decisions that were good for the company, and producing results. And still my work product was subject to review and evaluation by the boss(s), continuously.
As I see it, teachers also have assigned duties. These very often include TEACHING. At higher levels, they may also include research – which is a separate item. During the time assigned to TEACH, that is what they should do – teach their subject matter. Yes, certainly, this very much includes ‘how to think’, ‘how to understand’, ‘how to grow’, not merely memorizing facts. However, this should be done without reflection of the teachers personal beliefs and practices in areas unrelated to the subject matter at hand. And their effectiveness is imparting that learning to the students should be evaluated, and rewarded ( or punished ) accordingly.
During the part of their day where their assigend task is ‘research’, then the evaluation of course is different. A given employer, whether university or commercial, may decide to fund / subsidize their efforts for ten years or more, without guarantee of success , or even without a predefined focus of topic or targeted result. The assigned research task may in some cases be described as ‘Spend time thinking about your field of expertise, explore it as you wish, ( and / or other fields with it ), and see if you can add to / advance / increase the body of knowledge in the world’. Fine, if that is the way the employer chooses to spend their funds.
None of this suggests ‘tenure’ is a required element. The work assignment and performance should still be subject to review, and the meeting of expectations. One of the common ones among certain folk at certain levels, which is ‘publish or perish’, is not a valid criteria.
The tenure system helps to embody corruption, laziness, self-centered focus, and poor performance in teachers at all levels, it disregards the supposed primary beneficiary of the educational experience ( the STUDENT ), and it places the entire focus on ‘Get your peers to vote for your tenure’ etc, instead of ‘Do your job as an educator’.
July 24, 2010, 7:56 amPetep says:
” Tenure enables faculty to hire faculty. The folks best qualified to hire new faculty in my department are others in the same department.”
They should have input, as is often done in private industry as well. However, the final decision should be with the actual employer, the writer of the paychecks.
” With tenure, we don’t have to worry that the new hire is competing with us.”
And that is exactly why. With your tenure system, and ‘faculty hiring faculty’, the faculty gets to avoid anyone who ‘might compete with them’, who ‘might make them look bad’, who ‘they might not like being around on a personality basis’ etc. Or, commonly, avoid anyone who’s social or political views they dislike, or find ‘different from their own’.
” Without tenure, those considerations would make it impossible to have hiring performed by other faculty.”
No, faculty can and should still have input in interviewing / reviewing the candidate for employment ( no tenure ). Hopefully, extent faculty is skilled and knowlegable, and would have valuable insight into evaluating the candidate’s skills.
” As a result, faculty hiring decisions would suffer significantly, because administrators do not have the knowledge or expertise to make good hiring decisions. ”
Utter bullshit. If a manager is incapable of handling hiring situations well, and making good choices, then that manager is ill-suited to their job, and should be given other non-management duties, or terminated.
“This would be a dramatic change to academia, and a major cost of eliminating tenure that I rarely see discussed.”
Academia NEEDS a ‘major change’ ! Just look at what passes for ‘graduation’ at all grade levels today ! It’s pathetic. The system is designed at the student level, just like the tenure level, around the priority of ‘go along to get along’. Be liked, do well. Be like everyone else, do well. Be socially accepted, do well.
This is not a valid criteria for ‘education’.
The primary function of a university is to educate the students, not provide a nice comfy securer nest for the professors during their search for personal fulfillment and satisfaction. You seem to have forgotten this.
July 24, 2010, 8:18 amPerseus says:
A sneer was warranted given your presumption that “all other positions” exist to
July 24, 2010, 8:26 amservefacilitate the work of the faculty. You seem only concerned with preserving and enhancing the prerogatives of the faculty at the expense of the other ruling parts of the university (as a political theorist, I dislike the economic model of the university. I prefer to analogize it to a mixed regime: monarch=president (plus trustees); nobility=faculty; plebeians=students). Neurdoc raised a series of issues about how the interests of the faculty do not necessarily coincide with the good of the whole. In addition, what should the educational mission of the university be? What should be the specific content of that education (I think that students should have to take lots of courses in my field)? What should be the proper balance between research and teaching? What kind of students should it seek to attract? And so on. It is not obvious that the faculty have the best title to decide these sorts of questions.neurodoc says:
I think this a very significant concern, especially in departments other than science and engineering ones.
If it is not obvious, a savvy student should try to get a sense of the zeitgist of the field they would enter, especially at the school they would start their graduate work at. If it isn’t a good fit with their own, they ought to think long and hard about the advisability of proceeding ahead in hopes of an academic career. Faculty with the zeitgist (politics) different from theirs will greatly affect their experience of the field at every step along the way until they come up for tenure, that is if they are so lucky as to get accepted into the graduate program of their choice and later hired for an entry level academic position in the first place. Then those whose ranks they would hope to join will decide the big issue, that is if the aspirant gets tenure or not. I don’t worry on behalf of someone who wants to be a mathematician or a nuclear physicist, fields in which there is no “ideology,” but I would on behalf of someone who wanted to do political science or international relations.
Gender, national origin, and those other personal details that can be the basis for the discrimination individuals may experience in the wider world may not be obstacles the would-be academic will face. And those traits might even advantage them under some circumstances, e.g., an African-American woman who would go into science. But discordant political views might create huge obstacles to overcome, quite possibly insurmountable ones.
Care to give us a hint what field you work in? It’s hard for me to imagine what academic science or engineering field could be as beset as you describe. And, it’s still harder for me to imagine what could be such a “hot potato” that industry wouldn’t go there, provided of course there was the prospect of profits to be had.
July 24, 2010, 9:39 amneurodoc says:
AnonEngineeringProf, I would also ask about your marketability today after your time in academia as compared to what it was when you finished grad school and were offered 40% more to go work for industry than to become junior faculty. Has your earning potential in the wider world around you decreased over time, stayed about the same, or increased as you have proven yourself as a productive researcher? One can understand why someone starting out in History, Literature, Sociology, and other fields with little or no prospect of employment outside academia would be very concerned about job security and see tenure as little less important to their very survival than oxygen, food, and water, but in how many (and which) areas of science and engineering does one’s marketability decline if they chose an academic path?
July 24, 2010, 9:52 amAngus says:
This works in, say, a supermarket setting where the boss can quickly learn the basics of what is required to do each job. However, in academia where expertise is acquired over a 7-8 year period, a Dean who used to be in the Criminology department probably has little idea of what to look for in an Anthropology or Sociology hire.
July 24, 2010, 10:19 amMnZ says:
As a policy or academic matter, I am on the fence about tenure. However, I do find it interesting that at one time partnership in large law or accounting firms was akin to tenure. The old-timers at firms can tell stories of partners who were no longer productive (e.g., daily three martini lunch) who just stuck around. Those days are gone from what I see and hear. In a way, it is interesting that tenure still holds on.
July 24, 2010, 10:42 amPetep says:
Angus – on what basis do you assume that the ‘manager’, IE ‘Administrator’ is of lesser background ( in his/her area ), of lesser competence ( in management ) etc than the esteemed ‘tenured faculty’ ?
You will recall, I’m sure, that I also suggested that the faculty is reasonably included in the hiring process in terms of their specific backgrounds in specific areas of study, as you point out. However, that does NOT mean that ‘they are the entire selection process unto themselves’.
I have ‘sat in on’ MANY interviews, including the pre-interview resume-screening process, etc, as ‘the techy guy’, although a manager ( perhaps mine, perhaps not ) was the actual ‘hiring desk’. In these situations, my technical screening of the candidate was ONE of the factors the hiring manager considered, as it should be. If the manager knew me well, they probably credited considerable weight to my opinions and comments ( based on my own earned credibility with them ), but then THEY made the decision, not I ( in that kind of situation ).
July 24, 2010, 10:46 amFormer Army MP says:
Going from tenure to a 7-year contract would not change a thing.
New faculty applicants would be hired based on a simple checklist, just like now:
1. Liberal?
2. Black?
3. Whatever big minority the department has now (hispanic/asian/jew)?
4. Woman?
5. Anything other than Christian?
The only thing 7 year contracts would do would be a club to make sure all tenures stay 100% liberal at all times.
July 24, 2010, 10:54 amMatt Davis says:
It’s so repulsive that people hide behind anonymity and publish this cowardly rubbish, regurgitating all of the tired, kindergarten-level, conservative cliches about academia. You should be ashamed of yourself, Former Army MP. You’re a sad, sad human being.
July 24, 2010, 11:17 amMartha says:
This anecdote sounds to me like a managerial failure. They assigned a project but apparently never asked for progress updates / tests that would reveal problems before D-day. The software could have been written in two days, but the managers let the process drag into a year without reassigning anyone or documenting any inefficiency. Some manager approved the programmers to go on vacation when the software was to go into production.
And then they said that they couldn’t discipline the workers because that would require a year’s documentation, and they’d miss deadlines if they documented anything? If they had been doing their jobs in the first place, they’d have already had their documentation. Such ineptitude makes me wonder whether the managers made clear what was needed in the first place. Poor assignment often leads to poor results.
July 24, 2010, 11:18 amFub says:
Top of the head guesses:
Climatology?
Hydrology (political watershed wars)?
Toxicology / Pharmacology (outcomes influence regulation)?
Genetic engineering?
Biomed engineering?
Computer and network security?
All those areas and more can be highly politically charged, although I can’t think of a field that “industry wouldn’t go there”. But I could believe that academic researchers in some fields would be subject to lesser, or at least different, pressures for research directions than industrial researchers: he who pays the piper calls the tune.
July 24, 2010, 11:43 amArthur Kirkland says:
A huge reservoir of capital is searching for a promising home. Why doesn’t some of it fund an institution that would exploit Harvard’s tenure-generated handicaps — corruption, laziness, poor performance, self-centered focus — and produce a superior and profitable university (with the added benefit of vindicating the ideology of some investors, which ideology could use some rehabilitation)?
July 24, 2010, 11:47 amTenure-track Assistant Professor says:
In fact, faculty do have a lot of duties and responsibilities. The main duty of professors at top research universities is doing research. “Academic freedom” means that faculty members can decide what problems they study and what methods they use.
In order to get a tenure, an assistant professor has to prove that she is capable of doing world-class research. That takes year and year of graduate study and assistant professorship.
This is a misunderstanding of the mission of universities. The mission of universities is to to generate, disseminate, and preserve knowledge (see e.g. http://web.mit.edu/mission.html ), which does include educating students. But by no means TEACHING is the only or even the main goal of universities. Most innovations in technology, science, and medicine, which greatly benefit our society, are results of academic research.
You completely misunderstand what scientific research is. It is not about “thinking how to think”, “how to understand”. But rather is is about developing new theories, explaining physical phenomena, building prototype systems, proving new theorems etc.
Professors do not express their personal opinions about matters unrelated to their research during lectures. What college did you attend?
Again, I reiterate that doing world-class research is the main responsibility of faculty. This is not just some weird additional responsibility.
Do you care to elaborate? In my opinion, American universities are the best in the world in terms of research and education. Many students from around the world (including Western Europe) apply to MIT, Harvard, Princeton and other American universities. There are very few areas in which American companies are so competitive as in education (perhaps, the only exception is hi-tech companies that benefit a lot from their ties to universities).
July 24, 2010, 12:28 pmjust me says:
I am not a huge fan of tenure, although I am less familiar with it at the college level, but for elementary and secondary education it is a road map to disaster in many cases, because it protects teachers who may have at one time done a wonderful job, but who have essentially decided to stop educating for whatever reason.
I currently have personal experience with this at my daughter’s high school and her French teacher. Her French teacher essentially doesn’t really make much effort to teach her students French. Grades are essentially based on how well she likes the student.
The teacher is in her 34th year of teaching, and in spite of numerous complaints from parents, she still has her job and she still keeps collecting a paycheck, because she wants to keep teaching, and the school won’t fire her.
My daughter enjoyed the second half of the school year, when the teacher was out due to a health reason and they actually hired a long term sub that taught French (who was also appalled at the fact that halfway through the year they hadn’t even gotten through the first chapter of the textbook). Well the teacher who doesn’t teach is coming back, and the teacher who did teach is looking for a job. Gotta love tenure and teacher’s unions.
I do think high school and college tenure systems are a little different. High school teachers don’t generally do any research, and they aren’t expected to publish or mentor along graduate students in the same way a college professor does. Tenure for elementary and secondary education is designed more for permanent job security especially where unions are strong.
But my experience as a parent of children in a school that keeps the dreck because they don’t want to deal with firing a teacher, I am not a fan of tenure and think the system needs replacing or revamping.
July 24, 2010, 12:29 pmneurodoc says:
Yes, of course, “academic researchers in some fields would be subject to less, or at least different, pressures for research directions than industrial researchers,” and “he “who pays the piper calls the tune.” Who would imagine otherwise? Industry isn’t much interested in “basic” research, though in flusher times companies like IBM might have supported work that didn’t have clear commercial applications. But what relevance to the question of tenure, does tenure guarantee or even make more likely funding to support research, that funding most often coming from outside the university?
AnonEngineeringProf said,
There are a world of idiots out there, anyone of them capable of threatening a scientist or engineer with a lawsuit, or any of us with one, though they can’t come up with a legitimate cause of action, let alone facts to support one. So I’d like to know in which field(s) of academic endeavor as a scientist or engineer one might face credible threats of a lawsuit targeting them. Same with “their college presidents pressured to fire them,” by whom some yahoo state legislator, a wealthy donor, whom? And again what that might hold the prospect of profit is industry afraid to go near?
Scientist who experiment with animals have reason to fear for their safety and that of their families in the same way that abortion providers do. But industry researchers, who do not have tenure, face the same threats, which are real and sometimes acted upon. Similarly with genetic engineering and biomedical engineering, what difference does tenure make there? Computer and network security? Toxicology can produce some contentious disputes, but if industry isn’t pursuing the same topics it is because they don’t want the answers or aren’t willing to pay for them, and again toxicologists must tread more cautiously than scientific considerations alone would require unless who would do or threaten to do what to them?
I’m not maintaining that there are no scientific or engineering fields that would not suffer but for the protections tenure affords those working in them. I don’t know what they are, though, and would like some plausible examples.
July 24, 2010, 12:47 pmbee says:
Ilya writes: “At most, therefore, tenure will only protect the academic freedom of professors who either 1) manage to keep their unpopular views hidden from their colleagues until after they get tenure, or 2) have a road to Damascus conversion to unpopular views after getting tenured status. Such cases are not unheard of, but they are likely to be extremely rare….”
This might be a subject Ilya could discuss with Juan non-Volokh.
July 24, 2010, 12:49 pmneurodoc says:
I guess you’ve never heard of University of Phoenix, Capella University, Kaplan University, National University, and others of that ilk, which have been hugely profitable, indeed so profitable that Congress is at last scrutinizing them.
July 24, 2010, 12:51 pmArthur Kirkland says:
I have heard of them, but I believe none satisfies the “superior and profitable” standard. To the contrary, I would not hire a graduate or student of any of those institutions unless the applicant had a shockingly good explanation that overcame the lack of judgment displayed in choosing such a school.
July 24, 2010, 1:06 pmJimD says:
Here’s my perspective as a tenured finance professor at a public teaching university.
Good finance professors are difficult to find because there are options in the private sector. If you got rid of tenure, the price would certainly go up. My ability to find a job in the private sector has certainly fallen over time given that I’ve been accumulating teaching experience and not “work” experience.
I doubt that there are enough bad professors (and there are some) to justify the higher cost of not giving tenure.
July 24, 2010, 1:14 pmAllan Walstad says:
neurodoc
The same can be said of administrators, trustees, alumni, and students. Nevertheless, many faculty at undergraduate colleges do stay for the long term, and it’s a day-to-day long term. But my main point wasn’t anything about longevity, it was simply that undergraduate colleges are academic educational institutions, and the vast bulk of expertise in that regard lies with the faculty.
Where did I say “owners?” The closest I came to anything like that was with the somewhat metaphorical “…we faculty aren’t just employees of the college, we ARE the college.” The point being, the central, defining mission is education, and the central, essential interaction in college education, from time immemorial, is faculty teaching students. In that interaction, it is the faculty who have the expertise. So I suggest you re-read my comments to try disentangling what I said from YOUR presumptions about what I said.
Where the hell do you get “self-regarding” out of that? Are we to take students’ expertise as on a par with that of faculty? Do alumni not have a right to get on with their lives? If you have a real argument, fine, but drop the innuendo, please.
Perseus
I’m concerned about keeping a sufficient reservoir of power with the people who have the expertise: the professionals who bear the responsibility of carrying forward the central mission of academic education. As I stated in my original comment, one could not expect to run a college out of the faculty senate (for all sorts of reasons), and yes there are questions of overall direction, evolution of the mix of academic programs, marketing strategy, etc. etc. that are going to be substantially addressed and decided in other forums, although with respect and attention to the advice of the faculty.
July 24, 2010, 1:36 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
You can call them “tired, kindergarten-level, conservative cliches,” but what was one of the first attacks on Elena Kagan after her nomination? It was from the left, complaining that she didn’t hire enough women/minorities.
July 24, 2010, 1:37 pmneurodoc says:
Didn’t you say “(a) huge reservoir of capital is searching for a promising home”? It is in the hands of those who would insist upon a university that was both “superior and profitable”? Who would they be that would require both? There are a great many investors willing to pounce on opportunities to make money, and there are philanthropists who give their money to promote superior educational instutions. But though some of the former may also be among the latter, few would be so foolish as to imagine that they could simultaneously persue both at the same time, rather than one or the other.
July 24, 2010, 1:58 pmChris Travers says:
The fundamental problem is that in the industry, performance reviews are a sham (that’s the point of the book I linked to, which btw, was recommended to me by some of my former colleagues who are middle and upper-level managers at Microsoft). The goal of a performance review is to make the manager look good on his performance review, and this means that the whole interaction ends up being set up on the idea of making someone else look good rather than really trying to benefit the company. They don’t work. They’re damaging, and they inhibit workers from bringing up many legitimate problems to the attention of their superiors or engaging in politically risky behavior.
Borrowing a broken tool from industry in order to solve what tenure does strikes me as incredibly unwise.
I never said it was. I only asked what the alternative would be. One alternative would be a professors’ union with collective bargaining rights and union contracts guaranteeing academic freedom. Another alternative would be laws protecting the same. There are other alternatives as well. Performance reviews however don’t do what they are designed to do and they inhibit politically unpopular approaches. They are a bad idea in industry, let alone academia.
July 24, 2010, 2:16 pmneurodoc says:
No one is so foolish as to imagine that students have “expertise…on a par with that of faculty.” Students do, however, have interests that should not be subordinate to that of the faculty, and those interests aren’t always as well served by school administrators and faculty as they might be and should be.
“Do alumni not have a right to get on with their lives?”?! Are you really so obtuse as to think that the question rather than, “Do interested alumni not have a right to a say in their alma mater’s governance and direction, or does that right reside exclusively in the current administration and faculty?” What do you imagine the role of trustees to be? Do faculty have fiduciary responsibilities? They are, are they not, “employees” of the schools, however much job security they may have, and “employee” implies not in ultimate charge, doesn’t it?
“…although with respect and attention to the advice of the faculty,” which isn’t the case or would ever be otherwise? Why shouldn’t a school be run by the faculty senate, only because of practicalities, or might it be that the faculty has its own interests and those are not always in alignment with the school’s other “stakeholders,” including past (alumni) and future generations of students? The faculty could be allowed to run a school with the power to hire and fire administrators, engage a management company to run the institution’s day to day affairs, etc., but that isn’t the way it works or should work.
Have administrators and faculty ever behaved badly in concert? (see Duke lacrosse, Gang of 88, and Brodhead) Do you see the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (goacta.org) as a threat to “academic freedom”?
When I started my training as a physician, physicians were inclined to see themselves as the center of the health care universe, with others required to serve only as ancillaries or do what physicains weren’t interested in or trained to do. Things have changed hugely in recent decades where health care is concerned, and physicians, while still essential, no longer occupy that exalted position in the health care firmament. Your view of the role of faculty strikes me as akin to that of physicians back in the day, and for purposes of this comparison we might liken students to patients and note the interests of a great many others in both education and healthcare besides those of teachers and physicians.
“Self-regarding” comes from a narrowness of perspective and aggrandizement of the place of faculty in deciding matters beyond their classrooms and that immediately bearing on their function as teachers and researchers.
July 24, 2010, 2:30 pmneurodoc says:
A bit tautologic, but perhaps we should distinguish undergraduate colleges that are not part of larger universities from larger universities. The former are smaller, have fewer moving parts, and “teaching” gets more time and attention, all of which may have at least some relevance to this discussion.
July 24, 2010, 2:44 pmneurodoc says:
Thanks, that is responsive to the question I asked earlier of AnonProfessorEngineering (“I would also ask about your marketability today after your time in academia as compared to what it was when you finished grad school and were offered 40% more to go work for industry than to become junior faculty. Has your earning potential in the wider world around you decreased over time, stayed about the same, or increased as you have proven yourself as a productive researcher?”)
I think yours is a valid point in favor of tenure. If I saw my value in the “real world” declining over time rather than increasing as I gained more experience and proved myself in my chosen field, I would expect something like tenure to protect my long-term self-interest. (What would you have been willing to accept upfront as a lump sum payment in lieu of tenure to work on a fixed-term contract? An amount a school might be willing to pony up in return for greater flexibility in their hiring and retention practices, or an amount too great for a school to seriously consider?)
July 24, 2010, 2:56 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
Very interesting discussion so far. I’ve learned a lot. I’m an assistant professor in a political science department and am up for tenure this year, in the name of full disclosure. A few thoughts, drawing on mainy my professional experience. First, it might be more fruitful to not discuss tenure writ large but discuss it in particular contexts; standards vary from discipline to discipline, from university to university, and from department to department. For example, getting tenure at most law schools is comparatively easy, if the basis of comparison is a decent social science or humanities department at a research institution, where the publication requirements are much more demaonding. But that’s understandable. Law schools have to compete w/ the private sector for the best legal minds.
These days, it’s increasingly difficult to get tenure in a first-rate political science department. Many very good young scholars are denied and in some cases, move elsewhere when the writing is on the wall or simply to beef up their publication record. In addition, earning a Ph.D. in political science usually takes longer than six years. That’s partially because a competitive candidate needs decent publications even to be considered for a tenure-track position. For instance, in the political science department at UCLA, the average time to complete a Ph.D. –not to mention the high attrition rate– is nine years. I’ve seen the flaws in the tenure system firsthand but doubt, at least from my observations, that politicized scholarship is a serious problem. The differences and resulting disputes often involve methological differences. My concern w/ abolishing would be that if tenure/job security were abolished, fewer talented people would go into the social sciences and humanities because the risk vis a vis the reward would simply be too great. I don’t know if I would’ve pursued a Ph.D. w/out the possibility that someday, I would be able to earn tenure. The pay for academics in liberal arts departments is nothing to write home about, after all. But tenure/job security, coupled w/ a flexible schedule and the freedom, more or less, to do the kind of research one wants to do can make up for the poor pay. One more thought. Doesn’t a reform, like seven-year renewable contracts, raise some of the same problems w/ the tenure system as it currently exists? Any RPT process will be far from perfect.
July 24, 2010, 3:34 pmHerb Spencer says:
Sorry — not really! — to have asked a question apparently too hot for some to handle, but isn’t public university professors’ tenure status as open to public disclosure as, say, public entity attorneys’ salaries, or any other public employee’s job info? Why shouldn’t those who pay these profs’ salaries and maintain them in their positions have input on both? At least I’ve learned that some believe Zasloff to be a moron, which I suspected he was independent of, but not necessarily inconsistent with, his politics, and therefore more than eligible for removal from the public dole before he causes any more harm to the Constitution, let alone to law students, while on it.
July 24, 2010, 4:30 pmElliot says:
Interesting. Can you give some examples of engineering research that is politically charged? I’m not asking what your research is, just looking for some other examples since I’m not sure how engineering becomes politically charged.
July 24, 2010, 5:00 pmTenure-track Assistant Professor says:
I really hope that we will not try to model our education system after the health care system. After all, the education system (at the college and graduate level) is in a much better shape than the health care system.
July 24, 2010, 5:07 pmMartha says:
Yes. Zasloff’s rank (Professor), along with his 12 years at UCLA, suggests that he does have tenure. To be certain, you should contact UCLA.
July 24, 2010, 5:09 pmBama 1L says:
I could see abolishing tenure at law schools. Law professors aren’t typically engaged in the long research projects that require tenure’s protection to see through. A productive law professor just pumps out an article or two a year that some 2Ls, somewhere, will think is worth publishing. I mean, let’s be serious, how much actual research has an average law professor done in his life?
I am not too worried about the drop in quality abolishing tenure at law schools would cause. The number of qualified persons is truly huge, and there is little reason to suppose that the best and brightest JDs are law professors anyway. If anything, it would be a boon to the rest of the legal profession.
I am not being completely serious. But I do think law professors are an odd lot to be commenting on this and are bringing notably bad ideas to the table, because law is not a real academic field. Come on, be honest. You have two bachelor’s degrees.
I appreciate that the real attraction of being a law professor is to be allowed to comment on any matter than can be loosely described as “policy.” I suppose we all need law professors to have tenure so the occasional good idea will seep through.
July 24, 2010, 5:11 pmTenure-track Assistant Professor says:
For example, if you demonstrate that some devices or industrial practices are not safe or secure, you can alienate large corporations that manufacture these devices or that rely on these practices.
July 24, 2010, 5:14 pmAlessandra says:
World-class? No, although that certainly is nice when it happens. Repeating the party line research and having big-name connections in your résumé can certainly improve one’s candidacy for tenure, when the world-class level just isn’t there.
I have no fast answers to the tenure conundrum. Easier to solve than the tenure question is the adjunct situation. I think it shouldn’t be so hard to find a better way to afford them more ethical treatment, as everyone claims.
July 24, 2010, 5:15 pmTenure-track Assistant Professor says:
Of course, the tenure policy depends on the department and university. In my school, you are expected to have many publications in top ranked journals. Moreover, when your tenure case is sent out to leading experts in the field for review, it is a huge problem if one of them is not familiar with your research (that means basically that you don’t get tenure).
July 24, 2010, 5:34 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
For the record, Zasloff has tenure. I’m not sure what effect the abolition of tenure would have on law school hiring if the starting salary were held constant. Compared w/ most social science and humanities academics, they are paid very well. Would it be more difficult to lure excellent people out of private practice? Perhaps not, if it were very easy to have one’s contract renewed every five to seven years. De facto tenure. But isn’t job security, among other things, what makes being a tenure-track professor so attractive?
Again, my concern would be that whatever might happen at law schools or other professional schools, one would have to take on quite a bit of risk and uncertainty to try to complete a Ph.D. on the social sciences or humanities, try to find a tenure-track position in a very tight academic job market, and even after doing work as an adjunct/lecturer and then as an assiatnt professor, still not have job security? Who in his or her right mind would go into academia and take on this sort of risk for so little reward? At least a law professor who is denied tenure can return to the private sector and practice law.
July 24, 2010, 6:13 pmMike G says:
Doesn’t it kind of say it all that the institution in our society with a mechanism to preserve freedom is the one where you can most easily get into trouble for exercising it the wrong way?
Get rid of tenure, unfreeze the academic job market, and then professors can have as much freedom as normal people.
July 24, 2010, 8:27 pmreader says:
The first step should be to decouple tenure and compensation. It should be trivially easy for university boards to impose campus-wide salary cuts in times of economic difficulty, instead of having to lay off untenured faculty and staff while being forced to retain high-cost tenured faculty (both the good ones and the parasites). This will also allow boards to reduce senior faculty salaries overall to whatever level the market will bear — and today that would be vastly lower (you could cut senior faculty salaries in half and you’d still have 50 people lining up to take every position; and no I don’t believe academic “quality” would suffer, only academic self-importance).
First decouple tenure and compensation and let the system readjust. Then we can see if tenure needs to be abolished entirely.
July 24, 2010, 8:32 pmJoe says:
For those arguing for tenure, where does the notion come from that industry routinely hires and fires people? That everyone’s job is hanging like a thread and management is just waiting to fire that person. Not only is this patently untrue, those of us in private industry receive, gasp, raises! The companies we work for often find non-salaried ways to keep us working there.
July 24, 2010, 8:45 pmJoe says:
The argument that research scientists need tenure to complete their research cuts both ways. The incentive and temptation to work slowly is undeniable. Moreover, the rule of academia is “publish or die.” Publishing is, alas, not the same as innovating. The goals of producing commercially viable inventions are fundamentally different that to publish (and/or impress your colleagues.) Thus, the incentives to create productive innovations are totally perverse.
July 24, 2010, 8:49 pmHaba says:
Florida Tech is a science/engineering-focused school in melbourne Florida. It is a private, non-profit school with faculty who engage in funded research. It offers its faculty 4 or 5 year contracts once they are promoted to Associate Professor.
July 24, 2010, 8:58 pmTenure-track Assistant Professor says:
I disagree with that. Look at what is happening now with the University of California at Berkeley. UC Berkeley was ranked among the best universities in various academic fields. But because of the state deficit problem, they had to cut salaries of both tenured and untenured faculty. Many professors have been very unhappy about that. Some have already left UC Berkeley. If the exodus continues (which is the most likely scenario), Berkeley will loose its place among best American universities in several years.
July 24, 2010, 9:08 pmTenure-track Assistant Professor says:
What is the incentive to work slowly?
A lot of basic and applied research is conducted at universities. However, it is incorrect to assume that if research cannot be immediately used in practice, it is less important than more applied research. Newtonian Mechanics, Special and General Theory of Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics were completely useless, from a practical point of view, when they were discovered. But undoubtedly their impact on our life was tremendous in the long run.
July 24, 2010, 9:28 pmJohnMc says:
If not the tenure system, the Great Fermat Theorem and many other problems would still be open.
——–
I strongly disagree. Just look at Pharma. They will commit Billions to R&D with maybe one in ten making it through the process. And that process can take a decade.
If Industry can do it, without a tenure system, why can’t Education?
I teach as an adjunct at both for profit and nonprofit institutions. The trend I see at the nonprofits is that the adjuncts and upper level grads end up teaching courses once the prevue of full professors. Yet the schools tout to the parents how great it is that their child will be taught by this prize winning professor. Which in some cases maybe a fraud as that professor may only teach a 4th level capstone course in his chosen specialty, not the Physics 101 their child must pass his freshman year in a hall the size of the Metropolitan Art.
July 24, 2010, 9:50 pmTenure-track Assistant Professor says:
The difference is that proving Fermat’s Last Theorem took 350 years not 10 years.
Unfortunately, nobody explains what problem they want to solve by abolishing the tenure system. The only reasonable thing I’ve heard is that universities will be able to fire professors who no longer do outstanding research. In other words, they will be able to fire professors who don’t publish enough papers in 6 years (the duration of the contract). But this exactly means that a professor cannot spend more than 6 years working on one problem.
July 24, 2010, 10:02 pmAcad Ronin says:
1) So far no one seems to have mentioned the positive effect of tenure on teaching. I know the usual horror stories about poor teaching by tenured professors. However, what we measure is teacher popularity, not teacher quality. All the research of which I am aware shows that at best teacher ratings are uncorrelated with teaching quality (as measured by the students’ performance on follow-on courses), and at worst slightly negatively correlated with teaching quality. A recent article in the J of Political Economy, one of the top journals in economics, shows that tenured teachers received worse teacher ratings, but did a better job of teaching, than did untenured teachers. (Possibly the untenured teachers felt a geater need to stay popular, which would include not teaching material students don’t like but will need.)
2) As others have remarked, tenured professors spend a great deal of time on PhD students and on administration, and often have higher teaching loads than non-tenured faculty. In the absence of tenure, these faculty would spend more time on research and less on these activities because research is observable to people at other schools, who can then tell if someone is smart and up on their field, while teaching, administration, and the like are not. That is part of the reason why top schools try to protect untenured faculty from admin and give them lighter teaching loads. It these faculty do not get tenure it will be their research that gets them a chance to interview at other schools.
3) Tenure supports research, which is part of teaching. Not only does research ensure that faculty stay relatively current, it can help them to stay at the forefront of developments. This is only to a slight degree because of their own research. What people tend not to realize is that research is learning, and while you are teaching you need to continue to learn. Faculty that are active researchers spend as much time on the student side of the classroom as they do in front of the class. They just call it attending seminars, job talks by candidates, and sessions at conferences, and they are not graded. The result is that faculty that are active in research may, every now and then, give their classes something that is not yet in the textbooks. This is less likely to happen in basic courses but is somewhat more likely to occur in advanced courses.
4) Tenure frees faculty to hire people who are smarter and cheaper than the people who are doing the hiring. I would have difficulty voting to hire someone if I knew the Dean might decide a few years downstream to keep them and fire me. I would protect myself by hiring people who were a little weaker. I observed this in industry when people felt insecure about their jobs.
Disclosure: I do not have tenure. I taught at one top school and decided not to go forward for tenure knowing that I rightly would not get it, and was turned down for tenure at another, somewhat less highly rated school. I have also worked in industry in my field. I just prefer to keep trying to teach than working in industry, though industry paid better.
July 24, 2010, 10:08 pmJoe says:
What is the incentive to work slowly?
Are you serious? I’d go so far as to say that the failure to see something so patently obvious is exactly what’s wrong with tenure. When you have guaranteed employment, the penalties for not producing simply don’t exist.
To be more plain, if you have five years to develop something, why do it sooner? Who would care? And if you fail, who cares?
For the record, the special and general theories of relativity weren’t developed by a tenured professor. Damn. Furthermore, the belief that tenure was important to the developments of Dirac, Feynman, Maxwell, Bohrs, Schrödinger, etc. is beyond idiotic. First class intellects don’t need tenure, never did and never will.
July 24, 2010, 10:14 pmElliot says:
Well, where did they go? If they went to another university, what is the net loss to the system? For the unhappy ones still at Berkely, are there suffucient senior level positions available at other institutions to absorb them? Will they bump tenured people at these other institutions? If there is a generalized lowering of California state school pay, are all these unhappy faculty going to go somewhere else to get more money? Where?
July 24, 2010, 10:15 pmAllan Walstad says:
neurodoc
I believe I can assure you, neurodoc, that I’m not too terribly obtuse when it comes to analyzing issues. I don’t know who you think you’re impressing with these obnoxious little insults.
The thread is about tenure. I suggest that the core mission at an undergraduate college is faculty teaching students, and the main locus of expertise and proper responsibility in that regard lies with the faculty. Tenure makes it possible for experienced faculty to publicly, persistently, and if necessary stridently criticize administrators without being vulnerable to dismissal for doing so. This is the only real power we have, and it isn’t even actually “power;” it’s the ability to speak truth to power. Depending on how the college is set up, one of the places where faculty might take their criticism is in fact to the trustees.
Apparently, you think that my concern lies in selfishly protecting faculty interests. You might have considered the possibility that my interest lies in defending the quality and integrity of the educational process.
I agree with you that there are different kinds of colleges and universities and the differences may be relevant to the discussion of tenure and other issues. I am speaking from my experience at an undergraduate regional campus of a major university, where the “main” campus is research-oriented and heavy on graduate programs.
I don’t see where just because you graduated from X College it means you should have a say in how X is run — as opposed to your input being valued. But having some alumni on the board of trustees seems like a good idea to me. Seeking and accepting such a position implies a commitment of time and energy.
July 24, 2010, 10:29 pmDesiderius says:
“Leiter just writes like a philosopher”
No, like a dictator.
July 24, 2010, 10:35 pmChester White says:
My wife is a tenured research professor at a major university. Had tenure not existed when she went into academics there is no way she would have done it.
She is now one of the leading lights in her field.
Had she gone into industry, arguably her uni and the world would be
July 24, 2010, 10:37 pmmuch worse off.
AnonEngineeringProf says:
Why it would be difficult to hire someone: I think it would be difficult for the administration to evaluate applicants. Who would do it? Deans? But Deans typically administer half a dozen or more departments, and don’t have deep knowledge of more than one or two. Folks even higher up are even less likely to know much about the typical hiring case.
Where you can read more: see the comment by jseliger at this blog post and the comment by Cliff Bekar at this blog post. Sorry that I wasn’t able to give direct links; the blogs don’t seem to allow direct links to comments. You’ll have to use your browser’s Search function. You’ll find detailed, lengthy comments that discuss this in greater depth.
Whether the private sector suffers from the same problem: no clue. I don’t have enough industry experience to compare. Hopefully others will be able to compare.
July 24, 2010, 10:42 pmAnonEngineeringProf says:
The field: Electronic voting.
It’s highly politicized.
There’s not much prospect of significant profits. The large software firms aren’t about to touch it, due to the risk of having their brand tarnished with political conversy, and the existing voting technology companies tend not to have enough resources to do long-range fundamental research. If you look at who tends to employ private-sector researchers in computer science, it tends to be large companies (Microsoft, IBM, HP, Intel, etc.) who can afford to set up industry research labs. Those companies don’t want to be associated with studying electronic voting technology (from their perspective, only bad things can come of it — e.g., bad press, political controversy, etc.). I know of one researcher employed at a major industry research lab who does research in this area in his spare time, and publishes great work, but his employer doesn’t want to have their name associated with the research or to support this research, because it is a politically charged arena and not a business that they plan on entering.
Voting technology is important to society, but it offers little prospect of big corporate profits and it’s a “hot potato” that brings a significant risk of political controversy, which no large IT company wants to be associated with.
July 24, 2010, 10:54 pmBob says:
“The standard argument for tenure is is the need to protect academic freedom.”
We’ve tried it their way now for several decades, and what has that gotten us? Johnny still can’t read, and now he hates the United States — all at taxpayer expense.
I no longer see how a school can take public money and push an ideology that is hostile to the nation that supports it. Screw that. If you take public money, you need to teach what America is all about, as outlined in the Constitution — not what Marx and Soros would rather it be, taught under the guise of academic freedom. Private schools can teach what they want.
July 24, 2010, 10:55 pmAnonEngineeringProf says:
My marketability has undoubtedly increased significantly since when I was first hired as an assistant professor — but it would presumably also have increased significantly if I had taken the industry job instead. I don’t know what alternative offers I would receive today if I sought other employment, but I can tell you this: a job offer that doesn’t come with the job security of tenure would have to offer a significantly higher salary to make up for the lack of job security, for me to seriously consider it.
Of course, if some other university wanted to offer a 30-40% premium on salaries in exchange for lack of tenure, they might have a chance of attracting strong researchers. That’s essentially what industry research labs do, in my area (computer science). But if it comes down to a head-to-head comparison between two job offers, one with tenure and one without, at the same salary level, all else being equal, the one without tenure is going to be at a major disadvantage when it comes to recruiting the best talent.
July 24, 2010, 10:59 pmTenure-track Assistant Professor says:
I’d go so far to say that the fact that you insult your opponents in this discussion clearly indicates that you don’t have any arguments.
Still salary raises, and most importantly academic reputation, do depend on results. So if a researcher can get results faster, he or she will do their best to get them faster.
Absolutely. Nobody doubts that.
For the record, you were the first who suggested that. (I mentioned Relativity and Quantum Mechanics when I was comparing basic and applied research NOT when I was discussing the tenure system.)
I know. And any other opinion is “idiotic”. Right?
July 24, 2010, 11:10 pmadam c says:
Oddly missing from this discussion is an awareness that academic tenure in the U.S. is a 20th century phenomenon, so we have a good deal of evidence pertaining to how universities operate without tenure. There is a small literature on this topic in economics, including a highly useful article by Meiners & McCormick and a very accessible book by Amacher and Meiners.
The short answer is that the institution of tenure transfers power over personnel decisions to faculty and away from deans. How you feel about the decision-making ability of faculty committees vs. deans should largely shape your views on tenure.
In my experience, what deans most want is an absence of trouble, especially in the classroom. For sure they are generally incompetent to judge people’s research, so that would tend to be given less weight in personnel decisions made by deans. Also, firing people is and always has been unpleasant, especially if someone has been around for a while. The default decision in a world of regular reappointments tends to be a favorable one, because “it’s only for a few years.” The lifetime aspect of tenure decisions raises the stakes immensely, making them contentious.
The historical record suggests strongly that, rather than a being a way to protect indolent faculty, tenure arose as a way for senior faculty to impose higher performance standards on junior faculty. An empirical study of university decision-making by W. Brown identifies some of the pros and cons of a greater faculty role in university governance. It’s a mixed bag, but better personnel decisions seem to result.
Comparisons of the operational flaws in real-world tenure systems to the virtues of some idealized alternative are simply another example of the nirvana fallacy.
July 24, 2010, 11:25 pmAnonEngineeringProf says:
Here are two that jump immediately to mind from my field (there are many other examples):
After Avi Rubin (Professor at Johns Hopkins University) co-authored a seminal paper pointing out defects in Diebold voting machines, Diebold called up the president of Johns Hopkins and tried to get the president to force him to withdraw the paper, fire him, etc.
After Ed Felten (Professor at Princeton University) co-authored a major paper identifying devastating security flaws in the SDMI copy protection schemes, one company whose scheme got broken threatened the authors with a lawsuit unless they withdrew their paper. The threat was serious enough that they withdraw the paper. Ed Felten then spent the next year (his sabbatical) fighting in court to get declaratory judgement allowing them to publish the paper, and about a year later they were finally able to publish the paper.
Several years later, another voting technology company’s lawyers sent the same Ed Felten a threatening letter, after Felten announced plans to study their voting technology.
Here are some links where you can learn more about the Felten SDMI case, which received the most public coverage of these three incidents: Slashdot, EFF, Felten, NY Times, NY Times, Daily Princetonian (catch the reference to tenure?).
These threats are serious, and credible, and they do have an impact on research. Even if the company that’s threatening you doesn’t win their lawsuit in the end, they can cost you a lot of time and money — not to mention the off chance that they might win because some judge didn’t understand the technology.
July 24, 2010, 11:29 pmTenure-track Assistant Professor says:
They went to other top schools.
Well, the state of California clearly wants UC Berkeley to be a leading university in the nation (otherwise, they would not spend so much money on it to begin with). So for them it is a loss.
Of course, many people will stay. As far as I know, those who are leaving go mostly to private schools (not necessarily in California).
July 24, 2010, 11:34 pmcathyf says:
I’m kind of amazed that no mention is made of the ACTUAL day-to-day academic freedoms that tenure protects:
1) The freedom to give a failing grade to a student who failed the course. Even if the student’s rich daddy is BFF with the president. Even if the student is whiney and badgers the dean.
2) The freedom to push an important athlete on to the academically-ineligible list because the student is not performing adequately in classes.
A huge part of the academic economy is that institutions are accreditors of students’ knowledge and skills. Their opinions on their students achievements are valued because they have an accumulated “credibility capital” that comes from the past performance of their alumni. That “capital” is somewhat and often mostly the accumulation of their predecessors — who steadfastly resisted every whiney pre-med, every lazy rich boy, and every academically overwhelmed star offensive lineman. Example: Dean Spineless of Acme College has whiney pre-meds in his office every semester complaining when they get any grade other than an A. So he forces the physics and chemistry and biology professors to change the grades to A’s. The pre-meds with their straight-A averages graduate and go to med school, where the med schools find out that they don’t know jack about physics and chemistry and biology. So word goes down to the med school admission committee — no more admissions from Acme College! After a few years, word on the high school street is that Acme grads don’t get into med school, so no one with the slightest interest in medical school goes to Acme. The academic reputation of Acme collapses, enrollments trickle away, the school collapses financially and closes.
The fundamental fact about tenure is that it is only to the one institution — if you are a tenured faculty member, and your school goes belly-up, your tenure has no value. So it’s similar to peonage (the serf is owned by the land) in that it aligns the long-range economic interests of the faculty with the long-range economic interests of the institution.
So tenure means that SOMEBODY at the institution has long-term interests aligned with the institution. Presidents serve an average of five-year terms these days. Trustees are, as their name suggests, expected to act altruistically because while the academic reputation of the institution is a matter of pride to them, they are economically independent of it. Deans and other senior administrators serve at the pleasure of the president and trustees. All the other administrators serve at the pleasure of the senior administrators. Alumni (especially young alumni who have no intellectual reputation and are relying on their alma mater’s reputation) have a strong interest, but they aren’t there and have no authority (except for the handful that are trustees — who are rarely young.)
The free market works via the establishment and protection of property rights. Academic institutions suffer the Tragedy of the Commons — no one owns them. Tenure is an artificial construct which gives faculty ownership of the institution so that they have a direct economic interest in the preservation and acquisition of the institution’s reputation for academic integrity.
July 24, 2010, 11:35 pmneurodoc says:
And what critical difference did tenure make in these instances? (I expect that Bill Brody, then Hopkins president, with a PhD in EE/computer sciences and a patent holder himself, told Diebold that their lawyers should talk to Hopkins’ lawyers, but that he had not intention of disciplining, let alone firing, Professor Rubin for his service to the country in exposing the security flaws in those voting machines.) If Rubin were working for a Diebold competitor who wanted to challenge Diebold in the marketplace, do you think they wouldn’t have backed him up in the same way I expect his university did?
July 24, 2010, 11:40 pmAnonEngineeringProf says:
It means the university president cannot fire the professor as a result of their research and has very little leverage to pressure them to change what they are doing (assuming the professor is tenured). That’s a big deal. It changes the entire tenor of the conversation.
And here’s the most important thing: the professor knows in advance, when they are considering engaging in the research, that they are safe from reprisals, no matter what their findings may be, no matter who they may embarass. If there’s uncertainty — if you don’t know that you are safe no matter what you find — then there’s a higher chance that you will say “to heck with this, I’ll go work on some other problem”. Tenure helps prevent that.
That’s how I view it, anyway.
P.S. Here’s another recent story you might find interesting: Toyota appreciates professor’s help, but ….
July 25, 2010, 12:15 amKen Hahn says:
I used to be against tenure. I have changed my mind. It should be considered a taxable benefit, equal to all other taxable income. Any tenured academic would then pay income taxes based on twice the previous level of income. I think this would cure the problem.
July 25, 2010, 1:41 amElliot says:
This situation is not very different from private industry. Specialized knowledge exists at a given level, and as one moves up the org chart, or in a horizontal direction, familiarity with that specialty necessarily diminishes. That’s why there are usually many people consulted in a hiring decision. The specialists, direct supervisors, and potential co-workers are all involved. Industry is full of positions equally as specialized as those found in any faculty.
July 25, 2010, 2:24 amjoe silverman says:
I don’t find anything inherently more valuable in a university professor than in a plumber. So, either tenure for all or tenure for none. When the costs are weighed, the latter alternative dominates.
July 25, 2010, 2:58 amPerseus says:
Thanks for the links. JPE 1988? That brings back memories of when I was an undergraduate poring over KKR’s LBOs (“private equity” these days) to see how much bondholders got screwed over.
July 25, 2010, 4:25 amSDN says:
Arthur, as long as not one thin dime of my tax money goes to keep the current crappy system in place, either at the producing or consuming ends, they can have it. Are you willing to go for that?
July 25, 2010, 7:47 amneurodoc says:
AnonEngineeringProf, thanks for your responses, which have been informative. I still think these instances must be rather rare, but you have pointed to the possibilities in an area that had not occurred to me. (I thought, naively it seems, that engineering was surely the least controversial of endeavors, since it confines itself to the physical and seeks to accomplish useful ends.)
July 25, 2010, 9:57 amCJColucci says:
Unfortunately, nobody explains what problem they want to solve by abolishing the tenure system.
Several commenters did, but you’d have to read between the lines. A few are a little less discreet about it.
July 25, 2010, 10:18 amKev says:
If only this were true. In an ideal world where administrators were still actively engaged in teaching, they would, as you said, exist strictly to facilitate better teaching. But upon getting their “promotion,” many admins lose sight of what it’s like to be a teacher, and their decisions often reflect a personal agenda that has nothing to do with teaching. Requiring admins to teach even one class every semester would do a lot towards dismantling the proverbial ivory tower, but nobody seems to have had the courage to try this model yet.
This should be pretty obvious, as many admins end up overseeing departments or colleges that are much larger than their own area of expertise. How well can a Dean of Fine Arts (whose academic field is, say, art) truly evaluate a professor of piano? And expand that to a College of Arts and Sciences; the dean with the art background is likely to be totally clueless as to how to hire a French professor.
I can’t speak for the commenter to whom you’re responding, but what I’m saying is that the primary goal of universities should be teaching; if nothing else, that’s where the students’ tuition money (the amount of which has grown exponentially in recent years) should be going. Conducting research is indeed a laudable goal, but it should be funded almost completely externally. And a “professor” who excels at research but is a lousy teacher should not be among the best-compensated in his/her department (unless the extra funds are also generated externally), and some might wonder whether such a person should be retained at all.
July 25, 2010, 11:08 amTenure-track Assistant Professor says:
I just want to point out that the best-compensated professors are those who have named professorship appointments. Their salaries come from private funds not from student’s tuition money. Then it is the donor who sets the conditions under which the appointments are awarded (whether for outstanding teaching or outstanding research).
July 25, 2010, 11:31 amRonald C. Den Otter says:
Just curious. How many of you who oppose tenure have Ph.D.s? That is, you’ve been through a Ph.D. program and have been on the academic job market?
Another thought. No one wants to talk about tenure in the humanities and social sciences in this thread, but I don’t see how you will get good people going into those areas if you don’t have job security at the end of the rainbow. It is true that a public or private research institution may be able to offer enough financial compensation to attract good scholars, but what about, say, the CSU system? Perhaps you don’t know how low the starting salary actually is. It’s also evident to me that many of you don’t know how hard it is to publish in good places. Writing and publishing a book is an unbelievably time-consuming process, for example.
“I can’t speak for the commenter to whom you’re responding, but what I’m saying is that the primary goal of universities should be teaching; if nothing else, that’s where the students’ tuition money (the amount of which has grown exponentially in recent years) should be going. Conducting research is indeed a laudable goal, but it should be funded almost completely externally. And a “professor” who excels at research but is a lousy teacher should not be among the best-compensated in his/her department (unless the extra funds are also generated externally), and some might wonder whether such a person should be retained at all.”
I agree, Kev, but this is the way that research institutions have been set up. Even public ones. If teaching really counted in the RPT process, then there would be an incentive to teach well and spend time w/ students. Where I’m at, a non-research institution, teaching counts a lot. In principle, a bit more than research. I don’t see how research in the humanities could be funded externally, however. Those who do research in the social sciences probably couldn’t rely (much) on external finding as well.
July 25, 2010, 11:49 amElliot says:
“Another thought. No one wants to talk about tenure in the humanities and social sciences in this thread, but I don’t see how you will get good people going into those areas if you don’t have job security at the end of the rainbow.”
When somebody starts in a PhD program in the humanities they have no guarantee of job security when they finish. How many humanities Phd’s graduate each year? How many university positions are available?
In terms of tenure security prospects, I would compare the number of new humanities PhD’s each year to the number of people granted humanities tenure each year.
Perhaps somebody knows how many applications a school gets for each humanities PhD position it advertises?
July 25, 2010, 2:13 pmneurodoc says:
Today’s NYTimes observes (laments?) that the Roberts Court is the most conservative one in decades. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/us/25roberts.html?_r=1&hp Imagine what the Court might look like if instead of empowering the President to appointment subject to confirmation by the Senate each Justice, the Constitution had granted Washington the power to chose the first Justice, but thereafter given the choice of each new Justice of those already sitting as Justices. I see no “mechanical” reason why that wouldn’t work, but I would worry about the “diversity” thing if it were left up to judges to decide who would join them on the bench rather than the chief executive. Yes, not exactly how tenure works, since “outsiders” (often like-minded peers) are drawn in to the “confirmation” process (award of tenure), but I do think the way tenure works tends to produce ideologic monocultures in those fields most open to ideologies (not mathematics).
July 25, 2010, 2:33 pmSammy Finkelman says:
New controversies can develop after professors get tenure – the set of controversies is nit stable. Tenure makes it more difficult for new things to become wisdom all professors have to agree on.
July 25, 2010, 2:49 pmA non says:
@Kev:
In fact in most universities teaching is more important than research. This is true in most public universities (except at the very top), and in most liberal arts colleges. It’s true in all community colleges. The proportion of research-first positions among all academic positions is actually not that large. More importantly, before you start advising other private entities how to conduct their business you should try learning a little about the business. Look at the budget reports for Princeton in 2008-2009 and 1996-1997.
July 25, 2010, 4:28 pmA non says:
My post was interrupted, but to complete the thought suggesting that “tuition money” is funding research is ludicrous. In research universities the situation is the opposite: a large fraction of the operating budget comes from overhead on research grants in science and engineering (it is no accident that being able to obtain grants is a component of the tenure criteria in such universities). Moreover a non-trivial fraction of the students are on financial aid. In other words, the non-teaching operation is subsidizing the teaching operation. In the Princeton budgets I linked to, the net tuition income (tuition paid minus financial aid) is less than the costs for student services.
July 25, 2010, 4:57 pmA non says:
Finally, you may want to compare Princeton with Dartmouth, which is more of a liberal-arts college. There, tuition is a larger fraction of the operating income, and teaching is a very significant component of both hiring and promotion.
July 25, 2010, 5:06 pmneurodoc says:
You assert that “in most universities teaching is more important than research,” but it is not clear on what basis you make that claim. Is it the case that how effective an individual is in the classroom counts for more than their scholarly contributions when they come up for tenure? In most universities do tenured faculty spend more time engaged in keeping abreast in their fields and teaching per se (putting together their courses and preparing for class, lecturing, office hours for meeting with students, reading student papers, grading exams, etc.) than they do on research pursuits? Do the most senior faculty generally have the same teaching loads and responsibilities as the most junior faculty, as one would expect if “teaching is more important than research” at most universities? If the answers to those questions isn’t an unequivocal “yes” (and I don’t think it is), then what exactly is there for “teaching is more important than research,” something more than rhetoric?
Also, you don’t say what you would have us note in those Princeton budgets. Is it the numbers themselves (which?), or is it the VP for Finance and Treasurer’s discussion? What in those budgets argues in support of your contention that “teaching is more important research”?
I think it is interesting that the school’s treasurer says at the outset of her report:
I think those remarks by Princeton’s treasurer are interesting for a couple of reasons: first, the acknowledgement that some in Congress have started to question the mega endowment funds in the $Bs of a few schools, Princeton among them, which dwarf the treasuries of many countries and have grown enormously not only from untaxed charitable contributions, but also from untaxed and compounding earnings. Second, the unqualified statement that “institutions are obligated to expend the income from those restricted funds for specifically defined purposes,” when Princeton took a different legal position when sued by the Robertson family over how it had used the money donated by the Robertson for the establishment and operation of the Woodrow Wilson School.” http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2003/09/11/8458/
July 25, 2010, 7:48 pmDesiderius says:
“I don’t see how you will get good people going into those areas if you don’t have job security at the end of the rainbow”
Good people, in this case, is not a static concept. The problem is retaining the goodness past the end of the rainbow.
July 25, 2010, 9:57 pmFormer Army MP says:
I have decided to respond.
I am a white Christian vet who teaches in a soft area. I love teaching and would love to go from the adjunct union to the tenure union.
It will NEVER happen. I am white. Strike one–any black interviewee who ever shows up at my tier 6 university has the red carpet laid out, then any hispanic. The dean and the president or the senior vice meet them at the door to kiss their butts.
It will never happen. My area isn’t as bad as law, where 1/2 of all new hires are jewish even though they make up 10% of the students. Still, Christian.
It will never happen. The Chinese and Koreans organize to smear any internal applicant who is not one of their own. I am not one of their own.
IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN. I am a vet. Vets are evil stupid baby killers, who most likely even voted for Bush. Much too evil to come to committee meetings.
In conclusion, you are either dumber than dirt or you know exactly why I post behind a screen name. If I used my real name I would be out on my butt tomorrow.
July 26, 2010, 8:55 amneurodoc says:
Your source for “1/2 of all new hires are jewish even though they make up 10% of the students”?
July 26, 2010, 9:25 amRonald C. Den Otter says:
Nice point. I shouldn’t have overlooked it.
I’m also curious how the RPT process would work if there weren’t tenure. The people on this thread who oppose tenure seem to think that being a professor is like any other job but anyone who has had both knows that that isn’t the case. If the RPT process –say a judgment about retention– would occur every seven years, and the bar is set low, then what you would have is de facto tenure. If the bar were set high, then I doubt that many people who seek such positions, and stay in such positions, in the humanities and social sciences. I don’t know about other disciplines, however.
July 26, 2010, 11:51 amRonald C. Den Otter says:
P.S.- Increasingly, even the Cal State University system is requiring publications for promotion. Where I’m at, we’re constantly told that our model is the “teacher-scholar” model.
July 26, 2010, 11:54 amRonald C. Den Otter says:
Eliot, for what it’s worth, I was on the political science job market six years ago, and over the past five years, I’ve served on many job search committees, and I can tell you that there are far too many new Ph.D.s chasing far too few tenure-track jobs. In many cases, the candidate isn’t a brand new Ph.D. but has been on the market a few years and has been wroking here and there as a lecturer. It’s not unheard of to get 100+ applications for a single advertised position. Of those 100+ applications, a high percentage of them will be from qualified and even highly qualified people. When supply exceeds demand, even non-research universities end up getting some excellent people. My impression is that most young graduate students in the humanities and social sciences don’t realize how poor the odds are of ever (a) finishing a Ph.D. in a top-notch graduate program (b) securing a tenure-track job (c) getting tenure. If they knew of the risk, even w/ tenure, many of them wouldn’t pursue a Ph.D..
July 26, 2010, 12:02 pmMartha says:
And the push towards requiring more research at “teaching” universities generally comes from administrators more than tenured faculty. Higher research profile = more prestige and often more $ from legislators, too. Plus, publications and grant dollars are easier for bean counters to count/compare to other institutions. My univ has gone from “teacher-scholar” to “scholar-teacher” in just the time I’ve worked here, and the “teacher” part is constantly undermined by other admin mandates, such as larger class sizes. Thank goodness for USN&WR rankings or all our classes would be 150+.
July 26, 2010, 3:58 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
This is how things seem to be going as well, where I’m at, Martha. What’s tough is trying to do everything that good teaching and service require and then finding the time to do the research that is now required as well. Never enough time in the day to get everything done that needs to be done.
July 26, 2010, 4:51 pmfwb says:
Most people have no understanding of tenure. It’s failure is not in the protections it brings but in the gutlessness of the administrators to do their job. No tenured professor is protected absolutely. BUT administrators have no balls and don’t do the job of properly gauging performance. Colleges and universities are filled with dead wood simply because those who duty it is to police the faculty don’t have the courage.
July 26, 2010, 5:06 pmneurodoc says:
So your school is in the minority of universities, since according to A non, “in most universities teaching is more important than research”?
July 26, 2010, 5:11 pmElliot says:
“My impression is that most young graduate students in the humanities and social sciences don’t realize how poor the odds are of ever (a) finishing a Ph.D. in a top-notch graduate program (b) securing a tenure-track job (c) getting tenure. If they knew of the risk, even w/ tenure, many of them wouldn’t pursue a Ph.D..”
There is an interesting parallel to other threads here where people say they can’t get a job in law after they complete law school. So, we have smart folks borrowing to go to law school when job prospects are poor, and we have smart folks borrowing to go into humanities where job prospects are poor.
How about the sciences? Does anyone know the employment prospects for new Phd’s in physics, biology, chemistry, etc? Including both universities and industry?
July 26, 2010, 6:01 pmMartha says:
I don’t know whether we’re in the majority or the minority. I’m just saying that when research is prioritized, it isn’t always because of tenured faculty who care more about their hobbyhorses than their students.
July 26, 2010, 6:10 pmpgepps says:
Pretty much all of the existing organizations do have problems. I say, of course, that it’s administrators we need to scrap. ;-)
Historically, every culture that remembers its stories and learns from history and from interaction with other cultures does so because it protects some people who find this as their calling. The Anglo-Saxon scop (bard) was not required to do military service. Monks supported by local charity or church/court patronage preserved and developed much ancient and Christian learning during an era when European culture was divided between mere subsistence farmers and the mere warriors who protected them–none of whom could read, generally. Learning is not always and equally available or prized in a culture, but cultures which protect those who prize it have the chance to, for example, turn into cultures which abolish slavery because it’s wrong (England).
Today, we are not much at risk of being drafted to protect the local farms; we are at risk of being turned into a “volunteer army” of wage-slaves to pay off our student loans because the government bought “the system” on the open market from the lazy, greedy, and short-sighted with money coerced from taxpayers.
So, to the extent that tenure is a way of protecting scholars from wage slavery, I’m for it until you show me a better way. But I quite agree that the institution has been abused, and that for private institutions to try various models of achieving the same ends while ameliorating the abuses is worthwhile.
July 27, 2010, 4:20 pmHaba says:
Sciences tend to fair better. The unemployment rate for chemists (my field) is 4%. That includes temporary researchers, adjuncts, professors and industrial chemists.
July 27, 2010, 10:32 pmSuzy says:
A non and Anonengineeringprof have said some wise things here. I want to know more about the very premise that we should do away with tenure, though. Prof. Somin refers to the “huge cost” of tenure. What is that, exactly? I think it would cost more to hire professors if you eliminated one of the major job incentives–long-term stability in employment that allows them to do work that in most cases reduces their value in the non-academic market. The lost opportunity costs are enormous, so universities would have to pay a lot up-front. The best professors could then use every incremental review as a chance to turn the screws for a better deal. Otherwise, who’s going to accept job insecurity without greater pay? Only the less talented performers.
In this way among others, market forces are indeed relevant to academic hiring, contrary to Prof. Somin’s assertion that “market incentives in this industry are weak.” Regardless, though, tenure is part of an employment system that has been negotiated freely by the employers and employees. What is the justification for meddling in it, exactly? Should conservatives look around for other industries in which either employers or employees don’t seem to be getting the best deal, and try to modify the structures of the contracts? This whole issue seems so blatantly motivated by sour grapes and ideology. It’s not being motivated by conservative principles; that much is clear.
August 2, 2010, 3:00 pmAnthony says:
I am speaking for tenure in science and engineering.
In case if you don’t know, one of the most important jobs of tenured professors (in science and engineering) in a research institution is to do RESEARCH. It is their research that bring in grant money (from various funding agencies, like NSF, NIH, DOE, DoD, HHMI), which in turn support their research and the university. Yes, that’s right. The university. A large portion of the grant goes to the university. So instead of drawing money from the endowment, professors (again, in STEM) actually bring in money for the university. So the financial argument in Taylor’s article doesn’t apply.
As for academic freedom: that’s where tenure plays an important role in science and engineering. A lot of important scientific discoveries are the results of long term research that are risky and might not be immediately publishable. An excellent example is the long-term E. coli evolution experiment that has been studied since 1988. Tenure encourages scientists and engineers to perform these kinds of research that are vital to science. If, say, professors are on seven-year renewable contracts as suggested by Taylor, no one is going to risk their career to try out any long-term studies, or establish new scientific topics where results are not immediately publishable. That’s the beauty of academic freedom.
August 21, 2010, 7:01 pm