In a recent post, Orin (relying on an argument by H. Lorne Carmichael) cites faculty self-selection as an argument for tenure:
The basic idea is that tenure is a necessary evil because faculties vote on who to let join them: If professors know that their own jobs will be in jeopardy if they hire someone better than themselves, they will make sure that they only hire incompetent new people.
This is indeed a much stronger argument for tenure than the usual academic freedom rationale, which I criticized here. Still, I’m not persuaded.
Even if we need to give faculty some job security to get them to avoid hiring incompetents, lifetime tenure strikes me as overkill. Guaranteed longterm contracts of, say, ten years should greatly reduce the perverse incentives identified by Carmichael without giving people a lifetime sinecure. Furthermore, faculty incentives don’t all cut one way. A faculty that hires mostly incompetents will quickly undercut its prestige, and most academics are very prestige-conscious. Think about how badly many faculty at lower-ranked institutions want to move up to more prestigious ones.
In addition, I’m not convinced that the system of faculty self-selection is actually the best available option. In most industries, hiring labor is a management responsibility, in part for the kinds of reasons Carmichael identifies: we don’t want workers voting to hire incompetents who will make the incumbents look good by comparison. In academia, new faculty are hired by incumbents because the latter generally have more expertise on the relevant subject than administrators do. However, incumbent faculty are not the only possible source of relevant expertise. Administrators could also draw on the knowledge of relevant experts at other institutions, including faculty at other schools, scholars in government and industry, and so on. We already do this to some extent. For example, tenure committees routinely solicit reports about the candidate from outside reviewers.
Some combination of long-term contracts and increased reliance on outside expertise should enable universities to eliminate tenure without incentivizing academics to hire incompetents. The system wouldn’t be perfect. But it would likely be a lot less flawed than the perverse incentives of tenure itself.
Liam says:
In instances where administrators receive conflicting reviews from these “relevant experts,” how can they be reasonably expected to properly weigh the compliments and criticisms? One of my professors in college wrote extensively on Clausewitz, and depending on which branch of the military you asked, was either retarded or a genius. How does a president reconcile those competing claims if he has never so much as read On War?
July 27, 2010, 2:37 amOrin Kerr says:
Ilya writes:
While some scholars want to be at a more prestigious school, my sense is that many professors would rather have lifetime employment at a mediocre school than risk being fired for incompetence from a good one. The rarity of professors leaving tenured positions for untenured positions (even at “better” schools) would seem to support that.
July 27, 2010, 3:11 amdearieme says:
While I can see decent arguments against tenure, they are nothing like so urgent as the arguments against the powers of university “administrators”.
P.S. “The rarity of professors leaving tenured positions for untenured positions..”: I did.
July 27, 2010, 4:46 amThe Awful Truth says:
How many history professors with a non-military specialty have read Clausewitz?
July 27, 2010, 4:53 amdearieme says:
@awful: OK, consider the question rephrased as “How does a president reconcile those competing claims if he has never so much as read a history book?” (Wasn’t one complaint about Summers at Harvard essentially that he was an unlettered lout?)
July 27, 2010, 6:06 amMichael Tinkler says:
This gets back to the vanishing organizational model of “Faculty Governance.” The idea was that the permanent faculty WAS self-managing – set the curriculum, served as dept chairs and deans, made the hiring decisions. Of course that’s been changing for a long time.
July 27, 2010, 7:53 amFloridan says:
Really, how big a problem is tenure?
Perhaps Professor Somin could enlighten us by estimating the percentage of tenured faculty at GMU that would be fired for lack of productivity or substandard work if there was no tenure there?
July 27, 2010, 8:00 amWidmerpool says:
Orin’s argument makes sense only if professors are somehow much more devious than people working in any other industry that does not have tenure–not that I would wish to argue against such a view. Why wouldn’t this argue cut the other way that tenured professors would actually have an incentive to hire people not as bright as themselves since, if no one can be fired, they would want to surround themselves with people they can outwit and maneuver around when it comes to divvying up perks and what not. The argument is too cynical by half. Although it does have the virtue of being unverifiable and therefore irrefutable.
July 27, 2010, 8:21 amPersonFromPorlock says:
I wonder if the real problem isn’t so much tenured professors retiring on the job as it is that enthusiasm is largely a characteristic of the young. From what I’ve read, most groundbreaking academic work is done by people younger than forty, at least in the maths and sciences.
So how about early retirement for profs, for exactly the same reason we give early retirement to the police or military – to get those whom age has unfitted for the job out of the way of those who are fit? The retirees who are still able can hire out somewhere else.
Of course, the objection will be that colleges can’t afford it: but these are the same colleges that have been raising tuition and fees at well above the rate of inflation for the last forty years, so I’ll take leave to doubt it.
July 27, 2010, 8:31 amJeff the Baptist says:
The real issue with Orin’s original thesis is that “Academics are the best judges of who is a good academic.” In terms of the quality and quantity of their research, this is probably the case. Academics are consumers of other academics research after all. But is that the sole job of an academic? No. Among other things faculty are generally expected to teach at least one course per semester. I often find that academics have no idea what their colleagues are like inside the classroom.
July 27, 2010, 8:51 amAndy Patterson says:
At my law school, there were a number of faculty in their 50s, who had made their name with big papers published while in their late 20s or early 30s. But, after getting tenure, they dried up, not only in publishing, but also in teaching. Yet, nobody would take action, as it would force the administration to admit that there was deadwood. That’s why having 5- or 10-year renewable contracts would be better, as it would force the middle-aged faculty to keep up with doing research and updating their teaching every year.
July 27, 2010, 9:32 amcashmoney says:
If abolishing lifetime tenure means fewer Chicago School economists claiming that auto workers and Wal-Mart cashiers are better off for being unemployed from time to time, count me in.
July 27, 2010, 9:54 ambillb says:
KAUST. New university being set up to help the Saudis survive running out of oil some day in the future. 5-year contracts for professors. No tenure. It’s just getting started, but rumor has it they’re paying roughly 2x what US universities do plus some nice benefits. Query what fraction of that generous pay scale is to cover for the lack of tenure and what fraction is to cover living in a compound/campus in SA. :)
July 27, 2010, 10:16 amMuch ado... says:
Is the law school tenure model so bad that professors have zero incentive to do research, etc. after receiving tenure? In my academic field, a substantial portion of compensation depends on being research active, as does a reduced teaching load. If a professor “retires on the job” they can’t be fired, but there are substantial penalties.
I’ve not seen this discussed, so just curious.
July 27, 2010, 10:27 amFloridan says:
And what percentage is in lieu of academic freedom?
July 27, 2010, 10:47 amPetep says:
“know that their own jobs will be in jeopardy if they hire someone better than themselves, they will make sure that they only hire incompetent new people. ”
This is SUCH a complete perversion of anything resembling ‘freedom’, ‘competence’, ‘a free society’, or good business practice !
How can anyone actually propose this as an ADVANTAGE to tenure ? By saying that ‘these employees will act in a totally unprofessional and juvenile manner unless we quarantee they can’t be fired’ ?
Anyone in any private company taking this kind of attitude would be FIRED for it, not guaranteed their job !
An employee, be it a teacher or other, has a DUTY, when asked to participate in the hiring selection process, to choose the BEST possible candidate ( in their HONEST opinion ) for the job, and for the employer, not the WORST !!!!
How in the world can ANYONE condone anything else, under ANY rational ?
July 27, 2010, 11:04 amgo vols says:
I wouldn’t have a problem with ten-year contracts; five years might be a deterrent, in some fields, for the sort of long-ranging work that adds a great deal of value. The shorter the time-frame of the contract, the more you will focus on short-term projects. Of course, the implications for this by field differ.
One solution might be to replace the current bunch of administrators with all of those extra PhDs we’re producing. I realize that current academic programs don’t teach you how to manage a university (and they could be tweaked), but I’m not convinced the current crop of administrators knows what they doing anyway. Absent the money men, I’d rather have a dean or vice-president with significant academic experience.
Of course, there are probably about a thousand things wrong with this idea, but worth throwing out.
July 27, 2010, 11:08 amLN says:
Getting rid of tenure is a great solution.
Now all we need to do is figure out what the problem is…
July 27, 2010, 11:27 ammark says:
I think the argument has descriptive merit, but as far as a justification, it does not seem sufficient and whatever merit it has exists only if you assume everything else about the higher education system remains the same. Tenure is a merely a symptom of a broader mistake of perpetuating a strictly 19th century model of higher education. A 21st century model needs to be added that separates research and pedagogy; uses the internet to eliminate location-driven and facility-driven limits on access to the highest quality teachers (and compensates them accordingly); tracks institutions’ productivity as educators, not just as researchers or self-promoters; and increases productivity by eliminating most of the academic year’s down time and most extracurricular activities, and thereby enables faster and less expensive degree attainment for individuals who choose that path.
July 27, 2010, 11:30 amMark Field says:
But “doing ground-breaking research” isn’t the only criterion. Very few people at any time actually come up with something “ground-breaking”. Most professors do productive, albeit not revolutionary work. They also teach and administer. Passing the age of 40 doesn’t, AFAIK, “unfit” them for those parts of the job.
Then, too, there are counterexamples. I’m willing to put up with a lot of tenure to get one Milton.
July 27, 2010, 11:35 amMark Field says:
As others have pointed out, the US university system is generally, probably universally, considered the best in the world.
These all sound like good goals to me.
July 27, 2010, 11:38 amAllan Walstad says:
This still does not address the concern I raised on the original thread, namely, that tenure protects faculty from dismissal for criticizing and opposing administrators’ policies, and thereby helps to preserve a reservoir of “power” in the hands of the faculty — who, after all, represent the locus of expertise regarding the subject matter, the teaching thereof, the qualifications of applicants and colleagues seeking reappointment and promotion. If I personally were establishing a college that I hoped would achieve enduring success, then I would be concerned about maintaining a substantial measure of faculty control over academics, faculty influence throughout the institution as a bulwark against administrative overreach, and unhampered, effective faculty feedback to the trustees. What institutional structures would have that effect? A mixed array of mostly tenure-track but also many non-tenured positions is a simple way to promote a variety of goals, including the above.
July 27, 2010, 11:56 amPersonFromPorlock says:
Well, we’ve had about a hundred years of tenure; where’s the Milton?
July 27, 2010, 11:58 amEntwhistle says:
A faculty that hires mostly incompetents will quickly undercut its prestige, and most academics are very prestige-conscious.
Exactly right. Which is why tenured professors work so hard, puzzling as it may be to economists. Professors who don’t keep working may keep our jobs, but lose status, which is what matters. Well, money matters too, of course! But it’s only one incentive. If it were the only one, you guys would be doing something much more remunerative than professing law.
Data point: I’m tenured and I work much harder now, and produce more research, than before I was tenured. I probably do about the same amount of research work (but with greater productivity) and undergraduate teaching, but I do much more mentoring and administration, neither of which is a major responsibility for pre-tenure faculty.
July 27, 2010, 12:24 pmMark Field says:
John Bardeen, the only double winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, was 39 when he (with others) invented the transistor and 49 when he developed the BCS theory.
Also, most Peace Prize winners were over 40, though obviously many were not academics.
I don’t know that any of this meets the standard of Milton, but in that case we should be prepared to wait a lot longer than 100 years. And be relatively content with the best university system in the world while we’re waiting.
July 27, 2010, 12:37 pmElliot says:
Prediction: While folks continue to have long discussions about tenure, the internet will be the end of tenure as courses migrate to online venues. As courses migrate, certification tests in various areas (like the bar exam) will become vital to a students success. The migration will have a profound effect on all universities and result in the kind of organizational changes we have seen in other industries.
Each industry which has encoutered the encroachment of the internet has said, “It can’t happen here because bla bla bla is so vital and valuable.” Then it happens.
July 27, 2010, 12:42 pmEMB says:
I think professors who deliberately “retire on the job” are a tiny minority; the more common situation is simply that as a professor gets to their 50s-60s, they’re just not (in most cases) able to produce the quantity or quality of research that they could at 30. As their research output decreases, their teaching responsibilities are typically increased to compensate and they stop getting raises (and in some cases even take pay cuts).
This sounds pretty cushy, and in the humanities it may be cushier than it needs to be, but in science/engineering/law/medicine/etc. academia needs to compete with industry and generally doesn’t have the resources to come even close to matching industry salaries (and still wouldn’t, even if it could fire older faculty).
Thus, the biggest thing academia does have to offer to make up for the lower salaries is better job security. Knowing you won’t be losing your job (even for the “good” reason that you’re just not as smart as you used to be) just as you’ll be needing to pay your kids’ way through college is a big deal.
July 27, 2010, 1:00 pmSlocum says:
In academia, new faculty are hired by incumbents because the latter generally have more expertise on the relevant subject than administrators do.
But that expertise gaps exists in many other organizations, particularly in technical fields. Administrators hiring, say, engineers, programmers, or graphics designers rarely have the relevant expertise themselves — but they still don’t let the incumbents do the hiring (though very often they seek advise from the experts they have on staff).
July 27, 2010, 1:32 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
I mentioned this (good, I think) point on another thread about tenure. On the other hand, losing one’s job and losing one’s stature in the eyes of one’s collegues are two different things…
July 27, 2010, 1:41 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
Good post. One way to induce non-productive, older academics to retire early is to offer them a golden (or perhaps, silver) handshake.
July 27, 2010, 1:43 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
Before I would endorse reneweable ten-year contracts, in lieu of tenure, I would want to know how they would work in an academic setting. Do other countries have this system? If, at a particular American institution, renewing the contract were almost guaranteed, then what we would have is a de facto tenure system, which doesn’t solve any problem(s) (assuming such problems are serious enough to be addressed in the first place). Set the bar low and you wouldn’t have changed much. Set the bar higher –as I assume that those of you would would prefer ten-year renewable contracts would prefer to create incentives for academics to continue to work harder– then people who had been very productive as scholars in the past might lose their jobs if they didn’t remain as productive in the future. I would be surprised if many young, promising academics would opt for an institution that had such renewable contracts if other institutions had tenure.
Given how (relatively) easy it is for law professors to get tenure, why not make it much more difficult so that mediocre people don’t slide into job security w/out justification? And why not have steps? In other words, don’t let a person who gets tenure immediately become a full professor. After tenure, to create incentives to be productive, create different steps: associate professor, full professor, really full full professor :) This is what undergraduate research institutions do, after all.
July 27, 2010, 1:58 pmAngus says:
As others have said, this is a “solution” without a problem. The U.S. higher education system is the best in the world, and the envy of other nations. No one has shown that tenure is detrimental to the system. Frankly, in my experience, most opposition to tenure comes from conservatives who reflexively see it as a way to attack egg headed liberals.
July 27, 2010, 3:02 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
More or less, I agree w/ you, Angus, but I’ve seen, a number of times at different institutions, some older faculty members take advantage of the tenure system. Once they’re full professors, they basically can treat their position as a part-time job. But I doubt that abolishing tenure is the solution to this problem. If anything, it creates more problems than it solves.
July 27, 2010, 3:09 pmMoneyrunner says:
When I saw this I thought it was a bad joke, but you people are serious. It’s an admission that academics are scum. Please keep this discussion among yourself because if this gets out into the non-academic world Breitbart will have a field day with it.
July 27, 2010, 3:19 pmOrin Kerr says:
Moneyrunner,
The assumption here is that academics are just people. As James Madison put it in Federalist 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
July 27, 2010, 3:58 pmSk says:
“The assumption here is that academics are just people.”
No, unfortunately, not. Tenure doesn’t exist anywhere else in our economy. Arguing that academics need tenure to stop themselves from destroying their own organizations really is arguing that academics are (unique) scum.
Or perhaps you’ve left something out? Are you arguing that tenure, or tenure-like policies, are required throughout the economy, and not just within academia?
Sk
July 27, 2010, 4:29 pmMark Field says:
Depends on what you mean. As Joseph Slater has pointed out, tenure is (formally) nothing more than a “good cause” requirement which is common to lots of jobs (all civil service jobs, for example). To the extent that tenure has been interpreted beyond that, there may be an issue.
July 27, 2010, 4:41 pmTeh Anonymous says:
I’ve interviewed potential hires before. Not as someone who made a final hiring decision, but as someone who was asked to perform a basic screening. If I were hiring a potential co-worker or supervisee … I wouldn’t hire someone mediocre to make myself look good. I’d recommend someone who was at least decent, so that they wouldn’t create problems and extra work for me.
Granted, faculty members don’t usually have the kind of interdependence I have in mind, at least I don’t think they do … but there are very few jobs where you can have an inefficient co-worker who isn’t a drag on others, right? The ones I can think of mostly involve selling things on commission.
I always figured that managers did the hiring because they were perceived as having a better grasp of the requirements (job qualifications and HR/legal procedures), and because (not to be harsh here) they had more time to spare from actually being productive.
July 27, 2010, 5:04 pmMoneyrunner says:
Orin,
No; with all due respect the concept that without tenure academics would hire incompetents to preserve their position is one of the biggest arguments against interest that I have ever read made by a serious person.
The non-academic world is filled with people who hire the smartest people they can find. I run my own small firm. I cannot think of anyone who would deliberately hire an incompetent so that he can be assured of keeping his job. In fact if such a person existed, he would be fired for incompetence himself.
This issue is similar to the reaction I had to the exposure of the Journolist. You knew that the liberals in the media were in cahoots, you just didn’t think it would be this tawdry.
July 27, 2010, 5:04 pmMoneyrunner says:
Mark Field,
I’m not sure of the exact statistics, but most employees in the private sector are “at will” employees meaning that can be fired for any reason. Government workers, like academics are more priviledged. You can even get hired to high government postions if you cheat on your taxes. If you are an elected official, you can get away with murder, or at least manslaughter. But enough about the Kennedys.
July 27, 2010, 5:12 pmneurodoc says:
With only a few exceptions, we can be satisfied that those who have won Nobels in the sciences were fully deserving of them. The same cannot be said of those who have won the Nobel Peace Prize.
July 27, 2010, 5:14 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
“Granted, faculty members don’t usually have the kind of interdependence I have in mind, at least I don’t think they do … but there are very few jobs where you can have an inefficient co-worker who isn’t a drag on others, right? The ones I can think of mostly involve selling things on commission.”
Teh, I would never want, as a colleague, someone who was incompetent for that very reason. Perhaps someone who was competent but not too good? :)
I’ve served on more than ten academic job search committees, and for what it’s worth, faculty members disagree, often vehemently, about the quality of a candidate, which isn’t to say that they never agree on (a) who’s best (b) who’s the worst or unqualified. In our department, we make decisions by majority vote. I should add that we often give a lot of weight to what faculty members in that particular field think about the candidates. For example, because my field isn’t comparative politics, I more inclined to defer to what the comparativists think about the candidate, assuming that they agree.
July 27, 2010, 5:16 pmdearieme says:
“The U.S. higher education system is the best in the world,… No one has shown that tenure is detrimental to the system.” The US higher ed system also had tenure when the German universities were the best in the world and the US system wasn’t even the best in the English-speaking world. It’s hard to see how either aspect of the history tells us much about the desirability of tenure.
July 27, 2010, 5:22 pmElliot says:
Last year New York City fired five teachers for poor performance.
July 27, 2010, 6:07 pmMark Field says:
Agreed. SK’s argument implied (to me, at least) that nobody had similar protection. That’s not the case (again, formally), for better or worse.
I’m sure there are people who don’t like Milton’s poetry either, but that wasn’t really my point. PfP was suggesting that most people don’t make signifcant contributions past the age of 40. There are lots of examples of people who have done so by some reasonable measure, which is all I was trying to show. I don’t think we need to debate the merits of Paradise Lost in order to recognize that many people think it was important.
This, of course, is not to imply that tenure itself has any causal relationship with performance after 40. I was just noting that age alone shouldn’t be a cutoff.
July 27, 2010, 6:52 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
P.S.- Kant was very productive in his 70s. If I recall correctly, Hume did his best work prior to the age of 30.
July 27, 2010, 7:23 pmyankee says:
Are you implying that not being George Bush isn’t an accomplishment deserving of a Nobel Prize?
July 27, 2010, 7:37 pmIlya Somin says:
When I saw this I thought it was a bad joke, but you people are serious. It’s an admission that academics are scum.
I don’t think so. Very few other employees are in the position of hiring their own colleagues. If they were, you might well see some of the same sorts of problems as are common in academic hiring.
July 27, 2010, 8:02 pmElliot says:
I had nearly forgotten about that Nobel. It doesn’t seem to be something they want to talk about. We hear a lot more about Steven Chu’s nobel than Obama’s. Anyone know where the actual prize sits?
July 27, 2010, 8:06 pmRich says:
There are always going to be a few who once they have tenure will “retire”. In many places that means they teach more and get the classes no one wants to teach. Salary-wise it depends on where to are – a research University pays well. A new starting associate prof can expect 90-95K and the benefits are good. Full Profs can easily make 110-120K with it going up over time. But this is research Universities that train PhD’s. Colleges with terminal masters or less are a different story with salaries much less. Also those places do not usually get NSF or the like grants which give course releases to do the research and summer money of maybe 1/3 salary. The grants also cover travel and all sorts of nice things which one would not normally get. Now granted – administration is paid ridiculously. They seem to think that they are the equivalent of corporate CEO’s and should be paid as such. Many are not worth what the pay the adjuncts – but that is personal opinion :)
Productivity is often related to the quality of the PhD student one is supervising as they will publish a lot and if you do your job right it will be good.
Status is the ultimate perk and in the hirings that I have been involved in or observed the committee is trying to get the best they can – it all reflects on them and makes them look better.
July 27, 2010, 8:14 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
Excellent post, Rich. Although those salaries at research institutions seem a bit high to me. Are you talking about social scineces and humanities? Or natural sciences? In addition, one often can bump up one’s salary by threatening to take another (and better) job elsewhere. I’m not at a research institution –hence, they relatively low salary :)– but I’ve been on a bunch of hiring committees and we have sincerely tried to hire the best people that we could. To make the team better, so to speak.
July 27, 2010, 8:31 pmcathyf says:
I would argue that tenured academics are prestige-conscious because they are tenured. Or, more precisely, it is one of the biggest reasons that the prestige of the institution matters to them as opposed to just being concerned with their own personal prestige.
Tenure is a way of giving faculty members ownership in the institution, by giving them a huge non-transferrable economic stake in the survival of the institution. As an example: pre-meds hate getting grades other than A’s, and will go to any lengths available to get A’s. (Including working very hard, if all other options have been closed off.) One of their more-innocuous habits is going to department chairs and deans and whining to get their grades raised. Suppose you have an institution where the teachers don’t tell the chair or the dean to f*** off. So then the pre-meds from that place with their straight-A transcripts go off to medical school, where it is discovered that they don’t know jack about biology, chemistry, physics. So word goes down from the med school faculty to the med school admissions committee — don’t admit any more graduates from that school! Pretty soon it becomes known that this is a place where graduates don’t get into med school, so no high school students who are remotely interested in med school (i.e. all of the smart ones) will go to school there. The institution collapses, and all of the staff lose their jobs.
Tenure is only lifetime employment at that one institution, it is not a general guarantee — if the place goes under you are just as unemployed as any wal-mart greeter who gets fired for rudeness. It gives the faculty — the people who have the day in and day out ability to make or break the intellectual life of the place — a powerful economic incentive to steward the intellectual reputation of the institution as if it were their own personal property.
Because it is.
July 27, 2010, 8:47 pmgus3 says:
Tenure isn’t the only place where one’s future peers decide if you get to join them or not. In Louisiana, florists get to decide who will be their competition in the marketplace. Google “louisiana florist license” to see what I mean.
July 27, 2010, 8:48 pmsetnaffa says:
There are a lot of wonderful folks in the Professor role here and there. Tough standards for tenure would be nice as long as they were objective… like there’s any chance of that…
Perhaps the rules ought to be set by each University?
July 27, 2010, 8:50 pmrrr says:
I don’t know, as a grad student, I don’t remember anyone “speaking truth to power” and thereby needing the protection of tenure. Plus, I TA’d for two professors. One would go into his office and sleep until about 1/2 hour before his next class. The other would watch TV. Maybe my results aren’t typical, but as an older grad student, the only thing I saw in the real world that was remotely similar was an insurance agent who lived off of his renewals and played video games all day–when he wasn’t having a 3 hour lunch with a friend. So, 20 years in the workforce, one obvious and known poster child; 3 years in the academy, 2 obvious and known poster children. Maybe my results aren’t typical but it seems unlikely . . .
But here’s the kicker–a few years ago the insurance agent filed for bankruptcy and went to work in a non-sales job. His lifestyle caught up to him. The professors? We know what they’re doing, don’t we?
July 27, 2010, 9:16 pmChristopher Chantrill says:
@Elliott: Agreed. All this wittering on about tenure and its bureaucratic ins and outs is meaningless. Online learning is coming and it will eat the education establishment alive.
July 27, 2010, 9:21 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
These are young, untenured professors, rrr?
July 27, 2010, 9:21 pmcathyf says:
But employees in the private sector are in the private sector — which means that they are employed by enterprises which have owners. If the managers of the enterprise fire employees for no good reason, this will have a negative impact on the bottom line of the enterprise by: hurting the productivity of employees, causing good employees to leave and take their valuable enterprise knowledge with them, forcing the enterprise to pay higher salaries than the places that aren’t run by assholes. At which point the owners will exercise their ownership rights: they will fire or otherwise discipline the managers, or they will allow the managers to piss away their money. Because it’s their money.
In an educational institution, there are no owners to yank the chains of management when they do things that damage the financial health of the institution. Tenure is an artificial substitute for the property rights which give private enterprises the proper incentives to prosper. Think of it as an employee stock ownership scheme. By taking and giving faculty ownership of the institution, they face a financial penalty for f***ing the place up, and are financially rewarded for the institution’s successes.
July 27, 2010, 9:32 pmFat Man says:
How would anyone on the Harvard Faculty know?
July 27, 2010, 9:46 pmMark Field says:
The same used to be true of optometrists in Alabama. May still be, for all I know.
July 27, 2010, 9:54 pmFat Man says:
The problem is that we are using overpaid, intellectually bankrupt, conformist, hacks to teach our children at incredibly expensive universities. I just finished paying $150,000 to educate my youngest. And I am not happy about it.
As far as I am concerned, the entire professorate could be sent to re-education camps.
Oh, and you law profs. What a bunch of weenies. Real lawyers don’t have tenure or employment contracts. They are only as good as their last case. The entire idea of tenured law professors is a bad joke.
July 27, 2010, 10:02 pmBill45 says:
No one faculty member ever hires another. All faculty hiring is done via faculty committee which means that no one is accountable for a bad hiring decision.
And the complete lack of accountability by tenured faculty — to students, administrators, board members, taxpayers, anyone — is why tenure needs to be reformed. Full de novo tenure review every ten years.
July 27, 2010, 10:31 pmLN says:
The problem is that we are using overpaid, intellectually bankrupt, conformist, hacks to teach our children at incredibly expensive universities. I just finished paying $150,000 to educate my youngest. And I am not happy about it.
Wow, what a coincidence, I just spent lots of money to have someone bang my head against the wall. The system is like totally unjust man!
July 27, 2010, 10:43 pmMoneyrunner says:
CathyF,
Is your argument that tenure provides the ownership stake that faculty require to insure that otherwise their lack of accountablity would ruin their institution?
Does it follow from that that tenure has prevented the collapse of colleges throughout the fruited plain?
You do see that your argument is neither provable or irrefutable, don’t you?
I wonder if DeVry has tenure? Their stock is on a tear.
July 27, 2010, 11:15 pmMoneyrunner says:
correction: “refutable”
July 27, 2010, 11:17 pmDaniel says:
My experience is that administrations do award tenure, faculty merely recommends.
July 28, 2010, 12:20 amThe system at Harvard is as follows: If a department wants to give tenure to a candidate it has chosen, the administration appoints an ad hoc committee to locate the three best candidates it can find (anywhere in the world) in the same specific field, which may or may not include the department’s candidate. The tenured position must be offered to one of these.
Other schools have systems that give departments much more say in tenure appointments, but in all cases that I know about, the department solicits recommendations from outside for a candidate for tenure. These recommendations are reviewed by committees representing the entire school, and entire university and if tenure is approved at all these levels, the case is brought to the administration which has the final say.
All such systems are meant to prevent departments from awarding tenure to unqualified friends, or from trying to make sure that appointments go to scholars weaker than the existing faculty.
Extrememly Qualified Poster says:
Two of my old college room mates, now in the private sector, are adamant opponents of tenure (which I happen to hold). They have each been with the same company their entire careers, 35 years each and counting. I have held positions with six different employers during the same period.
Does this seem strange to anyone other than me?
July 28, 2010, 12:20 amneurodoc says:
And my point, I thought rather self-evidently, wasn’t at what age creativity/productivity peaks, it was that Nobel Prizes in the sciences are extraordinarily reliable indicators of merit whereas the Nobel Peace Prize isn’t. Agree or disagree?
July 28, 2010, 1:20 amneurodoc says:
No, not on its face. Why should it? If you think there is some implication of hypocracy, it is in the fact though they don’t have “tenure,” they have never been fired or been forced to seek other employment whereas you notwithstanding the fact that you now have tenure (since when?) have moved multiple times?
July 28, 2010, 1:27 amneurodoc says:
Until I read Elliot‘s post a couple after yours (8:06PM), I totally missed your point. Yeah, we could count that one among the dubious, but there are more egregious examples, e.g., Rigoberta Menchu Tum, or better yet Yasser Arafat.
July 28, 2010, 1:32 amneurodoc says:
“Unlettered”?! You’re kidding, right? “Unmannered” maybe, but no way the youngest person to ever be granted tenure at Harvard could be called “unlettered.” (Nephew of two Nobel laureates in economics and son of two U of Pennsylvania economics professor, the guy comes from a notably strong gene pool.)
July 28, 2010, 1:40 amrrr says:
Not hardly :) . They’re older than me by a long shot and I’m on my second career!
It’s odd to me that you would ask that. The striving for tenure doesn’t seem to promote napping and TV, istm.
Perhaps both have seen better days? I don’t know. Neither have spectacular records as researchers though both are very well-liked in the classroom (one in particular gets all the athletes). But, for the most part, they teach the same couple of classes, recycle tests, etc. They’re basically part-time workers but, while they never discussed salary with me, I doubt they are paid like it.
I’m not anti-tenure. I’m trying to sort it out. But the disconnect between academia and the real world is a shocking one, in my experience. Anyone that thinks otherwise hasn’t had to really work for a living, IMO. That said, the top ranked folks work incredibly hard. You don’t get to the top in any field unless your driven, I suppose.
July 28, 2010, 1:43 amDaniel Menes says:
I have worked for a decade in private consulting. Hiring decisions are made by an ad hoc committee of present employees of the firm. The committee consists of a mix of consultants–some at the same level as the prospective hire and some at higher levels. While such committees have sometimes made decisions I disagreed with, I never saw, and cannot imagine, any member of such a committee deliberately choosing to support an incompetent hire, or undercut a good hire, out of concern for their own comparative reputation.
People’s overwhelming concern in such a situation is, “I have to work with this person every day. Will they be intelligent and productive enough to help me with my work and make my day more enjoyable?”
I think university professors would act the same way. If I am wrong, and we would find that professors routinely select incompetent colleagues in order to make themselves look good, then that would be an indication of the corrosive effect that tenure has already had in selecting a professoriate unduly worried about job security above all else.
July 28, 2010, 5:39 amWidmerpool says:
When I saw this I thought it was a bad joke, but you people are serious. It’s an admission that academics are scum.
Somin: I don’t think so. Very few other employees are in the position of hiring their own colleagues. If they were, you might well see some of the same sorts of problems as are common in academic hiring.
Somin, have you heard of that arcane organization called a “law firm”? Believe it or not, the owners–whimsically referred to as “partners”–do indeed hire their own colleagues (as opposed to having managers doing the hiring decisions for them). Strange but true. For some reason, even though partners have very little job security nowadays, they do not value incompetence in the laterals that they seek to bring into their partnership ranks. Maybe they need a tenured law professor to explain to them why they are operating against their enlightened self-interest.
July 28, 2010, 8:29 amCJ says:
The bald assertion that faculty would hire incompetents assumes that the administration of a school has no self-interest in the matter. Colleges are very aware of marketing and reputation in a very competitive market; have college rankings involve faculty turnover and adjunct rates and you’d soon see a change! It also ignores the fact that the faculty we are getting now aren’t universally stellar.
As for academic freedom, the most interesting suggestion I have heard is long-term tenure that expires after 25 or 30 years. This could protect younger academics doing controversial research and older professors should have built enough of a reputation to afford them leeway. But it would also allow schools to put some pressure on those who “retire on the job” and neither publish nor teach.
While there would be schools that dump older (and more expensive) faculty for younger professors, such schools would soon find it more difficult to attract good people (or keep middle-aged faculty from jumping at the first opportunity).
And let’s put this in perspective: less than 40% of higher education faculty are tenured or on the tenure track. Over 65% of faculty have no expectation of tenure. Schools have already started relying on extended-term contracts out of financial self-interest.
July 28, 2010, 9:24 amMark Field says:
Agree philosophically, disagree for purposes of the point I was making. I just wanted a quick and dirty test to establish that people can do something significant in life past the age of 40 (not that I have any personal interest or anything, no sir). In that broad sense, I’m willing to use the Peace Prize as evidence even if I often disagree with the specific award.
July 28, 2010, 10:34 amJohn Hawks says:
For those bantering about the age of Nobel Prize awardees in the sciences, this is a very poor example because Nobel Prizes are awarded to people who are still alive.
This puts a strong bias in favor of people who made discoveries while young, because it generally has taken many years for such discoveries to be recognized as Nobel-worthy.
July 28, 2010, 11:20 amExtrememly Qualified Poster says:
The point wasn’t hypocrisy, it was humor. Oh, I should have mentioned that both have golden parachutes worth seven figures. That’s pretty good job security. I’d trade tenure for that in a minute.
I think that the point of this thread is drifting away from the interesting question. First, understand that people take jobs because of the total compensation package. This includes salary, location, security, colleagues, and so forth. Tenure has evolved in academic institutions. Unions have negotiated stringent dismissal rules in others. Certain businesses offer lavish golden parachutes. The interesting question is why academics have tenure whereas certain businesses have golden parachutes and unions have strict dismissal rules. What economic forces keep academics from having golden parachutes, union members having tenure, and certain businesses having strict dismissal rules?
A discussion of this would be so much more informative than a forum for calling people lazy.
July 28, 2010, 11:26 amElliot says:
I remain amazed by the idea that the university faculty population is so emotionally stunted that they would hire incompetents unless they were first given lifetime employment guarantees. Until reading this post, I would have dismissed that idea as silly. But I have to consider the number of academics in these threads who say it is true. So, I guess I have to reevaluate my position.
If this is indeed the situation, then I have to ask how these folks are produced. Does the academic environment foster these attitudes? Does living in the academic world and university community dispose one to such attitudes? Does academic life from kindergarten to PhD to university appointment develop these attitudes?
Or perhaps it’s self selection. Are people with enhanced notions of personal entitlement attracted to academics? Some have suggested ending tenure would be a disincentive to the best students pursuit of a PhD. I have to ask if they think they are really getting the best now? What makes them think so?
We might also consider that if hiring decisions are motivated by a desire to avoid being laid off because a new hire is better, what other fears do the hiring committees harbor. Will they subvert hiring to prevent a more promising scholar from outshining them? Will they subvert hiring to avoid a view challenging their ideas? If they will subvert hiring for one reason, isn’t it reasonable to suggest their sense of personal entitlement will subvert it for many others?
July 28, 2010, 12:10 pmLN says:
I have a hard time understanding this discussion as anything other than one motivated by an animus towards tenured professors, who have pretty nice jobs and who tend to be politically liberal.
The organization of universities is something that has evolved and will evolve over time. The professor career path has various costs and benefits, tenure is one of the benefits. It is a large benefit. But of course there are substantial costs to the career path as well.
Conservatives tend to defend naturally evolving arrangements; after all, they emerged for various reasons, and outsiders who blindly move in to “improve” things may not be very well informed about these reasons and are thus likely to muck things up. And there’s a market for professors, so if you change one aspect of the system (by reducing compensation) there will likely be countervailing effects as well (this will likely reduce, not improve, the talent pool).
Somin says that the market for professors is somewhat “detached” from market forces, but of course every market is somewhat insulated from market forces; very few markets work like Econ 101 perfect competition complete information markets. By this reasoning we may as well throw out 95% of libertarian writing on how markets make the world go round.
When pushed to explain the “problem” that eliminating tenure would solve, people talk about how undergraduate education is overly expensive for what you get. But there’s no argument made anywhere that eliminating tenure would improve teaching or reduce tuition costs. (People are often upset to discover the shocking truth that university faculty at research institutions are primarily concerned with research, not teaching, but that’s somewhat orthogonal to teaching.)
July 28, 2010, 2:09 pmAllan Walstad says:
Somin’s “the perverse incentives of tenure itself” refers to a 2-year-old editorial by Steven D. Levitt. From that editorial…
There are other incentives, not entirely trivial. One is promotion to full professor, with increased salary and prestige. Another is salary increment.
Not necessarily. Not if there is a prevailing political consensus (or indeed, a faulty professional consensus as in economics), such that most doors become closed.
July 28, 2010, 4:48 pmAllan Walstad says:
Also from Levitt’s editorial:
What indeed? Has Levitt or anyone else attacking tenure bothered to inquire with schools that abandoned tenure and later re-instituted it?
July 28, 2010, 4:51 pmjoe silva says:
There is an interesting absense of concern with education in most of this thread. There is a lot of concern with faculty welfare. When tenure is stripped of its grandiloquent justifications, it sounds much like a union’s job protection arrangements. This is not an endorsement of university administrations which, if anything, are deserving of even less job protection.
July 28, 2010, 9:23 pmElliot says:
I’m motivated by my objection to giving government employees guaranteed employment for life. They can do whatever they choose in private institutions.
July 28, 2010, 11:03 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
“I remain amazed by the idea that the university faculty population is so emotionally stunted that they would hire incompetents unless they were first given lifetime employment guarantees. Until reading this post, I would have dismissed that idea as silly. But I have to consider the number of academics in these threads who say it is true. So, I guess I have to reevaluate my position.”
Very few of them seem to, in fact, from what I’ve read on these threads. I don’t hold this view.
“If this is indeed the situation, then I have to ask how these folks are produced. Does the academic environment foster these attitudes? Does living in the academic world and university community dispose one to such attitudes? Does academic life from kindergarten to PhD to university appointment develop these attitudes?”
Most of us didn’t do K-Ph.D.. We’ve done other things as well, including holding non-academic jobs.
“Or perhaps it’s self selection. Are people with enhanced notions of personal entitlement attracted to academics? Some have suggested ending tenure would be a disincentive to the best students pursuit of a PhD. I have to ask if they think they are really getting the best now? What makes them think so? We might also consider that if hiring decisions are motivated by a desire to avoid being laid off because a new hire is better, what other fears do the hiring committees harbor. Will they subvert hiring to prevent a more promising scholar from outshining them? Will they subvert hiring to avoid a view challenging their ideas? If they will subvert hiring for one reason, isn’t it reasonable to suggest their sense of personal entitlement will subvert it for many others?”
As someone who has served on academic job search committees, it’s hard to know what’s going through other people’s heads, regardless of what they say out loud. It’s also hard to generalize about what happens in the process. There are a lot of factors. But as far as knowing or thinking that a new hire is better, that would require comparison of subfield vs. subfield. For example, in political science, a comparativist isn’t going to be threatened by a political theorist. Technically, they’re both political scientists but they work in very different fields. From my experience, for what it’s worth, methodological differences seem to matter more than anything else in hiring and tenure decisions. Also, personal differences.
Today, in the humanities and social sciences, at, say, a top-ten graduate program, to be admitted, you would have to be an outstanding candidate in terms of undergraduate grades, GRE scores, letters of recommendation, and writing sample(s), among other things. Do you know how hard it is to get into one of these top-notch Ph.D. programs? If you abolished tenure at public universities, but let private universities retain it, public universities would lose almost all of their best people in the social sciences and humanities; it would be a serious mistake if you care about the quality of liberal arts education at public universities.
July 29, 2010, 3:58 pmElliot says:
Well, I hope you are right. As I said, I found the idea astounding, but astounding ideas merit examination, too. My notion that it received support from academics includes the items listed below. Let’s hope I’m dead wrong. It’s happened before, and I don’t even have tenure.
July 29, 2010, 5:20 pmSuzy says:
LN, I think you have it exactly right. What’s the point of worrying about tenure, if it isn’t causing any particular problem? If tenured profs slack off, there are easy ways to solve that by tying their performance more tightly to salary and promotions, or giving them less choice and control over their jobs (e.g. they have to teach whatever sections get assigned to them, rather than the plum special topics course; or they have to teach more often and have less time for research assignment). Tenure doesn’t have to be connected to a promotion or salary increase; it’s a separate benefit.
It seems like the only reason conservatives are so up in arms about tenure is that they feel themselves a disproportionately small part of the group that most benefits from it at the moment. So rather than actually solve a problem here, they’d rather attack tenure because it’s a nice thing that too many of those pesky liberal profs and public school teachers enjoy. What’s the point of that? What harm is tenure causing, such that ending it is the best way to solve it?
Meanwhile, ending tenure would mean that more mediocre people remained in the teaching career, thus making the quality of instruction even worse. Only those most desperate for the job would remain. The chance of tenure is a big incentive to enter the academic career, given that it means making less money, having to teach more than is good for your research efforts, and losing the ability to move into a non-academic job later. When the university fires the 58 year old American history prof, because he’s getting to be more expensive than a young adjunct would be, where exactly does he go next? Why would he ever enter this career in the first place, when this could happen? He’ll just go to law school instead. I’d love to know this: if all the law professors knew that they wouldn’t have tenure, could be let go at any time, but after their time in academia they’d probably never get another law job again above the 35k mark and would have to end up as mail carriers or bank tellers or something, would they bother using their law degrees to become law professors at all?
August 2, 2010, 2:29 pmRick Hills vs. Brian Leiter on Tenure | theConstitutional.org says:
[...] NYU lawprof Rick Hills has posted a good critique of Brian Leiter’s (and others’) defenses for tenure (for which see here and here). For my own criticisms of tenure, see here, here, and here. [...]
August 20, 2010, 8:59 pm