Ilya has been doing some recent blogging about tenure, and I thought I would flag what seems to me the most persuasive argument in its favor: Academics are the best judges of who is a good academic, and tenure is necessary to ensure that a group of academics will hire the best person to fill an open faculty slot. This argument is made in detail in H. Lorne Carmichael, Incentives in Academics: Why Is There Tenure?, 96 Journal of Political Economy 453 (1988). 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.
Maybe everyone else is familiar with this argument, but I hadn’t seen it until recently: It turned me from a tenure skeptic to a modest supporter.
stevefromontario says:
I just love, love, love to listen to tenured folks extol the virtues of libertarianism and, sometimes, even objectivism.
Good stuff.
July 27, 2010, 1:19 amKarmaisking says:
Ridiculous, shallow, self-serving analysis.
Bankers are the best people to understand banking, so they should be in charge of the Treasury.
BP is best placed to understand about oil drilling so they should have representation in the EPA.
Big Tobacco has done the most research on lung cancer so they should be in charge of FDA.
Errr… ever heard of conflict of interest Mr Kerr? For this to come out of a LAWYER is simply amazing….
July 27, 2010, 1:20 amMQuinn says:
Nice to have you back, Orin!
July 27, 2010, 1:34 amRobert says:
Okay, I am a non-tenured faculty member (and it is not likely that I ever will be tenured). Basically, my job is to be a workhorse in the department taking all of those first/second year courses that tenured faculty (with exceptions for research purposes) are loathe to take. I am okay with this since I have not finished my PhD–I need to take comps and write the dissertation. So, I would like to say something about tenure.
Tenure allows a professor to pursue intellectual projects without fear of reprisal–trust me, it is a necessary thing. Ironically, because of cut-backs tenure is virtually dead at our institution. Some schools have adopted multi-year contracts in place of tenure: good. Professors should be accountable, and always on the cutting edge of intellectual pursuits. This is not the case at our institution. Now the best and the brightest minds–the ones best qualified for the most engaging courses are planning their exit strategy. 1/3 of our department (and we have a big department) has gone, and more are packing bags and heading for greener pastures. While we have never been a top-flight school, we were improving. Now we will be offering a weaker product for more money. The students, and society as a whole, will be the ones that suffer.
July 27, 2010, 1:35 amOrin Kerr says:
You know you’re really back to blogging when a commenter calls you “ridiculous” and “shallow.” I’m a bit disappointed that I wasn’t also called a political hack, though.
Seriously, though, I recommend actually reading the article before dismissing the argument as “shallow.” I’ve long been a critic of tenure, and am still quite uncomfortable with it, but the argument did really challenge my critical preconceptions.
(As for my self-interest, though, I would think it is in abolishing tenure, right?)
July 27, 2010, 1:42 amGov98 says:
The only thing I don’t quite understand is why the model of Faculty votes on new professors is an acceptable model. Shouldn’t that be “management’s” responsibility (the board or President.) It seems like if the best defense is “well the inexplicable underlying system wouldn’t work any other way perhaps the defense just isn’t that good.
July 27, 2010, 1:50 amleo marvin says:
Welcome back! Your political hackitude was truly missed.
July 27, 2010, 1:53 amLiam says:
I cannot even begin to fathom what your intended point was here. Academics, unlike for-profit corporations, are not subject to government regulation aimed at protecting consumers/citizens, so what is the analogous body to the SEC/FDA/EPA that you would have to be referencing to make an iota of sense?
If you comprehended the central argument (a dubious assumption, given the tone of your post), you would see the point is that tenure helps to reduce any conflicts of interest in the first place, by insulating the decisionmaker from theoretical negative consequences to himself. So to crudely apply your analogies in a vaguely sensible fashion, giving tenure to professors is like offering to reimburse banks for lost revenue when they limit systemic risk. Since banks are the experts, such a policy would probably be an infinitely more effective means of policing the industry than regulation by pseudo-experts (notwithstanding the impossibility of designing and implementing such a program).
July 27, 2010, 1:54 amOrin Kerr says:
Thank you, Leo! Now that’s more like it.
July 27, 2010, 2:04 amOrin Kerr says:
Gov98,
The argument is that administrators are not very good at identifying scholarly ability/accomplishment. Of course, if that’s not true, then you’re right: The best system in such a case should be one in which administrators pick the best scholar/teachers, pay them a lot to retain them, and yet can fire them readily if they start to slack off. I guess that boils down to an empirical question of the relative abilities of scholars versus administrators to identify talent.
July 27, 2010, 2:07 amLiam says:
Does that really solve the major problems that we see in faculty-run hiring, such as ideological discrimination? The President and other top-ranking administrators are oftentimes drawn the professorial ranks anyways, so I don’t see why they would be any better. Governing boards, at least in the case of state-run universities, are usually filled with political characters who are extremely ideologically partisan as well, but also have non-academic political considerations, and are dumber and less well-informed as to a candidate’s qualifications (having attended a state school, I’m less well-informed on the governing structure of most private universities, though I imagine they are similarly governed by groups of movers and shakers with similarly entrenched interests).
Faculty-run hiring is by no means flawless, but it seems to me that given the (perceived to be) high-stakes nature of university hirings, everyone is going to have a conflict of interests.
July 27, 2010, 2:13 amCurt F. says:
Excellent point Prof. Kerr. Combined with Tyler Cowen’s post the other day, your post has me wondering, will any of the proposed replacements for tenure provide hiring committees with an incentive to hire the best?
July 27, 2010, 2:24 amThe Awful Truth says:
Without tenure, professors would still have a strong incentive to hire the best candidates. If they hire a bunch of incompetents to avoid competition, the prestige of their department will go down. This will reduce their ability to increase or retain lines against other departments. If they have a graduate program, the quality and number of their grad students will go down.
Tenured profs also have disincentives to hiring the best candidates. In the humanities, the normal pattern of scholarship is for scholars to make their reputations with a new paradigm/approach/interpretation. As the get older, they tend to fight a rearguard action against their scholarship being superceded by fresh approaches. Some resist letting the enemy within the gates of their department.
July 27, 2010, 2:49 amOrin Kerr says:
The Awful Truth,
This is an empirical question, I suppose, but your argument strikes me as unlikely. My sense is that weak professors generally don’t care as much about the prestige of their department as they do about their own personal job security.
July 27, 2010, 2:59 amThe Awful Truth says:
My experience is that many weak professors don’t know that they are weak professors.
July 27, 2010, 3:08 amTyler says:
There is a saying in the HR World. A-People will hire A-People, B-People will hire C-People.
If people are afraid of hiring people that might be better then them, they shouldn’t be in charge of hiring.
July 27, 2010, 3:12 amOrin Kerr says:
My experience is that many weak professors don’t know that they are weak professors.
Whether or not that is true, I am not sure it is relevant. Under Carmichael’s argument, the issue is perceptions of ranking, not absolutely quality: All that matters is that a professor might perceive a potential hire as threatening because they see a chance that the potential hire could be considered by someone important to be better than himself.
July 27, 2010, 3:19 amThe Awful Truth says:
I didn’t realize I was essentially repeating an argument that Orin had already made more briefly and better.
July 27, 2010, 5:09 amMy apologies.
Paul Stanley says:
Arguments like this are very difficult to assess, since they depend on hard-to-test assumptions about sometimes unconscious psychology. Consider the following suggestions:
1. I will prefer to hire someone less competent than me, because they will not compete with me effectively.
2. I will prefer to hire the most competent, because they will increase the prestige of my department (which reflects on me, and improves my own prestige and marketability).
3. I will prefer to hire the most competent, because in academic work access to highly competent colleagues for discussion etc tends to improve individual performance.
4. I will frequently be influenced by factors other than competence (e.g. collegiality, tractability, political view) in choosing colleagues.
The list could go on. I don’t suppose any of these is entirely false. And I don’t suppose any of them is precluded by tenure. For instance, even with tenure there are still plenty of incentives to hire relatively inferior people to avoid competition (for prestige, increased salary: tenure does not end competition between faculty). And even without tenure there are plenty of reasons (e.g. institutional “reflected” prestige) to hire the best people.
It’s hard to make any categorical statement about where the balance lies, or how tenure affects it — or at least hard to make such a statement in terms which one can support beyond gut feeling.
FWIW, I doubt that tenure is very important for these reasons. In my experience, whether or not there is tenure in an organization, firing is quite rarely used as a way of removing the incompetent, in any but the most extreme cases of incompetence. And hiring commonly involves (not just in academia) some sort of “peer-group assessment”. In so far as that produces problems, my gut feeling is that they are much more often a result of giving undue priority to factors such as “collegiality” (which can easily be a cover for conscious or unconscious bias towards “people like me”, and a potent source of discrimination on irrelevant grounds) over competence. Tenure probably exacerbates that sort of problem, because if you think you are choosing a “colleague for life” such considerations loom larger.
I’d guess that concentrating on the way candidates are assessed (trying to make that process relatively rigorous and structured, and trying to minimize or at least make explicit the “good chap” element) is much more important than tenure or its absence if the goal is to match actual practice in appointing with the ideal of “choosing the best”.
July 27, 2010, 5:31 ambartman says:
What nobody ever says is what every economist knows: tenure is a form of compensation that helps to balance out the fact that academia pays terribly and demands absurd work hours for tenure-track faculty, as well as a lowly paid 10-year training period. Get rid of tenure and first three quartiles probably wouldn’t change their decisions, but the top quartile would – they’d likely be doing something else, and those are precisely the people you want to keep.
July 27, 2010, 7:02 amAdjoran says:
In what other field of endeavor are the workers elected by other workers? It’s a Marxist premise from the start.
July 27, 2010, 7:03 am`
This is no theoretical exercise – we have the practical results of decades of this paradigm to evaluate. The results cannot lie.
mikeyes says:
Oh, I don’t know, the US Congress, perhaps?
“Section 5. Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members, and a Majority of each shall constitute a Quorum to do Business; but a smaller Number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the Attendance of absent Members, in such Manner, and under such Penalties as each House may provide.”
July 27, 2010, 8:30 amSmooth, like a Rhapsody says:
Adjoran:
And the “results” are…what?
Don’t we have the best post-secondary education system in the world?
Now if you bring K-12 education into the discussion, that changes the argument: there should be no tenure there; and the effects of having tenure in K-12, along with other factors insulating that system from competition are fairly obvious.
July 27, 2010, 8:30 amPJens says:
The best evaluators of professors are successful students.
Somewhere in the tenure process, a professor ought to have the testimony of at least a dozen former students saying that tenure is due because of demonstrated excellent teaching performance.
Maybe something like this already exists, I don’t know.
July 27, 2010, 9:18 amSebastian the Ibis says:
Therein lies the crux of the problem. In the actual practice of law there are quasi-objective standards and constant feedback from real life descion makers, from judges, clients, partners, opposing counsel, or even when you are sued for malpractice.
July 27, 2010, 9:40 amCalderon says:
I don’t have access to jstor so only looked at the first page of the article, but it seems fairly unconvincing for at least a couple of reasons. First, why would academia be any different than other professions in terms of the hiring person’s ability to figure out the merit of a candidate? Most other professions do not rely on tenure, and typically have people besides those in the same position as the candidate make decisions on hiring. For example, in professional sports (mentioned at the bottom of the article’s first page) players do not make hires, but instead you have general managers, coaches, scouts, etc.
Second, even if you needed academics to make hires, why not just have a hiring committee composed of a cross-section of professors from across all disciplines? In fact, isn’t this what is actually done now? A chemistry professor has no reason to fear losing his job to a philosophy candidate, or vice versa.
Third, for many professions like law, accounting, investment banking, etc., new hires may eventually push out the old ones (as happened en masse at Cadwalader a decade or so ago). Yet again, no tenure in those institutions. Now you can say they are different because senior attorneys make money off younger attorneys, while that’s generally not the case with professors, but hiring qualified younger professors provides a benefit of someone with whom it’s easier to collaborate on with article, increasing the publishing output of both professors. If you don’t see other professionals concerned about being forced out, it’s difficult to see why this would be of particular concern to academics.
July 27, 2010, 9:49 amMark Field says:
This is not a comforting thought to, say, a Pirates fan.
July 27, 2010, 9:58 amSebastian the Ibis says:
Therein lies the crux of the problem. In the actual practice of law there are quasi-objective standards and constant feedback as to how you have met these standards from judges, clients, partners, opposing counsel, and even when you are sued for malpractice.
“Academia” is completely amorphous, no federal judge reads journal articles and votes the bad ones off the island. Instead it’s a circle jerk where one professor extols the virtues of another professors paper (and bumps up his cite count), and the senior professor realizes how bright the junior professor is for realizing how brilliant the senior professor’s ideas were. Read a random law review article from a junior professor and I’ll bet the platitudes extolling the virtues of more senior members of the “academy” easily outweigh actual cites to cases.
As for tenure itself, I am sure more budding professors have lost their jobs over transgressions such as daring to offer to teach a class in a more senior “Academic’s” traditional slot, or pushing for some minor academic/scheduling/curriculum shift than writing some truly ground breaking work which vexes a powerful interest group which lobbies for the removal of that professor.
In any event, it doesn’t really matter. At some point Uncle Sam is going to realize we have an indentured servitude student loan bubble and he will pull the plug on most federally guaranteed student loans, at which point academics will have to go earn those salaries in private practice, which they believe they could get had they not been an academic.
July 27, 2010, 10:03 amHouston Lawyer says:
I like the emphasis on hiring but not on subsequent performance. Other than self aggrandizement, what incentive do tenured professors have to do good work.
People who would avoid hiring someone more talented than themselves should be fired on the spot.
July 27, 2010, 10:34 amjosh says:
Prof Kerr
Welcome back. You actually are sorely missed for NOT being a political hack like some of your co-bloggers. The current landscape appears to have established that the media is controlled by jews, or liberals, or liberal jews. I’m not quite sure.
That said, I would love to see a post about your experiences in the Kagan confirmation hearings to the extent you can reveal any information. [Found your boss to be a little ... hackish]
July 27, 2010, 10:46 amMuch ado... says:
In at least some academic fields, they have a lot of incentive. A substantial portion of compensation (not just raises) depends on both the presence and quality of research, as does the teaching load. For those who don’t do much or dont’ do good work, they get paid less and teach more as a result. It seems this is not well known, but maybe it is not true in all fields. In my area, for instance, if a tenured professor decides to quit doing research they would lose about 20% of their pay and also get lower raises…they can’t be fired, but it’s not trivial.
July 27, 2010, 10:56 amJoseph Slater says:
First, Orin, welcome back!
Second, I also wonder what the huge problem is that eliminating tenure will purportedly solve. The U.S. is widely considered to have the best post-secondary education system in the world. Yes, there is some unproductive deadwood among the very senior, but that’s true in part even in private, “at-will” business.
Third, I agree that in academia, tenure/just cause firing is a tradeoff for the time/effort/cost of getting credentialed and the immense amount of work of the first 5-10 years.
Fourth, just cause discharge protection is much more the norm than the exception in industrialized democracies. Nearly every industrialized democracy besides the U.S. has just discharge protection as the general rule. Even in the U.S., big swaths of the economy — unionized workers, public workers covered by civil service rules, execs and some other high-level types with individual contracts — have just cause protection.
Fifth, this leads me to my criticism of tenure: it sometimes seems like it’s some extra-strong form of just cause. Having practiced in the real world, I know that folks covered by just cause agreements really do get fired and severely disciplined. That seems much rarer in academia. So, I would keep the just cause provision (for all the above reasons, plus other reasons folks have listed, like protection for those doing politically controversial work). But don’t treat it as “and you can only be fired if you do something felonious with/to a student.” “Good cause” for discipline and discharge should include really bad teaching and complete failure to engage in scholarly work.
Finally, Adjoran, it’s worse than you think. Faculty have significant power over most school policies. And most Dean search committees include faculty members. Heck, in law schools there is a rule that a Dean cannot serve if he/she is opposed by a majority of the faculty. Workers having a say in choosing, and even an ultimate veto on their boss! You might call this Marxist, but some of us think worker input and even actual power is a good thing.
July 27, 2010, 11:05 amPetep says:
“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”
In the REAL world, that fear is what makes an employee work harder, learn more, contribute more, do better. Not ‘screw their employer by hiring incompetents’.
This ‘CYA’ attitude is the true mark of selfish lazy incompetent teachers / professors, who are concerned not with the best interests of their students ( = hire the best teachers ) or their Universities ( = hire the best teachers / researchers ), but rather only with their own feeble pathetic self-interest and preservation, at the expense of the student body, and the university or school.
Truly sad and pathetic, that anyone endorses this immoral CYA attitude.
July 27, 2010, 11:11 amArthur Kirkland says:
College football coaching (and perhaps coaching in other sports, or at the professional level, but I have less familiarity there) offers an interesting, worthwhile, tenure-free comparison.
July 27, 2010, 11:28 amOrin Kerr says:
IPeteP, Arthur,
n the real world, there is a widely agreed-upon criteria for measuring the success or failure of business decisions — profit — and the boss’s success is measured by it. (In college football, it’s a win/loss record.) I’m curious, how do you measure the success or failure of faculty hiring decisions in a not-for-profit university?
July 27, 2010, 11:31 amAnon Y. Mous says:
This sounds like numbskullery piled on top of numbskullery. If the only way professors can be trusted to select competent colleagues is to give them a job for life, perhaps they aren’t the best choice to be making that decision in the first place. Instead of making the decision a committee decision, why not just place the responsibility in the hands of a single authority, like a Dean? Sure, I suppose it can be argued that then the Dean will be reluctant to hire anyone who could potentially take his place, but that’s true with any work environment. Somehow, it isn’t true that only mediocre applicants get jobs.
July 27, 2010, 11:41 amyankee says:
I don’t think this works. In most businesses it’s very difficult to attribute profit or loss to individual employees. How much of Apple’s profit do you assign to Joe X, one of many programmers on the team that designed the iPhone GUI? How much goes to Jane Y, who manages the mail room? How much goes to the secretary of the VP of Marketing? Evaluating these people requires using fuzzy criteria, not just a numerical metric.
There are some job categories where employees can be mapped to individual revenue items—sales, professional services, Wall Street traders—but those aren’t the norm.
July 27, 2010, 12:01 pmerp says:
Almost right.
Tenured faculty don’t want to hire people who will upset the status quo with new ideas and energy — and it’s true across the board, not only in law schools.
Cronyism, the right background, the right schools, etc. is what counts — competence is irrelevant.
July 27, 2010, 12:01 pmElliot says:
If hiring by faculty committee has populated universities with people who refuse to hire the best unless they have a guarantee of personal security, I’d suggest the system has already failed.
I don’t accept the university faculty population is this venal, but it appars many on the inside do.
July 27, 2010, 12:02 pmPetep says:
Orin = “n the real world, there is a widely agreed-upon criteria for measuring the success or failure of business decisions — profit — and the boss’s success is measured by it. (In college football, it’s a win/loss record.) I’m curious, how do you measure the success or failure of faculty hiring decisions in a not-for-profit university?”
I don’t know. I would think the academic community would come up with some kind of answer to that, based maybe on things like ‘how well educated are the students ?’
The mere fact that you have to draw a line between, in your word(s) ‘the real world’ and academia should tell you something.
BTW, ‘profit’ frequently does not enter into things as a metric, most especially in individual reviews. As an employee in a company of 5,000 employees, I am not held personally responsible for the bottom line. The company could be doing well, while I was a slacker, or the company could be suffering, while I was doing an excellent job.
BTW, Oren – what happens when current faculty ‘hires non-threatening lesser talents’, and then THOSE lesser talents, in 5 years, are hiring, etc etc ? Who do you end up with , Homer Simpson ?
July 27, 2010, 1:41 pmneurodoc says:
Gee, I really perked up when I read that, but then you said nothing more about “ideological discrimination,” a subject I raised in the previous tenure thread. Doesn’t the way tenure and the hiring process work serve to encourage “like-minded” departments and disciplines, that like-mindedness more often, though not always, in the left-leaning direction? And those ideologic biases only grow stronger over time, influencing the career choices of college students and would-be graduate students?
If I’m wrong about what I believe to be at work in universities, especially in humanities and social sciences, I’d like to hear it. Professor Kerr? How is it that George Mason, in particular its law school, seems to have a decidedly more libertarian bent than most law schools? Did Elena Kagan have to go to special lengths to hire conservatives because there aren’t many of them at large, or is it because over time HLS has gravitated more left, like a good many law faculties? (No data to support it, but I think this effect is much more pronounced in other than law schools, and certainly other than business and medical schools, where “ideology” is effectively an irrelevancy, and hence not a concern.)
July 27, 2010, 3:01 pmOrin Kerr says:
PeteP:
1) So how would you measure how well educated the students are? And would you measure that based on how much they improved, or their absolute levels of education? And what areas, and how tested?
2) I was using the “real world” versus “academia” distinction for clarity and out of courtesy to you, as it was the distinction you used: I don’t think that decision somehow signals a flaw in my argument.
July 27, 2010, 3:15 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
neurodoc, I don’t know how much so-called ideological discrimination exists in law school hiring –it would be hard to measure but clearly relevant– but in hiring in political science departments, especially research-oriented ones, the discrimination is more likely to be methodological (as in quantitative folks look down on qualitative folks these days).
Please correct me if I’m wrong about how hiring typically works for law school faculty, but I was under the impression that nothing is more important than pedigree –i.e.- where you went to law school (preferably, top five), whether you were on law review (preferably had an editorial position of some kind), and whether you had a prestigious federal court clerkship after graduation. If I’m right about this, why is this sort of pedigree the best –or even a good– predictor of scholarly potential?
July 27, 2010, 3:21 pmneurodoc says:
When we speak of “tenure,” are we talking only about job security, that is the protection against being fired, or are we including in the mix the hiring and promotion process that goes along with “tenure”?
You confuse me with “tenure/just cause firing,” since “tenure” is so much stronger a protection against being fired than “just cause” is outside of academia. (In academia, does non-productivity, even egregious non-productivity, count as “just cause” grounds for firing a tenured faculty member?)
OMG, you are bringing in foreign law/custom/practice here. If not anti-American, then facially un-American.
Now, I think you are onto something fundamentally important here. Why should it be nigh unto impossible to fire tenured faculty absent commission of a felony (e.g., that NYU anthropology professor was into synthesizing and distributing illicit using campus facilities for the purpose), acts of moral terpitude (would non-felonious examples include grades for sex?), or academic fraud, including egregious plagiarism? Let it be for “just cause,” and define “just cause” as serious transgressions, not lesser misconduct. So nothing like being an employee at will, but nothing like nigh unto untouchable when nothing remotely like “academic freedom” anywhere in sight.
Without getting into the particulars, and there are many, no reason for concern that the Harvard A&S faculty were so instrumental in getting Larry Summers sacked?
July 27, 2010, 3:58 pmTenure and Faculty Self-Selection Reconsidered | theConstitutional.org says:
[...] a recent post, Orin (relying on an argument by H. Lorne Carmichael) cites faculty self-selection as an argument [...]
July 27, 2010, 4:19 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
I haven’t read Carmichael’s piece yet. But wouldn’t those comparisons –if they’re made at all– be made in each subfield of law? How would a constitutional law professor/scholar feel threatened by someone who does research, say, in torts or bankruptcy? And even in the same field, how would a potential hire for an entry-level position who has published next to nothing be judged to be threatening by a faculty member who already has some publications?
Oren, as you see it, how could the law school hiring process be reformed to yield less “weak” professors? As I mentioned in a post above, my impression is that law schools don’t do a great job of hiring people who are likely to be good or great scholars. They do an excellent job of hiring people who had great grades in law school. Or do you believe that it shouldn’t be changed?
July 27, 2010, 4:27 pmneurodoc says:
Sorry about that. It was those “blockquotes” where there should have been “/blockquotes.” I do hope the comment is not to difficult to read.
July 27, 2010, 4:38 pmneurodoc says:
Hey, it looks like my comment corrected itself. (But why “awaits moderation”?)
When editing one’s comment, do others sometimes encounter problems getting the cursor to go where they want it to go because the screen jiggles? Is it necessary to hit “save” a certain amount of time before the allowed 5 minutes for editing runs out? Does the editing function always work for others, or is it sometimes impossible to employ it? These are all problems I have encountered at times, albeit not too frequently.
July 27, 2010, 4:42 pmPetep says:
Oren –
“1) So how would you measure how well educated the students are? And would you measure that based on how much they improved, or their absolute levels of education? And what areas, and how tested?”
Not being an academic, nor having given thought to it, I don’t know. I would think that the educational system would be the place to look for an answer to that question. I would think some kind of testing and standards would be required.
It would also be interesting to see how the High and Mighty ( Harvard, Yale, et al ) faired against, Oh, let’s say, SUNY, or a local community college, if an equal standardized test process were applied to students of each. Do you really come out of Harvard being $ 35,000 / year worth of smarter or better educated ? Hmmm……
Yes, I know the teaching community in general is allergic to the idea of anything that might actually put a quantifiable metric on their performance ( I do not put you personally in that group, of course ), where they could be evaluated, promoted or demoted, perhaps even fired, based on their PERFORMANCE rather than ‘how long they’ve been there’ or ‘How well the other teachers like them personally, or agree with their politics’
“2) I was using the “real world” versus “academia” distinction for clarity and out of courtesy to you, as it was the distinction you used: I don’t think that decision somehow signals a flaw in my argument.”
Nor do I. I think it points out a very real flaw in the educational system – the fact that it is divorced from the real world.
Another example would be public school teachers, salaries vs days worked. Totally divorced from the real world. They work ~ 170 days ( the school year ) minus vacation, sick, and personal days, where in the REAL world, we work 260 days minus V, S & P days. And yet teachers complain that they don’t make enough, their job is ‘so tough’. Well, they make as much per year as their neighbors typically do, they just work ~90 days / year less for it.
Before the public school teachers jump up to bite me and say ‘Oh, but they work such long days, they take papers home to grade, they spend nights and weekends designing curricula’ – I call ‘bullshit’. They are given multiple ‘free periods’ each and every day to do all that, plus ‘teacher work days’. Only the stupid ones fail to manage their time properly. I’ve known a number of public school teachers, including my parents, and it’s few and far between, if ever, that one brought work home with them, or worked a long day ( unless they were getting paid extra to do some after-school thing ). When that bell rings at 3:00 or 3:15, bango ! zippo ! Gone like a flash, count on that !
Then there’s ‘sabbatical’ – a paid year off every ten or so. Damn. Plus great bene’s. and when was the last time you heard of a teacher being told ‘You can’t go on vacation as scheduled, in fact you have to work until 10 PM every night for the next two weeks, plus Saturdays, to meet a new dealine or deal with a crisis’ ? Never.
Like I said – totally divorced from reality, and tenure is just one example of it.
July 27, 2010, 5:07 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
“Another example would be public school teachers, salaries vs days worked. Totally divorced from the real world. They work ~ 170 days ( the school year ) minus vacation, sick, and personal days, where in the REAL world, we work 260 days minus V, S & P days. And yet teachers complain that they don’t make enough, their job is ‘so tough’. Well, they make as much per year as their neighbors typically do, they just work ~90 days / year less for it.
Before the public school teachers jump up to bite me and say ‘Oh, but they work such long days, they take papers home to grade, they spend nights and weekends designing curricula’ — I call ‘bullshit’. They are given multiple ‘free periods’ each and every day to do all that, plus ‘teacher work days’. Only the stupid ones fail to manage their time properly. I’ve known a number of public school teachers, including my parents, and it’s few and far between, if ever, that one brought work home with them, or worked a long day ( unless they were getting paid extra to do some after-school thing ). When that bell rings at 3:00 or 3:15, bango ! zippo ! Gone like a flash, count on that !
Then there’s ‘sabbatical’ — a paid year off every ten or so. Damn. Plus great bene’s. and when was the last time you heard of a teacher being told ‘You can’t go on vacation as scheduled, in fact you have to work until 10 PM every night for the next two weeks, plus Saturdays, to meet a new dealine or deal with a crisis’ ? Never.
Like I said — totally divorced from reality, and tenure is just one example of it.”
Petep, I thought that we were talking about tenure for academics, not for public school teachers. The situations are different. I don’t know much about the latter. I can speak for myself, and probably for other young academics, that we work our asses off not only trying to get tenure but also trying to get that next promotion because many of us are paid poorly. The work includes not only service and teaching but research. Do you have any idea how muich time and effeort goes into, say, writing a 350 page book? If I get tenure this academic year, I will get a quarter (10 weeks) paid sabbatical as a reward sometime in the future. What will I be doing over those ten weeks? Most likely, working on the next book so that I can get the next promotion. When I’m not teaching, I’m doing research. Or reading students personal statements for law school applications. Or doing other job-related activities. I’m just not clear on why so many civilians think that academics are lazy and when they’re not in the classroom, they’re not working. If the problem lies w/ older faculty members, then give them incentives to retire early and replace them w/ younger persons who have more enthusiasm and energy. Btw, I’m not trying to be a jerk but I’ve heard people say what you said above time and time again and it doesn’t jibe w/ what I saw as a grad student, lecturer, or tenure-track professor.
July 27, 2010, 5:29 pmneurodoc says:
Thank you for your answer. Alas, I have no answers for you, at least no authoritative ones. Though I have degrees from four different institutions (and all presume to ask me for money) and have in the course of six years of residency/fellowship spent time at a couple of other institutions, I have never participated in any faculty members hiring or firing, so can’t speak of these things from any experience or real knowledge.
As for “ideologic discrimination” in academic hiring, that has been taken up in previous VC threads, as has the reality vs appearance of “homogeneity” most often favoring the left over the right. I believe it is so, but could be persuaded that there is less bias at work than I think. If there is bias, more than a “quantitative” vs “qualitative” thing, though, mightn’t tenure foster it? (By way of aside here, Paul Starr, a sociologist, wrote an absolutely brilliant book on the history of American medicine, looking at all the things that influenced its development. The book won a Pulitzer Prize, but Starr was denied tenure at Harvard because the Sociology Department there felt that respect only came through doing “quantitative” sociology,” not “descriptive” stuff. Thus, Starr wound up at Princeton rather than his first choice, Harvard.)
It would be interesting to hear from David Bernstein or Ilya Somin about how things are at George Mason. It is my impression that the school generally is “pro-business” because that is where the administration has taken it in pursuit of $$$ and support from the surrounding community, and that the law school has a more conservative/libertarian slant than most as a result. Would a raging Leftie have as much of a chance of being hired there as someone over to the right of center given equal credentials as scholars, or would there likely be some ideologic bias at work in the hiring decision? (Maybe the ideologic bias would work in favor of the Leftie if the school wanted to go for a bit of “diversity.”)
July 27, 2010, 5:32 pmJoseph Slater says:
I have had that problem, FWIW.
PeteP:
As I mentioned earlier, just cause discharge protection is not actually “divorced from reality” in much employment, even big chunks of employment in the U.S. But since you obviously think that, for example, middle school teachers have such a great deal — so great it’s unreal — what stopped you from becoming one?
July 27, 2010, 5:35 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
neuro, again, based on my personal professional experience, ideological bias is only likely to be factored in in borderline cases, if it exists at all in that department (which it may, of course). Simply put, given the criteria for tenure, some people have unarguably met it and some people haven’t. I would be more concerned w/ personality conflicts and/or personal differences in borderline cases. Of course, someone might not like someone else because of his or her politics but academics are often petty, and you’d be surprised what could get under a colleague’s skin. The media pays a lot of attention to allegations of ideological bias but I doubt that it’s all that common… could be wrong, of course. Also, in deciding where to apply and where to accept an offer, I doubt that a candidate would choose a department that has that sort of reputation if that will work against him or her a few years down the road.
July 27, 2010, 5:48 pmElliot says:
If one contends an individual employee in a profit oriented company can be judged on the results for the whole company, then could one also contend an individual law professor could be judged on the law school graduates rate of passing the bar exam on the first attempt?
I don’t think either is valid, but I think the analogy fits. I’m sure law professors can tick off lots of reasons this wouldn’t work, just as those of us in profit oriented companies can do the same.
July 27, 2010, 5:52 pmElliot says:
Yes. It jiggles on my small netbook, and it jiggles on my quad core 3.4 GHz machine. Usually I have to use the arrow keys to target the cursor in the right place, then type the correction blind.
July 27, 2010, 5:56 pmPetep says:
Ron – “Petep, I thought that we were talking about tenure for academics, not for public school teachers.”
Just when you think you know the answer, they change the question ! :-)
“we work our asses off not only trying to get tenure but also trying to get that next promotion because many of us are paid poorly.”
I don’t doubt you. However, that is not a reason you have earned / deserved / should get a lifetime guaranteed job. Nowhere else in ‘the real world’ does merely ‘working hard’ get you that. Dude – we ALL work hard, not just you. Most of us do so at least partially in hopes of making more money. Many of us barely make ends meet now ( or less ). That is OUR problem, not society’s, and it does not mean we get a lifetime guarantee.
” The work includes not only service and teaching but research. Do you have any idea how muich time and effeort goes into, ….” snip
I’m sure you’re a hard worker, and use your time productively, if you say so. I’m sure you’re an ambitious kind of guy, if you tell me so. None of that means you get a lifetime guarantee of anything, in the REAL world.
“say, writing a 350 page book? If I get tenure this academic year, I will get a quarter (10 weeks) paid sabbatical as a reward sometime in the future. What will I be doing over those ten weeks? Most likely, working on the next book so that I can get the next promotion.”
BTW, how many copies will go to print ? Enough to cover the costs of publishing, and perhaps your salary ?
” When I’m not teaching, I’m doing research. Or reading students personal statements for law school applications. Or doing other job-related activities. I’m just not clear on why so many civilians think that academics are lazy and when they’re not in the classroom, they’re not working.”
In K-12, I’m sure of it. In secondary, I’m not sure, in fact I don’t know at all. However, I AM sure that MANY MANY people ( including myself ) do that in the REAL world, and there is NEVER an promise of any ‘lifetime job’.
” If the problem lies w/ older faculty members, then give them incentives to retire early and replace them w/ younger persons who have more enthusiasm and energy.”
Buy them off ? pay them to take their inadequate performance down the road ? Guess what – in the REAL world, only CEO’s and such get that kind of deal ( witness BP today ). Us ‘common folk’ get a swift kick in the ass and maybe two weeks severance.
” Btw, I’m not trying to be a jerk but I’ve heard people say what you said above time and time again and it doesn’t jibe w/ what I saw as a grad student, lecturer, ”
I didn’t say you were a jerk, of course, however, A ) my prior specific comments were directed more at K-12 level, and B ) The idea hols trued, no matter what you tell us about how hard you work, etc, that many MANY MANY people in the real world work equally as hard, and there is never the slightest possibility of any ‘lifetime guarantee’. Thus, ‘tenure’ is a fantasy invented in the la-la-land of education.
Joseph – “But since you obviously think that, for example, middle school teachers have such a great deal — so great it’s unreal — what stopped you from becoming one?”
I hate kids ;-)
I have a friend who made a different decision – he’s been a HS teacher 20 + years, in Graphic Arts. He made a decision back in college, when I first met him, that he would go into teaching even though he hates being around kids, because his father, a School Superintendent, taught him that he could use his position to buy all the graphic arts supplies he wanted for himself ( including high-end computers, software, etc ), and use them all he wanted, plus have tenure and great bene;’s for a part-time job.
Me, I’d have had to supply two things for my classes – duct tape, and a small light to put in the closet so they could see :-).
July 27, 2010, 6:22 pmneurodoc says:
What if the bias is rife across schools? For example, in departments of Middle Eastern studies it is easy to find very vocal, often activist, critics of Israel, not easy to find those of the opposite persuasion. A student who wasn’t of the “progressive” anti-Israel persuasion would be well-advised to think twice, thrice, or more before starting graduate studies with the hope of an academic career afterwards. (I would throw out the names of Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes here, but I am not interested in arguing with anyone here about the particulars of their cases.) Doesn’t the current system foster such “monocultures,” where one ideologic stream can take hold and grow more entrenched over time, all the while celebrating “academic freedom”?
Should it be as hard as it was at the University of Colorado to get rid of a fraudster like Ward Churchill? If the president of DePaul had been so imprudent as to sign off on the department’s decision on tenure for Norman Finkelstein, then so long as Finkelstein was not convicted of a felony, did not engage in grievous sexual misconduct with a student (e.g., grades for sex), or do something qualifying as “moral turpitude,” then Finkelstein would have been licensed to use his position for the purposes of political activism, disparage his employer, and otherwise cause the school embarrassment and injury, because that is the meaning of “academic freedom,” which tenure is supposed to be so much about? (BTW, if he could be counted on not to use his classroom or the school platform for his tendentious political agenda, and would limit promotion of those ends to his non-work day and place, I would be OK with that, notwithstanding how odious I find him and what he represents. Same for the likes of Joseph Masoud and others of that ilk. Now, Noam Chomsky, who has been faculty at my alma mater for 50+ years, is equally distasteful to me, but for the most part his political advocacy has been extra-curricular to his position as a professor of linguistics.)
July 27, 2010, 6:29 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
“BTW, how many copies will go to print? Enough to cover the costs of publishing, and perhaps your salary?”
I don’t know. As of a few weeks ago, in about ten months, it has sold more than 250 copies. According to my book contract, it won’t go into soft cover unless it sells 2000 copies, which seems to be out of the question. It doesn’t help that academic books, especially hard covers, are overpriced, at least initially. Even academic publishers try to make a profit on each book. I don’t know how often they actually succeed. So far, I’ve spent more on the index than I’ve received in royalties. Hey, I have an idea. Why don’t you buy it and see how much effort went into it? You can get it on Amazon.com. The price has come down a bit :)
But seriously, in how many jobs does one need a Ph.D., usually from a top-notch graduate program, to even be considered for a position at a four-year university, and not necessarily a research one. And then to get tenure, one needs to publish peer-reviewed articles in decent academic journals or publish a book? Apart from what’s expected, teaching-wise. It’s a lot harder than it looks, and the standards for tenure, at least in humanities and social sciences, are higher than they were in the past. I doubt that I’m paid much more than most public school teachers in California. If I were at a research institution, I would (probably) be paid more, w/ less of a teaching load and but much more pressure to publish more and publish in better places.
July 27, 2010, 7:11 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
In sum, sure, there are examples of people who probably shouldn’t have gotten tenure. But for me, the solution is to ensure, as much as possible, that the standards are sufficiently high and that, again as much as possible, ideological bias doesn’t play any role at all. The latter will be harder to achieve in some fields than in others.
July 27, 2010, 7:21 pmPetep says:
Ron – “As of a few weeks ago, in about ten months, it has sold more than 250 copies. According to my book contract, it won’t go into soft cover unless it sells 2000 copies, which seems to be out of the question.”
So, you didn’t write it with the expectation that lots of people would read it, or that it would make you money ( two separate goals ). If the supposed purpose of a book is to be read, then what is the point of writing one that is NOT going to be read ? Answer – Academia, being divorced from reality, mandates ‘publish or perish’, even if NO ONE ever reads your words.
“But seriously, in how many jobs does one need a Ph.D., usually from a top-notch graduate program, to even be considered for a position at a four-year university, and not necessarily a research one. And then to get tenure, one needs to publish peer-reviewed articles in decent academic journals or publish a book?”
One that won’t actually be read, thus defeating the purpose of publishing a book. That’s not ‘communication’ or ‘free speech’, that’s ‘the fantasy land of academia’, where things like ‘books that are never read’ have value, and get you a lifetime contract.
” Apart from what’s expected, teaching-wise. It’s a lot harder than it looks, and the standards for tenure, at least in humanities and social sciences, are higher than they were in the past. I doubt that I’m paid much more than most public school teachers in California. If I were at a research institution, I would (probably) be paid more, w/ less of a teaching load and but much more pressure to publish more and publish in better places.”
Again – I take your word for all of it, but I say that none of it entitles you to a lifetime job guarantee, at least not anywhere except academia, which is in it’s own unreal private world.
BTW, you tend to quote WAY too much of what you’re replying too :-) another little ‘real world’ kind of detail ;-)
July 27, 2010, 7:43 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
“So, you didn’t write it with the expectation that lots of people would read it, or that it would make you money ( two separate goals ). If the supposed purpose of a book is to be read, then what is the point of writing one that is NOT going to be read ? Answer — Academia, being divorced from reality, mandates ‘publish or perish’, even if NO ONE ever reads your words.”
You hope that other academics –those in your field who care about the intellectual issues that you care about– will read it and you also hope that you will contribute something to that field. Most academics don’t contribute much but they try. One of the obvious reasons that academic books are rarely read by ordinary people is that they’re written w/ a particular audience in mind, namely specialists.
I think that the strongest argument in favor of tenure is that if there is a dramatic change in the incentive structure, which there would be w/ the abolition of tenure, is that the quality of entry level people will drop in social science (perhaps not economics) and humanities fields. Most four-year universities hire only Ph.D.s and getting through a Ph.D. program isn’t anything close to a walk in the park. At UCLA, the average time to finish a Ph.D. in political science is nine years (it took me eight). The attrition rate is high in some programs as well. In fact, getting into a top-notch graduate program is very difficult. You need great undergraduate grades and a great GRE score at minimum. And you have to worry about funding. I also taught as a lecturer for two years before landing a tenure-track job.
If you don’t have an incentive like tenure, one would be crazy to go into certain fields like History, English, or Philosophy. Who would take that risk for so little reward? And it’s not as if the UC or CSU, if tenure were abolished, would double starting salaries. Most other jobs don’t require the minimum qualifications that a tenure-track position requires. There has to be some gold at the end of the rainbow. Even w/ the existence of tenure, it amazes me that so many people still want to enter graduate programs w/ the hope of becoming a professor someday.
The last thought that I will add for now is that anyone who has spent some time in academia knows that it is more “real world” and less “ivory tower” than outsiders tend to believe. Btw, I’ve enjoyed the exchange…
July 27, 2010, 8:26 pmOrin Kerr says:
Petep,
You don’t have to answer, of course, but I’m curious: What line of work are you in?
July 27, 2010, 8:33 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
Orin, I’m curious now. Can you say something about the standards for tenure for law professors? How many are denied? Is denial rare? And also about the standards for hiring? Was I right in another post about the importance of pedigree? I looked at your CV and you met exactly what I had been told the criteria was. Which is quite impressive, btw!
July 27, 2010, 8:38 pmShelbyC says:
Many organizations have a system where peers have much, if not most, of the say in who gets hired. You don’t have tenure, though. If you think sombody is sabotaging the organization by hiring crappy folks, you fire them.
July 27, 2010, 9:59 pmOrin Kerr says:
Ron,
The job is incredibly competitive to get at the entry level: Lots of great people want it. But then, someone strangely, getting tenure at most law schools is actually quite easy: As a general rule, very few people on the tenure track are denied it.
Re credentials, times have largely changed: Prior publications and their quality matters a lot more, law review and clerkships matter a lot less. (FWIW, I wasn’t on law review and hadn’t clerked at the Supreme Court when I went on the teaching market as an entry-level; I applied to clerk when I was already a tenure-track professor.)
July 27, 2010, 10:12 pmMike G says:
I once read that the average number of readers of an academic paper is seven.
Made me feel much better about the time I spend blogging, where I routinely beat that by 50, even 100%.
July 28, 2010, 12:50 amMike G says:
To me, before I accept any arguments about tenure, I’d like some current examples of people who’ve made good use of it by bucking their field and drawing the ire of their colleagues. Show me the academics who’ve published papers on what a great thing liberating Iraq was, for instance.
July 28, 2010, 12:53 amneurodoc says:
I think your point is a good one, but it only goes to one strut of the pro-tenure argument, the “academic freedom” one. For whatever reason, these recent threads about the merits/demerits of tenure have focused largely on “economics” and other considerations, e.g., does it encourage the best hires.
July 28, 2010, 2:02 amPetep says:
Orin – I am a Computer programmer. FYI, no college background, and my legal background is limited to < 1 day on jury duty :-) As soon as I described to the judge during voir dire my belief in jury nullification ( without using that exact phrase ( to avoid pissing him off TOO much ), but I expressed the concept of it ), he excused me in something under 1 minute :-)
If you were to propose that this lead to a certain binary flavor in my thinking, you might well be right ;-) I would propose in return that your esteemed background in academia and the law leads to certain thought patterns as well. ( merely an observation, not intended to be derogatory in any way ).
Ron – "I think that the strongest argument in favor of tenure is that if there is a dramatic change in the incentive structure, which there would be w/ the abolition of tenure, is that the quality of entry level people will drop in social science (perhaps not economics) and humanities fields."
I suspect you might be right – if you withdraw one of the big benefits of a position, the people who are capable of doing better elsewhere, will. Of course, anyone who majors in 'social sciences' or 'humanities' only has two real employment options – academia, or the government ( social services ).
"If you don’t have an incentive like tenure, one would be crazy to go into certain fields like History, English, or Philosophy. Who would take that risk for so little reward?"
IOW, these fields don't carry great demand in the real world, thus they are in effect artifacts of la-la-land academia. Let's face it, they don't exactly attract the 'best and the brightest' as fields of study.
" And it’s not as if the UC or CSU, if tenure were abolished, would double starting salaries. Most other jobs don’t require the minimum qualifications that a tenure-track position requires. There has to be some gold at the end of the rainbow."
Don't teachers usually claim they're in it 'for the love of teaching' ? -:)
" Even w/ the existence of tenure, it amazes me that so many people still want to enter graduate programs w/ the hope of becoming a professor someday."
I wonder how many start out with an examination of the number of positions likely to be available, vs the number and caliber of graduates competing for them ? Anyone here who would like to go back in time and compete with Prof V one-on-one for a college background and career, raise your hand :-)
"Btw, I’ve enjoyed the exchange…" As have I :-)
July 28, 2010, 8:57 amMike G says:
Yeah, Neurodoc, but I think those are all kind of sides of the same issue: is it fostering heterodoxy or orthodoxy, which is also a quality issue if a brilliant independent thinker can’t get tenure (see Paglia, Camille) but mediocrities can squeak by because they share the group consensus. Does anyone doubt that this happens, a lot?
July 28, 2010, 11:05 amRonald C. Den Otter says:
Thanks for the info., Orin. It’s interesting that so few of us who favor or are sympathetic to tenure haven’t gravitated to the traditional “tenure serves academic freedom argument.”
“If you don’t have an incentive like tenure, one would be crazy to go into certain fields like History, English, or Philosophy. Who would take that risk for so little reward?”
IOW, these fields don’t carry great demand in the real world, thus they are in effect artifacts of la-la-land academia. Let’s face it, they don’t exactly attract the ‘best and the brightest’ as fields of study.”
Some of the faculty in philosophy departments that I’ve met or taken classes w/ are some of the brightest people that I’ve ever met. At UCLA, for example, Seana Shiffrin and Barbara Herman immediately come to mind.
”And it’s not as if the UC or CSU, if tenure were abolished, would double starting salaries. Most other jobs don’t require the minimum qualifications that a tenure-track position requires. There has to be some gold at the end of the rainbow.
Don’t teachers usually claim they’re in it ‘for the love of teaching’ ? -:)”
I wish more professors cared about teaching. Too many of them at research institutions don’t, even public ones, and the incentive structure has a lot to do w/ that. Why spend a lot of time helping students and preparing for class if doing so has no effect on one’s professional future?
”Even w/ the existence of tenure, it amazes me that so many people still want to enter graduate programs w/ the hope of becoming a professor someday.”
I wonder how many start out with an examination of the number of positions likely to be available, vs the number and caliber of graduates competing for them? Anyone here who would like to go back in time and compete with Prof V one-on-one for a college background and career, raise your hand :-)
My guess is that most of us who went the Ph.D. route in the humanities or social sciences didn’t take the poor odds too seriously or dismissed them. Also, typically, graduate programs admit many more students than there are academic jobs out there for a number of reasons.
July 28, 2010, 9:31 pmPetep says:
“Also, typically, graduate programs admit many more students than there are academic jobs out there for a number of reasons”
Yes – we need street musicians, too :-)
July 28, 2010, 9:48 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
We do need excellent people in the humanities and social sciences.
My point above was that some (and that’s being charitable) research institutions will exploit graduate students as a cheap source of labor –teaching and research assistants and readers/graders– and at least initially, make it seem as if all graduate students will land an academic job someday, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
If I had to reduce my position to one point, it would be that academic tenure-track jobs, at least in the social sciences, are unlike most other jobs out there. People who oppose tenure often argue that there is no job security in many other jobs. Therefore, an academic job shouldn’t merit job security/tenure either. The implicit premise in this argument is what I just stated: that an academic job isn’t different in the relevant respects from other jobs. I believe that this is false. I’ve held other non-academic jobs and none of them resemble being a professor. In any case, you would have to defend this claim because it’s far from self-evident. In previous posts, I’ve tried to show what it takes to secure such a position is very different from an ordinary job. If you want good people going into these fields because the social sciences and humanities are an important (in fact, as I see it, essential) part of a well-rounded education, then I wouldn’t tinker w/ the incentive structure. You want people who have Ph.D.s from first-rate institutions teaching at institutions of higher learning around the country. When someone who has a Ph.D. earns more or elss the same as someone who teaches, say, at a public high school, and has to do quite a bit more work because research is required for hiring, retention, and promotion, very few people would ever take 7-10 years of their lives to earn a doctorate. It just wouldn’t be worth it. Too much risk, too little reward. If you want older (as in post-tenure) faculty members to remain as productive as possible, you create incenttives for them to do so. And you also induce them to retire early.
July 29, 2010, 3:38 pmElliot says:
Perhaps one might ask if the qualifications for the job make any sense? How much of that work is necessary to handle the position? Is it really necessary to do all that cheap labor? I’m not asking if the tasks the cheap labor performs are important, but whether performing those tasks is necessary for an individual to perform well as a professor. (Shoveling the snow on the main quad is also important.)
Is it possible the profession has surrounded itself with a bunch of unnecessary jumping-through-hoops simply to erect barriers to entry? Perhaps it really doesn’t take all that work, but folks pretend it does? If risk, reward, and investment are decision variables, might one get an even better person entering the profession if the path to a PhD was made as efficient and effective as possible?
I wonder if folks are saying, “We need tenure because the path to a PhD is so long and difficult, so let’s make sure we keep it that way so we get to enjoy tenure.”
What does grading papers for a 101 level course have to do with developing a brilliant resaarcher?
July 29, 2010, 5:04 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
“Perhaps one might ask if the qualifications for the job make any sense? How much of that work is necessary to handle the position? Is it really necessary to do all that cheap labor? I’m not asking if the tasks the cheap labor performs are important, but whether performing those tasks is necessary for an individual to perform well as a professor. (Shoveling the snow on the main quad is also important.)”
This is a really good question. In my case, I teach public law classes at a four-year non-research university. I have a law degree (top-ten law school) and a Ph.D. (top-ten political scinece department),which took me eight years to complete. I was a teaching assistant for five years. After earning my Ph.D., I taught as a lecturer (non-tenure track for two years) before landing the tenure-track position that I now have. Is all of that necessary to teach reasonably well? Probably not, at least not for lower division courses, but I know that that background has helped a lot in terms of being much better than average in the classroom (which I think I am). Most professors will tell you that if you haven’t done a doctorate, then your research will be poor and in turn, that will (negatively) affect your teaching. I’m not sure that either is true –it depends on a bunch of variables– and that’s another topic altogether. But if you’re asking am I a better teacher (and researcher) because of the background I have, the answer is yes, w/out question. How much better? I’m not sure. Would all of that extra time/education be justified by the improvement in my teaching? Again, I’m not sure. But if we’re talking a more advanced class, say constitutional theory, then yes. You need time to try to master theoretical debates.
“Is it possible the profession has surrounded itself with a bunch of unnecessary jumping-through-hoops simply to erect barriers to entry? Perhaps it really doesn’t take all that work, but folks pretend it does?”
I wondered about this as well. Especially when I was a law student. I think the standards not only for being admitted to a top-ten graduate program, getting through it, and then landing a tenure track job are much, much higher than they were in the past. If I had to take a stab at it, I would say that institutions of higher learning, because the supply of (good and very good) Ph.D.s far exceeds the demand for them in the humanities and social sciences, can impose these higher standards if they want to, which they do. In addition, the standards for tenure at very good research institutions have gone up dramatically.
“If risk, reward, and investment are decision variables, might one get an even better person entering the profession if the path to a PhD was made as efficient and effective as possible?”
Perhaps. Hard to know. I would add that from my experience at least, a fair number of people who go to graduate school and do well care more about their own research agenda –and being left alone to do it– than anything else. But that isn’t to say that they’re indifferent to economic incentives. Far from it.
“I wonder if folks are saying, “We need tenure because the path to a PhD is so long and difficult, so let’s make sure we keep it that way so we get to enjoy tenure.”
I woudl argue that in certian fields, it is an almost necessary incentive, given how graduate programs are set up these days. Many people fail to complete their doctorates and of those who do, many of them never land a tenure-track job. All of this assumes, of course, that prospective graduate students make these sorts of calculations. I’ve expected the market to self-correct for a while now –as in fewer and fewer people apply to graduate school because the academic job market in the humanities and social sciences is lousy– but it hasn’t.
“What does grading papers for a 101 level course have to do with developing a brilliant resaarcher?”
You might be surprised that I’m more open to this concern than most academics. Is the research background really necessary? At times, I think that the rationale –a better research translates into a better teacher– is self-serving in that it serves to justify what many academics prefer to do: do their own research and not be bothered w/ teaching responsibilities. That’s another long discussion and a problem that exists at all research institutions as far as I can tell. That said, to answer your question, it would depend on the course. Let’s say that you have someone w/ an M.A. teaching that introductory course, compared w/ someone who went through a top-notch program and has published extensively in that field. The chances are that the latter will know quite a bit more about any topic in that field that the student chooses to write on and if so inclined, will give much better comments. One doesn’t have to be a brilliant reseacher –that’s setting the bar pretty high– but has to be at least competent, I suspect, to have the kind of background knowledge (and familiarity w/ what’s currently going on in the field) to teach the class as well as possible.
July 29, 2010, 8:07 pmChrisTS says:
Thank you. The readiness of many to speak whereof they know not is an enduring wonder.
July 31, 2010, 6:42 pm