It’s not money that’s the root of all evil; it’s tenure. A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but in her latest book, The Faculty Lounges (Ivan R. Dee), Naomi Schaefer Riley argues that eliminating tenure presents the most promising first step for the reform of our colleges and universities. It’s the “game changer for American higher education.”
What is the real significance of tenure? We are often told that free-thinking academics need the security of tenure to preserve academic freedom and open debate. Really? Riley makes the entirely accurate observation that precious few professors write or teach anything remotely controversial. It’s hard to image how an exercise-science professor can get sideways with college trustees.
Far from securing a free and open academic culture, tenure can have the opposite effect. Riley does an especially good job showing how tenure constricts rather than expands the intellectual diversity of most college campuses. Colleges and universities want to give jobs and tenure only to qualified applicants—and qualified applicants are those who think the same way as the already tenured professors on the tenure review committees.
So, no, tenure does not encourage a fluid, energetic, and open-ended culture of intellectual give-and-take. Rather, tenure encourages conformity, homogeneity, and stolid continuity. Graduate students write dissertations designed to be appealing to hiring committees—of tenured professors. Then as young faculty they conduct research and write scholarly articles designed to appeal to the tenured professors who allocate grants and make decisions about tenure.
By Riley’s way of thinking, this tendency toward intellectual homogeneity is sufficient to condemn tenure. In her Afterword she commends the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts. Recently founded, this innovative institution has tossed aside a number of academic conventions, including tenure for its faculty. Richard Miller, the president of Olin, comments to Riley that “peer review”—which is the central mechanism for tenure review—“makes faculty members worry about what everyone else thinks. It makes you propose only things that succeed. It makes you conservative.”
True enough, and a powerful argument against the widespread conceit that tenure protects academic freedom and creates an academic culture more hospitable to new and challenging ideas.
That certainly was not my experience in academia. For every professor who uses the security of tenure to make a bold, and controversial claim, there are thousands who carefully conform so as to get tenure in the first place. Moreover, as Riley details, tenure discourages responsiveness to students, parents, and trustees. It conduces to laziness and has led in recent decades to a haughty, exploitive attitude toward part time and adjunct faculty.
All very true, and as I said something I’ve seen again and again. Yet, in addition to the bad consequences, I’ve seen some good in the insular, immobile, and self-complimenting mentality of tenured professors, as well as the unresponsive and conservative (in the institutional, not political sense) culture over which they superintend.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge responded to the growing influence of democratic politics and in early decades of the industrial revolution by penning an idiosyncratic work of political theory, On the Constitution of Church and State. By his way of thinking, the fluid and innovative forces at work in modernity play an indispensable role. As healthy society needs party of progression, as he put it, institutions that lead the way in innovation and creative enterprise. Something akin to the Olin College of Engineering—or the creative destruction of free market economics and high stakes game of electoral politics—is good for a society, keeping us responsive and on our toes.
Bu there is also a need for what Colerdige called a party of permanency, which means institutions and forms of life that remain insulated from the fluid dynamism of modern society. We need constancy as well as progress, a perhaps stolid and inefficient durability as well as creative destruction and urgent innovation.
Coleridge saw that the old party of permanency, the European institution of landed aristocracy and its old-fashioned feudal sentiments no longer had purchase on the modern imagination and in its place he proposed what he dubbed a clerisy. This class included not only the clergymen who are immersed in the old-fashioned patronage system of the established church, but also the donnish and bookish men whose place in society is not determined by success in business or popular politics. This clerisy, he imagined, would play a conservative role, providing cultural ballast to the increasingly mobile and fluid realities of modern life.
Many of Naomi Schaefer Riley’s arguments against tenure focus on its insulating properties. Designed, perhaps, to protect faculty from intellectual control, tenure has largely protected faculty from any sort of control. Deans and provosts and college presidents come and go, but tenured faculty endure, often unmoved. Students complain about inattentive teachers—but little comes of it. Reformers point out that liberal arts education has disintegrated into long menus of disparate course offerings designed to dovetail with faculty research interests, but to no avail. Coddled by tenure, faculty can continue on as they wish.
Ever insulating against change, tenure supports a clerisy. This clerisy brings with it all the attendant problems associated with the patronage systems that inevitably characterize the pre-modern institutions (the Catholic Church, for example) that Coleridge thought we ought to cherish, because they contribute to what he called permanency. These problems are legion and much commented upon in ancient and medieval literature: inefficiency, homogeneity, cronyism, mediocrity, and more. We see as much in the contemporary university. It cannot control rising costs, manifests a supine submission to the worst kinds of Leftist ideologies, tolerates indifferent pedagogy, tends toward a stifling homogeneity, and exploits part-time and untenured instructors. Riley documents these ugly truths quite well.
But I’m ambivalent about her solution. Riley is certainly right on the main point: higher education is a mess and we need a “game changer.” And she may be right that we should chuck tenure. If so, then we should take care and make sure that we don’t undermine the possibility of a more responsive and responsible clerisy in our university cultures. Resistance to change, indifference to market forces, serene neglect of popular demand—these can in some circumstances be virtues.
R.R. Reno is Editor of First Things. He is the general editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible and author of the volume on Genesis. His previous “On the Square” articles can be found here.
RESOURCES
Naomi Schaefer Riley, The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won't Get The College Education You Pay For
Fall Web Campaign: Please donate to support the online mission of First Things.
Comments:
Fr. Kev raises a good question: what are reasonable job protections for teaching faculty, if not tenure? Perhaps yearly or three-year contracts? Even with mandatory classroom evaluations from qualified professionals in addition to anonymous student evaluations, there is still the risk he describes. How do we make classroom evaluations sufficiently objective to avoid reinscribing a particular peer group mentality? I'm not sure it's possible.
the system thus allows me to have a measure of security but keeps me accountable on a number of fronts. It helps that all of the full time faculty are in the same situation.
It has served to diminish some of the distinctiveness of the various faculty ranks. The only substantive difference between a full prof and an associate or assistant prof is the paycheck.
The system means that i cannot simply check out and cry "tenure" if someone notices. On the other hand I think the administration has taken advantage of it. The institutional needs seem to trump the educational integrity needs occasionally and the faculty does not feel it has a voice to challenge this. Do any of us have the ability to challenge the excessive use of adjuncts when there are 50 applicants for every one of our jobs if they are posted? Wouldn't the administration be foolish not to simply get rid of me and find someone who would be more pliable to their institutional demands? That question haunts our faculty meetings.
I think we should have adjunct administrators.
The current regime has it all backwards.
A comment also on Dr. Reno's remark that, "It’s hard to image how an exercise-science professor can get sideways with college trustees." What if we replace "exercise-science" with "climate science", "evolutionary biology", "pure mathematics", or something similar? Can Dr. Reno imagine such a situation then?
Or what if we replace "trustees" by "the dean", "the president", or "powerful, well-funded departments in a college"? Perhaps one points out how they squander money, glorify themselves at the expense of other hard-working, less glamorous fields, or abuse their power by trying to impose their own conceptions of how a different field ought to be research on a department that has done quite well for itself for quite some time.
In such situations, tenure is enormously useful; it can be used to shame deans and presidents who overstep their bounds, draw out such battles in a courtroom setting, and in some cases even prevail over administrations that forget they are to serve students and faculty, not the other way around.
Moreover, in the sciences tenure allows a professor more room to explore and innovate with something riskier. Now that s/he no longer must to produce x papers every y years, s/he can spend time delving deep into a subject. A good example of this would be a scientist who dedicates himself nearly exclusively to working on a very difficult problem, while the administration wonders why his rate publication has declined.
Now, removing tenure in favor of a different model may be a good idea; I don't know. It is certainly true that many faculty forget that their job includes serving students, and not the other way round. However, much bigger problems plague higher education: the worst example, I suspect, is the grotesque expansion of high-paid administration staff, many of whom have at best a tenuous connection to education, and crowd out the hiring of tenured faculty; another example would be the lowering of admission standards so as to secure an ever-greater share of federal tuition aid. For some reason, this makes news only when for-profit institutions engage in this practice, but not-for-profit institutions who have been doing it a long time.
It's easy to bad-mouth tenure, using the many bad apples that exist. It would be nice to see a careful study of just how often tenure is abused, and how often tenure is used to defend against administration abuse. Then we could have a serious discussion.
As for the questions Fr. Kevin raises about evaluation of teaching, that is already a problem faced by candidates for tenure. As near as I can tell, it is often addressed by combining both student and peer evaluation. Imperfect though that solution may be, having renewable contracts does not create an issue in this respect that does not already confront those seeking tenure.
Concerning administrative "gaming" of a contract system mentioned by Phil Brandt, could that not be handled by establishing a well-defined role for faculty governance in the structure of the university to counterbalance the upper administration?
So, I agree, that the basic problem is faculty homogeneity and group-think, but I think it is still an open question as to whether abolishing tenure is the way to improve. Phil's experiment above, sounds promising. But, I'm inclined to argue that until our culture decides that truth and power are two different things, university faculties with be small-c conservative bastions of whatever power group happens to be at the forefront of the prevailing cultural winds, regardless of what hiring-tenure systems we use.
Until then, I'll keep my head down, avoid my colleagues' parties and lounge small-talk, and figure that any job where I get three months off a year is worth cultivating a thick skin. There's a slippery slope from survival to cynicism: the less contact I have with my colleagues, the less cynical I'll be, and this will redound to the benefit of my students, whose tendency to cynicism needs no further assistance.
You actually express one of the misconceptions about tenure. It is indeed possible to dismiss a tenured professor due to performance, conduct with peers, administrators, etc. However, it's quite difficult, and requires due process. This due process takes place within the institution itself (in a public, state system, that "institution" may include a statewide governing body, such as the NY Board of Regents -- I'm not sure, and it may vary by state or institution).
That's why I suggest that the bigger problem is not with tenure, but with administrators. Aside from bloating their own ranks, they are unwilling to pursue the options at hand even when it's genuinely necessary (if controversial), preferring instead to use the tools at their disposal to hound individuals or even departments whom they deem too costly, or even those which may be profitable but whose competencies lie outside their vision of what the university should be.
In such cases, they are often quite successful -- I know of one regional university near my hometown that once had a thriving nursing program, but it didn't satisfy a new president's vision of the institution's future, so he shut the program down. The professors had to pack up & leave elsewhere, after exhausting their options.
One wonders why, notwithstanding the well-publicized disparity between the number of available tenure-track positions and the number of newly-minted PhDs in various fields, any sensible young person would embark on obtaining a PhD in said fields. To a great extent, these folks who migrate between adjunct positions are reaping what they have sown in choosing to enter a profession with a gross over-supply of willing indentured servants. The world doesn't need very many PhDs in philosophy, classics, medieval studies, and the like, and yet every year a great number of eager young minds, having been brainwashed by their undergraduate professors, enroll in graduate programs that will not lead to permanent, gainful employment. That is the real scandal, not the tenure issue that most would-be scholars will never have the luxury to face.
[If you ever wondered how, say, Thomas Aquinas College can have a fantastic faculty:student ratio and show up on 'Best Value' and 'Least Debt' lists, wonder no more. That's what happens when the faculty run the place (without a huge expensive administration) AND the faculty actually live up to that responsibility. Obviously that will look different at schools with more than one program of study and more than 400 students, but the principle is the same.]
I don't think tenure should be a sacred cow. But I think those proposing alternatives have to avoid the allure of centralized decision-making. The fact that many tenured faculty are pampered postmoderns doesn't mean that an administrator has magical central wisdom powers. Teaching, though difficult in some ways, is easier to carry out (by actually doing it over and over again) than to distill into some set of organizational plans and standards that can be dispensed from the central authority and applied willy-nilly to any discipline, topic, or level.
Suppose that faculty members were no longer assessed on published research. Suppose they were instead assessed and promoted on the basis of teaching. What could be better, right? Now, wait--how would that be measured? Can you imagine what would happen if student evaluations decided your professional fate? And if it's peer evaluation instead, hasn't the old environment been recreated?
There are no easy solutions. We lack shared standards of excellence because we lack shared goals.