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For many years, tenure has been a popular target for
critics outside of higher education. What's different today is that even
some leaders of academe are calling for radical changes in tenure, and
even for its abolition.
"Tenure, as it currently operates, has become more of a problem than a
help to our endeavors," C. Peter Magrath, president of the National
Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, wrote in The
Chronicle in 1997.
James Carlin, chairman of the Massachusetts Board of
Higher Education, expressed his view of tenure even more bluntly in a
November 1997 speech to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce: He
called it "an absolute scare" that should be eliminated.
As president of one of the nation's major research
universities, I disagree. Tenure is indispensable. Without it, our
system of higher education--which is the envy of the world--would be
more elitist and less efficient, more costly and less accessible.
Opponents of tenure will find my position
preposterous. They will cite the example of the American
corporation--also, in many ways, the envy of the world. Corporations
don't grant tenure. They downsize periodically to react to changing
markets and changing times. If corporations are right, universities must
be wrong to cling to tenure.
Let me state the obvious: Universities are not
corporations. Their missions are fundamentally different, as are their
strategies for managing personnel. Of course, the contrasts are not
absolute. Both universities and corporations have had to become more
efficient and accountable. Yet tenure still has a vital role to play in
higher education.
In corporate America, many new employees take
entry-level jobs. From there, individual careers follow dramatically
different paths, as a company promotes or shifts employees into slots
where they can be the most productive and the most effective--or, in
some cases, where they can do the least harm. Conversely, a university
offers little internal mobility to faculty members who are granted
tenure. Even those professors who move into administration frequently
continue to teach. Shifting an employee from one corporate department to
another might make sense, but imagine trying to retrain a scholar of
medieval French literature to teach astrophysics.
That's why tenure should be hard to get. The lengthy
probationary period of the tenure process helps the university make the
right decision in filling a specific, well-defined, long-term job. The
job security provided by tenure is a suitable incentive for those who
embark upon, and make it through, that rigorous process.
Tenure's critics ignore other important ways that
the system benefits universities and students. In those fields in which
competition between universities and corporations for highly skilled
employees is keen--such as business and information
technology--universities tend to pay lower salaries than corporations
do. A tenured faculty member will accept lower compensation in exchange
for job security--knowing that his or her position is unlikely to be
eliminated during downsizing or restructuring. If tenure were eliminated
tomorrow, taking academic job security with it, faculty compensation
would have to increase. Higher pay would mean increases in tuition or
the student/faculty ratio. The first result would curtail access to
higher education; the second would decrease its quality.
Abolishing tenure would also bring more competition
among institutions for top professors. As compensation became
increasingly important in the absence of job security, richer colleges
and universities would be able to attract even more of the best faculty
members than they already do. The disparity among institutions,
especially between public and private universities, would grow. Major
public universities traditionally have promised that students from
varying academic and income levels would be able to study with some of
the best minds in their chosen fields. Bidding wars for "superstar"
scholars have already chipped away at that promise, and the abolition of
tenure would hasten its demise.
But the strongest argument for retaining tenure is
its crucial role in protecting academic freedom. That was a central
reason for the development of the tenure system in the first place, and
academic freedom remains fundamental to higher education's mission of
teaching and research.
Some critics of tenure have argued that the courts
protect free speech, including that of faculty members. I have serious
reservations about that claim. Courts have not intervened in cases when
universities have fired faculty members, provided that due process has
been observed. The presumption is that tenure and termination decisions
are within the province of universities.
Furthermore, First Amendment protections for faculty
members do not apply to private universities and colleges. And, as
Matthew W. Finkin, a professor of law and labor relations at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, points out in The Case for
Tenure, the Supreme Court has made clear that a public employee is
covered only to the extent that the employee's free speech is a matter
of "public concern"--that is, a matter of political, social, or other
concern to members of the community. At this point, not enough case law
exists for us to know whether professional publications and classroom
speech fall within the purview of the First Amendment.
ATTACKS on professors' freedom of speech are not the
only threats to academic freedom. Tenure also protects faculty members
from the pressures of the bottom line. Today's corporate world offers
little opportunity for research that does not promise an immediate
return on investment. Yet many professors devote their entire careers to
studying more-basic problems, or to doing research that has no obvious
commercial implications. Of course, the academic freedom that enables
faculty members to conduct that kind of research has led eventually to
many of the dramatic advances that we have seen in medicine, information
technology, and a myriad of other fields.
Any fair evaluation of tenure must include a look at
the defects of proposed alternatives. Some critics suggest a system of
renewable, multiyear contracts; the idea is that such a system would
allow universities to monitor the performance of faculty members more
closely and give professors more incentive to maintain high standards of
research and teaching. But would that truly be the outcome?
Several universities that now offer such contracts
have found that they routinely renew them. Completely evaluating a
colleague's work as a teacher and a researcher takes a lot of time. How
thorough could that process be if every faculty member on a campus had
to go through it every three to five years? Without time to conduct a
detailed review, teams of faculty members will naturally err on the side
of retaining a colleague. Some faculty members who would not earn tenure
might continue to receive contract after contract.
All right, the critic may respond, but if we must
retain tenure, how can we motivate faculty members to perform?
That question misses the point. Those who argue that
tenure leads to declining productivity do not understand the motivation
of faculty members. Professors are far more interested in gaining
knowledge and communicating it to others than they are in high salaries.
It does not matter if the knowledge is a scientific breakthrough, a new
interpretation of a text, or a noteworthy performance of a classical
score. It is the activity itself and sharing one's results with students
and colleagues that faculty members find rewarding. Being a faculty
member is not a job, it's a life.
In response to those isolated cases in which faculty
members do lose their commitment to learning and research, the best
action is not to dismantle the tenure system, but rather to take the
necessary steps to deal with individual cases. That is why many
progressive universities have been considering the issue of post-tenure
review. Dozens of universities--including state universities in Arizona,
Florida, Georgia, Texas, and Wisconsin--have adopted post-tenure reviews
of various types.
Some universities have made such reviews mandatory
for all faculty members. I think that is a mistake. Not every tenured
faculty member should undergo a full-scale review--that is extremely
inefficient. Rather, post-tenure reviews should be undertaken only when
evidence exists to warrant them. If a professor's annual review for
salary purposes suggests that his or her performance is inadequate, then
a full-scale post-tenure review should occur.
The primary goal of the review should be
professional renewal. If a faculty member's commitment to learning
cannot be restored, it may be appropriate to fire him or her. However,
that process of termination should be distinct from post-tenure review
and must follow all the legal and moral requirements of due process.
That may sound unwieldy and old-fashioned to those
used to reading about hundreds or even thousands of workers receiving
pink slips when corporations restructure themselves. But if it is
considered old-fashioned to stick with a proven, humane system that
benefits students, faculty members, universities, and society, I plead
guilty.
Myles Brand is the president of Indiana University,
a professor of philosophy at Indiana University at Bloomington, and
vice-chairman of the Association of American Universities.
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