Lawmakers rant about “deadwood.” Citizens rail over professors’ provocative diatribes. Colleges struggle to revamp faculty to meet rapidly changing needs.
But tenure endures.
Cast by critics as academic carte blanche and a bane to progress, tenure has been challenged repeatedly since it became a pillar of American higher education in the 1940s, when it was invoked to shield professors’ academic freedom from shifting political winds – and virtually guarantee lifetime employment.
“I’d put democracy and tenure in the same category,” says Edward Prescott, a Nobel Prize-winning economics professor at Arizona State University. “Nothing better has been developed.”
Not that some haven’t tried. Widespread campus unrest prompted calls for change in the 1960s. The mid-1990s generated a trend away from tenure-track hiring to allow colleges and universities greater curriculum flexibility and potential cost savings.
But despite occasional high-profile conflagrations like the University of Colorado’s recent Ward Churchill saga, sporadic experiments with non-tenured faculty and legislative challenges to the system, experts say tenure often percolates in public discussion but emerges essentially unscathed.
“The drama is in these bizarre, isolated incidents,” says Richard Chait, a Harvard professor and self-described “tenure agnostic” recognized as one of the foremost authorities on the subject. “Day in and day out, most college and university faculty do the work the public expects them to do.
“Ward Churchill is a very isolated man-bites-dog story.”
But it generated a lot of barking.
The Churchill fiasco – triggered by his now-infamous “little Eichmanns” reference comparing some Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi figure – quickly became a national affair and prompted politicians and others to call for his firing. Many also, while deploring what he wrote, rushed to his defense on First Amendment and academic-freedom grounds. An internal investigation supported his right to controversial speech.
But the furor also renewed questions surrounding his scholarship and even his claim of American Indian ancestry. Churchill’s career arc at CU – which cut corners off the traditional tenure track and common demand of a doctoral degree – has a lot of people scratching their heads.
“I wonder what in the world was going on,” says David Longanecker, executive director of the Boulder-based Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. “Few master’s-prepared people receive tenure at the University of Colorado. Retention is always an issue with some faculty, and apparently they thought a great deal of Ward Churchill to retain him.”
The long road to tenure
Generally, faculty hired on “tenure track” embark on a six- or seven-year probationary period – seven years at CU – in which they work, usually as assistant or associate professors, toward a final evaluation by their colleagues and administrators.
Their efforts in areas such as procuring research grants, conducting research or artistic endeavors and publishing in reputable journals usually are assessed near the midpoint of the process. Candidates judged unsatisfactory at that point often are encouraged to leave.
In most cases, candidates have achieved the highest academic degree in their field, or some equivalent professional experience, before a committee examines their portfolios and recommends whether to grant tenure. Those who don’t make the cut often receive a final, one-year contract.
The CU Board of Regents does allow for awarding early tenure “under special circumstances” – and Churchill fell under that exception.
Interest in Churchill from Cal State- Northridge nudged CU to offer tenure in an effort to keep him, despite what would normally be considered insufficient credentials.
Other tenured faculty at CU have had difficulty reconciling those circumstances with their own experience.
“What I read about Churchill’s tenure case is so different from what I know of as normal university process,” says CU physics professor and Nobel laureate Carl Wieman. “That tells me not that there’s a problem with the process, but that the process is not maintained.”
In the wake of the controversy, CU initiated a committee, chaired by University of Colorado at Denver provost Mark Alan Heckler, to re-examine its procedures for awarding tenure as well as post-tenure accountability.
“The bottom line is this: In the higher education industry, which is one of the principle forces for economic development and economic recovery, the standard for recruitment of employees is tenure,” Heckler says. “Anyone who wants to throw tenure to the wind has to understand that if we do, we’ll get out of the game. But our tenure process has to be second to none in rigor and thoroughness and encourage and foster faculty to be productive their entire career.”
Re-evaluating the system
The prospect of yet another look at tenure – and, specifically, the way in which it’s awarded – has inspired a range of emotions among CU faculty, says Rod Muth, a tenured professor of educational administration at CU-Denver and chair of the faculty council.
“It varies from panic to ennui,” Muth says. “For some of us who are productive scholars, it’s just one more hurdle that we have to go through. To faculty not yet tenured, this process is really rather scary – are they going to change the rules of the game in the middle of the process?”
But Nobel laureate Thomas Cech, the CU professor who shared the prize for chemistry in 1989, figures that now might be a good time to re-examine the mechanism for granting tenure and evaluating tenured faculty.
“That’s always a good discussion to have,” Cech says. “In any large system, when you see something that looks like it’s a slip in the system, it’s a good moment to look at the whole thing and say, ‘Does every department have a process that has the same degree of rigor?’ Maybe the process has to be somewhat different in fine arts, humanities and sciences, but that doesn’t mean it should be trivial in one department and rigorous in another.”
Tenure’s power to trigger controversy has surfaced again and again – and with particular venom recently at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, N.M.
Under new president Manny Aragon, a longtime state legislator, Highlands has instituted several sweeping and contentious changes as part of a new strategic plan.
In the process, the new administration has galvanized some faculty and alienated others, particularly with the recent decision to deny tenure to four of seven candidates.
Previous school officials had created a culture in which tenure was looked upon as an “entitlement,” says interim provost for academic affairs Janice Chavez. She also was quoted in the student newspaper La Mecha as saying that Highlands handed out tenure like “dinner mints.”
“Rubber-stamping had happened in the past,” Chavez says. “They never really took the tenure process seriously.”
But Tom Ward, president of the faculty union and chair of the school’s behavioral sciences department, disputes that Highlands grants tenure any more generously than other schools. This year’s denials, he adds, weren’t in line with standards set forth in the faculty handbook.
“The criteria were applied in a way that was arbitrary and capricious,” says Ward, noting that two of the four rejected candidates had unanimous approval from their peers, only to be rejected by administrators.
The collegiality wild card
Sometimes, the tenure-granting process also can turn on the whims of colleagues.
Charles Glass has been on the tenure track in the engineering department at Howard University in Washington, D.C., since 1999. Now, as a 33-year-old assistant professor, he has put together his portfolio to submit for consideration of tenure and expects a decision by the fall term.
Any number of things could trip him up, but the one he fears most is “collegiality” – tenure’s X-factor and least-defined variable. It refers to a spirit of cooperation among colleagues, sometimes an indication of social compatibility. But Glass offers a saltier definition: “Basically, it means people who are senior would like you to kiss their butt.”
He says he tried. Glass took one senior faculty member out for drinks but admits that the plan to build social bridges went up in flames when he boasted that he could get hired lots of places if Howard didn’t grant him tenure.
Later, he says, another faculty member took offense to a magazine article in which Glass talked about how to pull in ancillary income while teaching – remarks he says were interpreted as indicative of less than total commitment to the academy. He’d made two enemies who, he claims, tried to get him fired at his midterm review.
Now he’s wondering if they’ve marshaled more opposition to sabotage his final tenure review.
“I will work to show I’m worthy, but if they expect me to be a crony, I won’t be,” says Glass. “No universities publish what they want you to do for tenure. They give guidelines, but in the end, it becomes, ‘Fit in and be like us. Be our friend. We don’t want you around the rest of your life if we don’t like you.”‘
A tradition on the decline
But while about one-third of faculty at U.S. colleges and universities are tenured, national statistics show that percentage has been on the decline since 1992-93. Schools seeking short-term curriculum flexibility and cost savings increasingly have been turning to part- time, contract and non-tenure-track faculty.
National Education Association figures from a 2001 study looked at tenure through the 1990s and found that the average percentage of all faculty with tenure at all types of postsecondary schools declined 3 percentage points from 1992 to 1999, from 35.2 to 32.2 percent.
Colorado’s public institutions vary widely in terms of full-time tenured faculty, with some of the smaller, more remote campuses having much higher percentages of tenured and tenure-track faculty than large institutions such as CU-Boulder. Reasons can range from the relative difficulty in securing tenure at a top research school like Boulder to the market-driven necessity of smaller, outlying schools offering tenure to attract talented professors.
“There’s no one easy, concise answer,” says Matt Gianneschi, chief academic officer for the Colorado Commission on Higher Education. “Each institution has a different business model and academic model. Institutional types and faculty personalities play a big factor in this.”
Wieman, the CU Nobel laureate and 2004 national professor of the year, notes that any top research institution would be committing academic suicide by doing away with tenure.
“It’s like being in a competitive industry and announcing you’ll only pay half the salaries as everyone else,” he says. “All the decent people would leave. It’s a ridiculous discussion for a single university to have.”
But many colleges and universities have had discussions – and, in some cases, have gone even further – regarding practices to diminish tenure’s pervasive presence.
At Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, administrators dabbled in tenure alternatives that included financial incentives, early-retirement options and term contracts.
But former president Arthur Taylor, who earlier in his career headed CBS Inc. and served as business dean at Fordham University, recalls the experience as “a worthy experiment that failed.”
Even so, he doesn’t see tenure enduring far into the future. Its demise won’t be tied to institutional finances so much as the anomaly of tenure’s guaranteed lifetime employment, he says.
“It’s not economic; it’s cultural and sociological forces,” he says. “There’s an imbalance, and this society has a way of correcting imbalances. It’s also true that many of those people who have the greatest claim to tenure don’t need it, and those who have a lesser claim shouldn’t have it.”
In 1999, the University of Central Arkansas also attempted to wean faculty from tenure – and achieve more academic “flexibility” – by offering three-year, non-tenure-track appointments that included financial incentives.
That move, along with a rash of tenure denials and dismissals, contributed to the school’s censure by the American Association of University Professors, which claimed that UCA flew in the face of basic principles of academic freedom and tenure as set forth in a 1940 AAUP statement that remains, with occasional revisions, its last word on the subject.
Incoming school president Lu Hardin officially rescinded the financial incentive program in 2003 and, with that and other changes, regained the blessing of the AAUP.
“Some professors felt that while monetary rewards were greater, security and academic freedom were compromised to the extent you did not have the protection that comes with tenure,” explains Hardin, a former law professor who also served 14 years as a state senator.
Administrators and faculty alike have blunted calls for tenure’s demise by proactively proposing systems of post-tenure review. Under those systems, colleagues and administrators examine the productivity of tenured faculty at intervals throughout their career and often mandate remedial measures for professors found to be underperforming.
“I think the key is that the appropriate balance be struck between academic responsibility and freedom,” says E. Thomas Sullivan, provost at the University of Minnesota, where the tenure argument raged in the mid-1990s. “The middle point might be called academic integrity.”
At some academic flashpoints, embattled professors push back.
David Deming, a tenured associate professor of geosciences at the University of Oklahoma, became the focal point of controversy for his criticism of school officials and for staunchly conservative public statements challenging gun control and affirmative action.
Deming, whose department briefly banished him to a windowless basement office and allegedly waged a campaign to oust him, struck back with a lawsuit against the university when he felt his post-tenure review was “egregiously abused” in an effort to oust him.
Tenure can make for strange bedfellows. Though at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Ward Churchill, Deming offers words of encouragement when advised of Churchill’s ongoing battle with CU.
“Go, brother!” he says.
Staff writer Kevin Simpson can be reached at 303-820-1739 or ksimpson@denverpost.com.
Staff writer Alicia Caldwell can be reached at 303-278-3216 or acaldwell@denverpost.com.
