Critics of academic tenure have again taken out their cudgels after the recent release of the independent study of tenure at CU-Boulder.
While the arguments are familiar, tenure is one of the most poorly understood aspects of higher education.
Professors and administrators argue tenure is a vital tool for preserving the greatness of American colleges and universities.
Critics argue that tenure awards lifetime job security to people who cease to be productive and who mock society’s values and beliefs.
But, it’s not clear if even academics understand, or at least agree on, why tenure exists.
The consensus view among academics is that tenure exists to preserve academic freedom. To some extent this is true. Tenure has provided some protections for the rights of faculty members to research and to publish on topics that are controversial or held in contempt by the public.
But, tenure hasn’t always protected faculty. The notion of academic freedom in America grew out of the 1916 case of Stanford Professor Edwin Ross, who was fired for criticizing, of all things, the gold standard. And since then, tenured faculty have continued to be dismissed for being Communists or for having some affiliation with the Communist Party, for advocating “socialism” or for urging resistance to the military draft.
Faculty such as assistant professors and lecturers don’t have tenure, but they are presumed to enjoy the same protections of academic freedom as their more senior and tenured colleagues.
Nor were tenure and academic freedom the reasons given by CU for refusing to sanction Ward Churchill for his statements about Sept. 11. The investigating committee claimed his statements were protected by the First Amendment since they were the statements of a private citizen about a non-academic matter.
So, a strong case could be made that tenure is not essential to academic freedom. Tenure is hardly necessary where the culture already recognizes and embraces the right of faculty to ask unpleasant questions or to suggest distasteful answers.
A more practical explanation for the practice of tenure comes from economists. The University of Toronto’s Aloyius Siow and Columbia’s Jagdish Bhagwati and Brendan O’Flaherty have argued that the case for tenure rests on the same economic rationale as patent protections for inventions. Tenure, they argue, encourages specialization, which is vital to excellence in higher education. Advancing knowledge and earning tenure both require that the individual focus attention on a narrow area or field. Under this theory, tenure protects academics from being penalized for knowing a lot about a little.
If academics knew they faced a danger of being pushed out as their specializations became out-moded, their best strategy would be to generalize and dabble broadly in a variety of topics. But this is a less optimal system for advancing knowledge at the fastest and most socially useful rate. The promise of tenure gives younger faculty the incentive to do the intense (and professionally risky) and focused research that’s the hallmark of academic excellence.
While this explains a rationale for tenure at top research universities, it doesn’t do as good a job explaining why tenure should be used at more teaching-oriented institutions like state colleges. Although such schools have adopted the tenure traditions and the emphasis on research of their elite peers, their production of research and knowledge is more limited.
Finally, there’s another rationale for tenure, one that makes the most sense to me. It’s at the heart of how we organize universities. It’s rooted in one of the longest traditions of the academy, but it’s rarely mentioned. It’s the role tenure plays in academic governance.
Ever since the first universities sprouted centuries ago, they have been self-governed. The faculty set the rules, established the curriculum and set the standards for an educated graduate. Independent boards and administrators hired are responsible for financial matters and day-to-day issues. The faculty’s role in governing has been seen as essential because of a common understanding that learned and expert scholars could (and should) best evaluate what constituted necessary knowledge and how best to deliver it.
Academic self-governance remains at the heart of the university today. In a recent survey of academic governance that I conducted at all four-year colleges and universities, well over 90 percent of institutions indicated they awarded tenure and an almost equal amount placed great emphasis on an explicit role for faculty in organizational decisions.
It’s important to understand the role of governance at American institutions of higher education. At CU, 20 percent of faculty time is expected to be taken up by service on academic committees and decision-making about organizational issues. Faculty meet to decide changes to curriculum, course content and graduation criteria, admissions, hiring of future colleagues, the creation of new degree programs, and standards for promotion and institutional advancement.
There are few realms in American life where the employees’ role in such decisions is widely seen as so essential and so central.
Colleges and universities rely on the same principles of democracy and representative governing as the rest of our society. In a functioning democratic system, no successful deliberative body should be able to determine its own membership.
If members can freely decide who participates in decisions, then democracy dies, because the majority can vote out and remove members of the minority over issues of major disagreement.
The safety of tenure lets faculty members speak their minds about important issues in faculty meetings. A professor can safely stand up as the lone voice of dissent.
Tenure ensures that faculty members make decisions about the institution with its best interests in mind, instead of trying to keep their jobs or impress a superior. Although senior faculty do choose whom to award tenure, that process includes recommendations by faculty at other institutions.
Few junior faculty, without tenure security, report constraints on their academic freedom. Such evidence suggests that academic freedom probably doesn’t flow from tenure and more likely stems from the commitment to its principles by faculty and administrators.
But ask any junior faculty how free they feel at faculty meetings, and you may find a different story. Until one has tenure, the willingness to fully participate in faculty deliberations is likely to be somewhat curtailed. Few assistant professors, knowing they will come before a tenure committee comprised of senior and tenured peers, are likely to voice strong opposition to the positions of tenured faculty.
But once they have tenure, they can afford to be indifferent to such feelings and unconcerned by the grudges of such folks. But until then, most junior faculty, adopt a get-along-and-go- along strategy and rarely voice strong opposition in policy issues.
By itself, tenure isn’t enough to encourage faculty to live up to all their governing responsibilities.
But it is an essential tool for securing their participation by promising that their jobs will not be checked by powerful people and factions who disagree with them.
