My last post on this subject was prompted by an anti-tenure article that I thought was silly and poorly argued. As a result, I think it made me seem like a stronger proponent of the current tenure system than I really am.
(In case anyone doesn’t know, let me stipulate a couple of things: 1. I have tenure. 2. As someone who places a high value on security, I like having tenure.)
The traditional argument for tenure is that professors need to be able to advance controversial ideas that attack the power structure without fear of reprisal. That idea isn’t wholly without merit, but I have to admit that I don’t see it as such a pressing need that we should structure the entire academic employment system around it.
No doubt my perspective is influenced by the fact that the work I do has no political implications. If I worked in a more controversial field, I’d probably see things differently.
Certainly an alternative to the tenure system would certainly have to have strong protections against ideological firing of faculty members for espousing controversial ideas, but it seems likely to me that infinite job security is an overreaction to this threat.
For most faculty members, I suspect, tenure’s not really about academic freedom. It’s just a job benefit, like a dental plan or a day-care center. And like those other benefits, if employers got rid of it they’d have to offer either higher salaries or other benefits, in order to compete for the same pool of potential employees.
I don’t know if anyone’s tried to estimate the economic value of tenure to typical faculty members and hence how much it would cost to eliminate it. Academic salaries are not high, compared to other jobs with similar levels of training, and I suspect that the job security of tenure is quite valuable to many people who have it. I doubt the cost of eliminating tenure would be trivial.
The most often mentioned cost of the current tenure system is the dead-weight, lazy, unproductive, incompetent tenured professor. Such people no doubt exist, although I don’t think that they’re terribly common for reasons I mentioned before. Still, I think it’d be possible to design a system with strong protections against ideological firing but that still allowed universities to get rid of people for actual incompetence.
To me, the biggest disadvantage of the current tenure system is its rigidity. People’s lives are complicated, for all sorts of personal and family reasons, and the current system makes it hard for anyone who can’t conveniently follow the specific tenure-track career timeline.
I think the equivalent to politically charged research in the sciences is high-risk research programs, which often do not yield results, but when they do, are game changers in the field. Without tenure, you’d probably be scared to engage in much of this–you’d need to be sure you get papers out to keep your job.
That’s an excellent point. Even with tenure, there are significant barriers to that sort of risk-taking, mostly having to do with getting and keeping grants. But adding the risk of losing your job to that would make things much worse.
I do question how much the distant prospect of tenure functions in attracting people away from the private sector and into academia. That might be the case in fields where there are equivalent private sector jobs — say law, applied sciences, or finance. But most people in the humanities and social sciences aren’t, IMO, weighing the economic pros and cons of academia versus the private sector. Rather, they’re going into academia because they can’t get paid to work on the kinds of issues they’re interested in working in the for-profit world. I know that in the 13 years since getting off the academic track, my frustration with the insecurity and low pay of non-profit work has occasionally led me to think about trying to find my way into the private sector, but I could never bring myself to seriously pursue it because I knew I couldn’t find the same kind of intellectual satisfaction. I have now finally turned to government work to get me the kind of stability I’ve been lacking while hopefully still providing meaning and intellectual challenge. And the pay’s actually a lot better, too.
Just to fill out the details of the insane professor I mentioned in response to your previous post: he had a thing about yellow handkerchiefs. He’d have one stuff into each of his pockets; the back pockets of his trousers, as well as the front of his shirt (he always wore the same clothes). He carried his chalk in a Milk Duds box and held his index finger out in front of his face and stared at it while he lectured. But his behavior in the classroom was relatively sane compared to how he acted outside of it. He could usually be seen (perhaps still can, but he’s probably dead or institutionalized by now) wandering the streets of Hyde Park, carrying an umbrella, regardless of the weather. (In keeping with the meme, the umbrella had a yellow handkerchief tied to the end of it). When he passed someone on the street, he would raise the umbrella in front of him, like a soldier on parade with his rifle, and break out into a song which went, “Ha ha ha, ha ha ha, hey loser, hey loser!” Unless the unfortunate passerby happened to be a woman, in which case the song was changed to “Bitches and whores! Whores and bitches!” He was already acting in this way when I had the misfortune to sign up for his common core biology class — at that point I’m certain that no one majoring in that field would take his classes, so they foisted him on the unsuspecting masses. There were 23 people in the class to begin with; I was one of the 16 that dropped the class. Of the 7 unlucky or imprudent people who remained, he gave failing grades to 4. Many people went to the Bursar’s office and demanded, justifiably in my opinion, that they be refunded the portion of their tuition that covered the class. The university, of course, ignored these demands, nor did it do anything to purge the transcripts of the people who were victimized by his insanity. My friend Greg was unable to graduate on time because of that class.
You’re probably right that he was already showing signs of his pathology when they granted him tenure, but at that point it probably fell within the range of acceptable academic eccentricity. By the time it had progressed to full-blown schizophrenia, they didn’t know what to do with him.
I don't know if anyone's tried to estimate the economic value of tenure to typical faculty members and hence how much it would cost to eliminate it.
Some countries have weighed the costs of civil servants as opposed to regular employees, on similar grounds. Bottom line: compensating financially for the lack of job security is more expensive than the cost of providing job security.
To me, the biggest disadvantage of the current tenure system is its rigidity. People's lives are complicated, for all sorts of personal and family reasons, and the current system makes it hard for anyone who can't conveniently follow the specific tenure-track career timeline.
I think this applies to the academic world in general, not just tenure-track positions.
The solution is simple: Since it is obvious to those whose job it is to know who is worthy and who is not even during the time as a doctoral student (at least the number of mistakes is comparable to a few years later), we need more permanent jobs, less temporary jobs and get people into permanent jobs earlier.
I would still vote for keeping the concept of tenure, but keep in mind that the more insecure the time before tenure is, the more attractive tenure has to be to compensate.
“The solution is simple: Since it is obvious to those whose job it is to know who is worthy and who is not even during the time as a doctoral student (at least the number of mistakes is comparable to a few years later), we need more permanent jobs, less temporary jobs and get people into permanent jobs earlier.”
While I agree this would be the fair and right solution, the reason it doesn’t happen is precisely what I posted above — I don’t believe universities are competing with the private sector for the best and the brightest, except in certain fields. If it were, the reduction in permanent jobs should lead to a correspondent reduction in the number of Ph.D. candidates. Instead, universities continue to churn out large numbers of Ph.D.’s who are essentially unemployable outside of academia, making it quite easy for the universities to save money by relying more and more on temporary positions.
There really should be a more concerted effort to make the number of doctorates awarded match up more closely with the number of tenured positions available, but unfortunately it’s in the best interests of the people making the decisions not to do so.
Note that my reasons for more permanent jobs (and less temporary jobs, for the same budget) and getting people into them earlier is not primarily about competition with industry, but rather just in the best interests of most of those involved. The academic world is small compared to the rest of the world, so the rest of the world can absorb whatever academia doesn’t want (at least in fields like physics). It’s not that there is competition: whoever wants more money will go into industry straight away. It’s just that academia loses good people due to lack of job security.