I don’t have time to do justice to this post because I need to work on the chapter that apparently will never be finished. However, the time for a conversation about tenure and what it means and what exactly protects is one that we definitely need to have, especially given the latest news from Albany.
So, first, in case anybody wasn’t clear about this, earning tenure
- Does not mean that you can’t be fired.
- Does not mean that you have institutional power such that you can make sure your job (or field of study) is protected or valued.
- Does not mean that you are exempt from the corporate model that guides higher education today.
- Does not mean that you suddenly don’t have to work for a living.
- Does not mean that you can rest on your laurels – though it might mean that all of the work that you do gets little recognition and compromises your job mobility.
With those things being the case, it seems strange that people would blame tenure for the woes of universities and colleges today. Let’s be frank: tenure – that state of being that protects our freedom to pursue unpopular paths of scholarly inquiry or to teach potentially controversial subject matter in our classes – is not the cause of higher education’s woes. Moreover, tenure does not protect us from “budgetary realignments” or from drastic changes in institutional or cultural priorities, changes that can do everything to change our working conditions (if we’re lucky enough to keep our jobs) or our actual employment status.
I probably have more to say about tenure, but as I noted, I have real writing to accomplish today so I can’t waste my time on a lengthy blog post. Have at it in the comments, folks. Is tenure really the problem and I’m just not seeing it? Is there an alternative to tenure that preserves academic freedom, not only in research but also in the classroom? Would eliminating tenure cost less than keeping it? Why exactly is tenure the target of angry adjuncts and anti-intellectual ideologues alike? Is it just me, or do those seem to be strange bedfellows?
Reassigned Time 2.0 
Tenure just means lower salaries in exchange for job security. Without tenure we’d have to be paid more– possibly as much as our counterparts in the private market. Without tenure, there might be fewer graduate students, but whether or not the excess supply of PhDs in some fields is a problem is also debatable.
I’m not sure I understand it. Lots of people–mostly non-academics–presume that as an adjunct, I hate must hate tenured faculty and I really don’t.
Annie – I don’t think all adjuncts do (sorry if it seemed that way – wrote quickly this morning) but rather that often what one sees, say, in comments at inside higher ed and the like is that those who most violently attack tenure identify as adjuncts. I think the logic is that the tenure system perpetuates inequality and relies on a permanent underclass of adjuncts for its survival, and so by doing away with tenure then the employment conditions for all who teach in university systems would then be equitable. I don’t actually believe that is true for a lot of reasons, but I think that’s the argument, and it’s one I’ve seen quite frequently. In contrast, I think the ideologue position is that tenure protects lazy people who don’t earn their paychecks and it is a waste of resources and is bad for children, who are the future.
We talk a lot about tenure protecting one’s ability to do politically sensitive research and teaching—such as studying Communism or gay & lesbian literature—but I would also like to put in a word for the importance of long-term projects that do not conduce to yearly or even tri-annual “productivity.” There are people who work on dictionaries of obscure languages, for example, that can take a decade to be completed (with trips to the area where the language is spoken, another possible target for accusations of flibbertigibbing around instead of working); without tenure (even with 3-year or 5-year review cycles) these might not exist. I’m sure there are people who would say we don’t need dictionaries of languages spoken by 200 people, but I’m not one of them.
Tenure protects intellectual freedom of many kinds.
[…] Crazy has started a conversation about tenure on Reassigned Time 2.0. I think the point I would draw from her post is […]
The UK system has pretty much done away with tenure (there are still a few pre-abolition-contract people out there, but they are rapidly aging out of the system or being promoted and given non-tenure new contracts). My uni, like many, has 4-month or one-semester notice clauses on both sides and a process of annual and quinquennial review.
Certainly the gripes seem very similar here and in the US! It is still hard to get rid of someone just for being lackadaisical. There is still a lot of inertia in the system even if a department or dean seriously sets out to sack someone for poor performance they still have a long drawn out process of warnings, mentoring etc. to work through.
From reading about the tenure process, I think that our 2-3 year probation system is less stressful in many cases, especially outside the research star places where income generation is still very important. And therefore maybe there is less likeihood of collapse once the hurdle is crossed… and there is promotion to work for. Promotion does matter, because the lecturer pay scale has only a few steps. You get an annual rise for each year of service until you reach the top of that scale then, without promotion, you get a cost of living raise (or not…) only. Achieving promotion to Senior Lecturer does require building a good portfolio but, unlike tenure, you go up in a year of your choice, and can go up repeatedly with no penalty, so again, it perhaps encourages improvement rather than fiercely penalising not-quite-getting-there.
There are many things wrong with our system, and with the US one, and with western-style HE in all its forms, I think. But I don’t think tenure is a big part of the puzzle, or even in the top ten issues…
No, no, I totally got it. Even though I don’t, people think I do because that’s sort of the discourse they’re accustomed to hearing because yes, some of the most vocal opponents do self-identify that way.
An astonishing number of our young faculty are utterly ignorant of the facts you listed here, mainly because many of the senior faculty are equally ignorant of them!
And not just at Albany. There is also a story (yesterday and today) at IHE about firings at Bethune Cookman where the AAUP questioned due process in a case where 4 professors allegedly kept an apartment used to seduce their students.