The Chronicle of Higher Education
Date: July 14, 1995
Section: Opinion
Page: POV
By Jay Parini
The lynching season has come again and gone. This year, like last, I lost a favorite younger colleague: She was axed by the tenure committee. Last year, the committee said: "The candidate is a brilliant teacher, but her scholarship is somewhat lackluster." This year, it said: "The candidate is a truly remarkable scholar, but her teaching is not quite as good as her scholarship."
In 20 years of college teaching, I've rarely experienced a year without some similar disaster. My feelings of loss and anger seem only to grow stronger. I keep wondering: Are we in the academy so incompetent, so lacking in imagination, that we cannot rectify this appalling situation -- this continual loss of faculty talent? Is the current tenure process really the best we can come up with?
There is no denying that tenure increases the comfort level of those who have it. But the arguments against tenure are stronger by far than any in favor of it. For a start, the system does not do what it was supposed to do: protect free speech. On the contrary, my untenured colleagues, who must endure seven or eight years of uncertainty before the "big decision," do not feel free to speak their minds with impunity during those years.
I have watched the lynching of those who dared to point out institutional flaws or offer their own viewpoints too sharply, and it was not a pretty sight. I would certainly advise all my younger colleagues who care about getting tenure to keep their mouths shut until the decision is made in their case. The problem is, those who keep their mouths shut for seven or eight years can get in the habit of remaining silent. The result of the system often is senior faculty members who are unwilling to challenge authority.
Probably the worst aspect of the tenure status quo is that it divides the academic world into us and them, the tenured and the untenured. It also divides the us into factions, resulting in professors who often see their role as protecting certain people and making life difficult for others. Were these Mafia-style politics not bad enough, another obvious problem exists: Tenure committees only rarely seem to accomplish what they set out to do, which is to sort the sheep from the goats. If tenure decisions were completely rational, and if tenure committees did somehow manage to retain only the most-productive and original scholars who were also dedicated and inspiring teachers, we might just sit back and say to ourselves, "Well, it's a cruel, Darwinian system, but it works."
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work. Deadwood clings to deadwood, and whole rafts begin to gather and float in the academic ocean. Fiery teachers with big mouths (and good intentions) often get canned, and highly original scholars frequently get the boot because their scholarship is "not up to standard." Politics and ideology usually play a part: A candidate is either too feminist or not feminist enough, too this or not enough that. Candidates for tenure easily can get caught in an invisible crossfire between senior colleagues waging scholarly or personal wars. The unfairness of it all bristles what few hairs I have left.
So what to do? I have spent a good deal of time (eight years) at British universities, and I admire some aspects of their system. You are hired as an assistant lecturer, and if you "work out," as most do, you are "made permanent" after two or three years. That length of time is enough for colleagues to spot obvious problems. A scholar does not advance in the hierarchy of the profession without publishing, however, so those with ambition work steadily to produce scholarship. I spent last year at Oxford University and was amazed by the calm productivity of the Fellows of Christ Church, the college at which I was based. I also was impressed by their devotion to good teaching. All of that was accomplished without the misery of a tenure process. Peer pressure and a firm sense of institutional goals were enough to assure productivity.
I must assume, however, that some form of tenure will probably endure in the United States; the system is too deeply entrenched for complete dismantling to become a likely option. Nevertheless, reforms are in order. To begin with, we must somehow shorten the time it takes to get tenure; three or four years is long enough to keep anyone on probation, especially if the person already has been through an elaborate vetting process in graduate school, including teaching experience.
Then, on the other side of the Great Divide, we must think of ways to make institutions more responsive to the individual preferences and talents of senior faculty members. This would include a fresh look at the always vexed relationship between teaching and scholarship.
Why don't we simply face the fact that teaching and scholarship are distinctly separate talents, which rarely inhabit the same human being? I usually have agreed, along with almost everyone else in the profession, that teaching and scholarship are two sides of the same coin, and that good teaching is dependent on lively, productive scholarship. In theory, this sounds wonderful. Unfortunately, when I think about it honestly, I must admit that I haven't met many people who embody this theory. The very best teachers I have known generally have been unproductive scholars, and the opposite seems true as well. The most brilliant and fecund scholars I have known have been competent and interesting, but not inspired, teachers. The few exceptions prove the rule.
I propose a dual-track system for both tenured and untenured faculty members. An individual faculty member should simply be able to choose whether to be on a "research track" or a "teaching track." Faculty members choosing the research track would have a somewhat reduced teaching load and would have to meet high expectations for research and publication. The expectations would vary from one type of institution to another, of course, but each institution or department should be able to work out reasonable standards. Although those on the research track would get more time to focus on their scholarship, they also would be expected to teach competently; no academic can fly with one wing. But the expectations for teaching performance would be somewhat scaled down; for example, the faculty members emphasizing research could advise fewer students and be given more flexibility in choosing the courses they teach.
For faculty members choosing the teaching track, expectations for classroom performance would rise accordingly. Salaries, promotions, and institutional perquisites would depend on teaching performance, as measured by student evaluations and peer reviews. People on this track would not be subjected to the stringent criteria for publication established for their colleagues, and the research they did would be aimed largely at enhancing the courses they taught.
Faculty members would have the option of switching from "research" to "teaching" and vice versa every five years or so. Thus, at the end of a given period, each faculty member would have to assess where his or her career was going and what his or her current interests were. Then each would decide which track seemed more appropriate. This might well mean that a person would stay more or less permanently on one track or the other. Yet the option of switching tracks should be readily available, so that nobody would feel stuck on one track. This also would help prevent stigmatizing one track or the other. (I assume, of course, that institutions would require faculty members to declare any change in tracks early enough to insure that all courses could be covered.)
It seems likely that non-tenured faculty members would want to begin on the teaching track, since it is notoriously difficult to adjust to college teaching while maintaining a vigorous scholarly life. I am never surprised when younger colleagues fail to publish enough to get tenure; I am amazed that anyone does!
The brutal fact is that the present system favors those who publish over those who shine in the classroom; indeed, it doesn't take a genius to see that the rewards for excellence in scholarship -- sabbaticals, fellowships, endowed chairs -- are infinitely more plentiful than the rewards for excellence in teaching. My proposal would give teachers who want to focus on teaching the chance to do so, and it would reward them properly for their efforts, with study leaves, promotions, and bonuses.
Any dual-track system must require general competence in both teaching and scholarship. A candidate for tenure who had chosen the teaching track would still have to show evidence of scholarly potential; real scholarly achievement could come later, if that was the direction the individual wished to take. The same would be true for those choosing research; they also would have to demonstrate solid teaching skills.
One of the many benefits of a dual-track system would be a reduction in the oversupply of second-rate scholarship, the sort that is read only by tenure committees and the parents of the tenure candidates. How many forests must we fell in the name of tenure? Only scholarship that is done for the love of it is any good, and the same is true of teaching. Common sense urges that we somehow rig the system to promote such love affairs and to discourage the current process, which already has wrecked so many promising careers.
Jay Parini, a poet and novelist, is a professor of English at Middlebury College.