The Chronicle of Higher Education
Date: February 7, 1997
Section: Opinion
Page: B4
By Richard Chait
Tenure has become the academy's version of the abortion issue -- a controversy marked by passion, polemics, and hardened convictions. The often shrill debate situates tenure as either indispensable or indefensible, as either the bulwark of academic freedom and economic security or the bane of institutional flexibility and accountability. On one side the Patrick Henrys proclaim, "Give me tenure or give me death"; on the other, the champions of reform, primarily legislators and trustees, stalk tenure as Ahab hunted the white whale. Are there any ways to bridge this gulf? I think so.
First, the discussion must be recast to focus on objectives. Attacks on tenure are often that and little more. "If only we could eliminate tenure, then we could ...," and the strong voices of tenure's critics trail off, unable to detail precisely the educational payoffs of a world without tenure. Rather than ask, "How do we overturn tenure?" lawmakers and regents should first identify, with substantive input from the faculty and administration, the results desired, and then ask administrators and faculty members to design sensible policies and practices that head the institution in the right direction. Tenure may not, in fact, be a substantial obstacle.
Regents and lawmakers might aim, for example, to shift resources from low-priority to high-priority programs, a key concern when the University of Minnesota's Board of Regents tried to reform its tenure code last year. This might be accomplished by reallocating faculty positions among departments, encouraging retirements, and phasing out marginal programs.
Or the goal might be to eliminate "deadwood" in the faculty, which might be done through a combination of stringent post-tenure reviews, salary reductions, and budget cuts in departments with more than an occasional substandard performer.
Often, however, academics react to any inquiries and initiatives -- whether concerning productivity, flexibility, or assessment -- with indignation, resistance, and counterattacks. Too many faculty members ask first, "How do we preserve tenure?" rather than "How can we achieve our educational and professional objectives?" Academics should realize that trustees and legislators, with rare exceptions, attack tenure not out of malice, but out of frustration with persistent educational and financial problems on campus.
When a Texas lawmaker contemplated introducing a bill last year that would have required the dismissal of tenured faculty members who received unsatisfactory performance reviews, the goal was to address the complaints of constituents, not to abolish tenure. Reflexively, faculty members on many campuses in the state circled the wagons. The president of the University of Houston, on the other hand, wisely advised the faculty there "to play offense, not defense," that is, to identify changes that would respond to the legitimate concerns of the legislator and the public.
Unfortunately, too many faculty playbooks have only one entry under the tenure tab -- the American Association of University Professors' recommended policy. Having only one choice inevitably means two sides: for and against. Small wonder, then, that we have such a polarized debate.
The academy needs to invent new employment arrangements, not merely to respond to criticisms of tenure by various constituents but, just as important, to create more alternatives to better serve individual faculty members and thereby strengthen departments and institutions. The times have changed since 1915, when the A.A.U.P. was established. Then, there were 951 institutions of higher education and no two-year colleges. By 1940, the year of A.A.U.P.'s landmark statement on academic tenure, 1,708 institutions existed, including a few two-year colleges. Today, we have more than twice the 1940 total, including branch campuses, community colleges, technical institutes, and professional schools. As a result, one size no longer fits all.
In a profession that prizes autonomy, we should not bar professors and universities from creating new, yet mutually beneficial, terms of employment that match individual interests and campus needs. In other words, let Bennington be Bennington. In the 21st century, the byword on tenure should be choice, not conformity.
Tenure will continue to exist as an appropriate arrangement for some faculty members on some campuses, but why not afford more professors the opportunity to voluntarily accept a term contract in return for a higher salary, as Greensboro College does, or in return for more-frequent sabbaticals, as Webster University does?
Why not offer more people the chance to serve indefinitely as full-time senior lecturers or research professors, as various schools do at Harvard and Stanford Universities, respectively? Even more creatively, the University of Virginia Medical School now has six tracks for full-time faculty members. One leads to a mandatory tenure decision, two offer the possibility of tenure, and three do not offer tenure; yet all offer the opportunity for promotion through the ranks.
Full-time, long-term, non-tenured jobs are attractive to institutions and to some individuals, particularly in professional schools, where financial pressures mandate new employment arrangements, where faculty members with practical experience are especially valued, and where professors have the safety net of possible full-time jobs outside the academy. Yet, even within the arts and sciences, many faculty members elect to work on campuses with contract systems -- and not out of desperation. In a recent study, "Where Tenure Does Not Reign," a colleague and I noted that the preponderance of faculty members at these colleges see their academic life as agreeable, collegial, and devoid of the caste system that tenure fosters.
As the management adage cautions, solutions are the source of all problems. Therefore, we can and should argue about the relative merits of alternative career paths and employment arrangements, mindful that all such arrangements, traditional tenure included, have drawbacks. (Indeed, three separate studies published in the past year -- by Eugene Rice, by William Tierney and Estela Bensimon, and by Cathy Trower -- reached the same conclusion: Tenure-track faculty members are largely an unhappy lot, chiefly as a result of a probationary process they view as a mysterious, politicized, and stressful crapshoot.) However, when more options are introduced, the chance to find common ground expands greatly.
Of course, whenever unconventional employment arrangements are mentioned, especially by "outsiders," the alternatives are immediately labeled a "threat to academic freedom," which then freezes the debate. The dogma of the academic profession posits that tenure and academic freedom are inseparable. If faculty members were more receptive to evidence that tenure and academic freedom can be uncoupled, the discussion might become more productive.
In "Academic Freedom Without Tenure," an article recently published by the New Pathways Project of the American Association for Higher Education, Professor Peter Byrne of the Georgetown University Law Center offers a useful springboard for rational discussion. He outlines a procedure to provide academic freedom and due process to all faculty members -- tenured or not -- when disputes over academic freedom arise. The key elements include a peer-dominated review panel; a requirement that the faculty member make a prima facie case that a violation has occurred, whereupon the burden of proof shifts to the institution; an oral hearing held prior to the panel's decision; and the possibility of arbitration of still-disputed claims by an external tribunal of trusted academics.
Such arrangements are not simply a matter of legal theory; numerous four-year colleges, such as Hampshire College and Evergreen State College, have comparable provisions with no adverse effects reported by the faculty (described proudly by Evergreen's president as "more cussedly outspoken than any other").
In reality, about one-half of all American faculty members (when part-timers and adjuncts are included) do not have tenure, a fact that calls into question the unbreakable bond between academic freedom and tenure, and more than justifies efforts to find other ways to guarantee academic freedom for all members of the faculty. Ironically, under the current system, many junior faculty members feel that the quest for tenure and the perceived need to accommodate the preferences and prejudices of senior colleagues significantly limit their academic freedom.
A constructive step to unfreeze the debate about how to protect academic freedom would be to invite a group of distinguished law professors, university attorneys, judges, and other knowledgeable professionals to codify contract language that would give every faculty member a legally enforceable right to academic freedom and due process. Purists will say, "Impossible," and skeptics will say, "Tenure by another name." However, why not try?
If we succeed, some professors who are now committed to tenure mainly as an assurance of academic freedom might voluntarily accept a 5- or 10-year appointment with academic freedom contractually guaranteed. If significant numbers of colleagues followed suit, the public might finally understand the value that the profession truly attaches to academic freedom as a fundamental principle, rather than as a convenient rationale for near-absolute employment security.
One additional step might advance enlightened conversations about academic tenure: greater reliance on data and less dependence on anecdote. Academics normally insist on empirical evidence and factual data, yet the debate on tenure often proceeds without either. To a remarkable degree, universities lack basic information, such as the percentage of the payroll disbursed to tenured faculty members, the projected turnover of faculty members, or the number and percentage of positions periodically shifted from one department to another. Consequently, trustees' questions about whether tenure impedes flexibility are not definitively answered.
Ask a provost, president, or faculty leader, "How many tenured faculty are deadwood?" and the most common replies are, "I don't know," "Fewer than you think," or "No more than in any other profession." Such responses do not allay legislators' impressions of rampant faculty incompetence.
Some policy makers worry that tenure standards are too lax, while many probationary faculty members believe that the bar has been set too high or angled so as to put women and members of minority groups at a disadvantage. Vague assurances are not the proper antidote to these arguments. Why not collect and publish annually data -- by race, gender, and department or school -- on how many faculty members achieve tenure, much as law firms do on the rates at which associates achieve partnership? This information could confirm or correct impressions about the rigor and fairness of the tenure process, just as data about the number of faculty members prodded or compelled to resign or nudged into retirement could answer questions about the stringency and impact of post-tenure reviews.
Comparative data on personnel policies are equally scarce. In the absence of readily (and electronically) available data on the criteria and standards for tenure or the grounds for layoffs and dismissal or post-tenure-review procedures, the debate inevitably turns on anecdote, hearsay, and emotion.
Thus, a professor at the University of Minnesota unequivocally declared, at a Board of Regents meeting last summer, that the institution's ability to recruit professors would be severely jeopardized by any changes in the ironclad protection that tenured faculty members enjoyed against termination were their programs discontinued. He presented no internal data to support this assertion and no comparative numbers from the scores of research universities without such a guarantee. Vehement assertions were presented as fact; a doctoral-dissertation committee would have been distraught.
Opponents of tenure hardly do better. Contentions by trustees and legislators about the slothfulness and intransigence of tenured faculty members, the prevalence of deadwood, and professors' rampant indifference to teaching are frequently based on a single, secondhand anecdote. While a corporate executive confronted with a comparable complaint at work might investigate such an anecdote, none would make policy based on it. Yet too many trustees and legislators are too apt to do just that.
The costs are high. Jean Keffeler, a former regent at the University of Minnesota and a strong advocate of changes in the tenure code, recently remarked that much of the ultimately counterproductive debate there was marked, on both sides, by amateurish work, the absence of intellectual standards, and too little information, provided too late.
In contrast, the faculty and academic leaders of Arizona's public universities agreed last year to collect and present to the regents a yearly "tenure audit," with detailed data on all academic personnel actions -- appointments, promotions, tenure decisions, and post-tenure reviews. In no small way, the faculty's agreement to provide these data reassured the regents that the quality of faculties and the effectiveness of the tenure system would be monitored. As a consequence, support among the regents for radical solutions to the tenure "problem" atrophied.
In sum, deliberations about tenure should exemplify the best of the academy, not the worst. We regularly tell the world that the academic profession thrives on systematic inquiry, careful experiments, and robust debate. Lest we properly be labeled hypocrites, we must create opportunities for civilized discourse and incisive analysis about the value of tenure and alternative employment practices. We must insist that the quality of the discussion surpass the minimum standards we set for students -- no unexamined assumptions, no unsubstantiated claims, and no blind allegiance to convention.
If we fail to do this, a riskier fate may await us: public referenda, legislative incursions, and trustee initiatives that pre-empt further discussion. Even more dangerous, the academy's aversion to a robust, open-minded exploration of employment arrangements would signal to society at large that the bastion of academic freedom rests on a very insecure foundation.
Richard Chait is a professor of higher education at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education.