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With only 8 percent of private employees belonging to trade unions, job security outside government employment has become a sometime thing. One group of employees, however, does have nearly total job security: tenured university professors. Faculty tenure is under attack as never before in the past 50 years. I like tenure, but why should my group of workers get special protections against the vicissitudes of demand for our “product?” Self-interested arguments about job protection are unsatisfactory. I recently “debated” a journalist on this issue, with the resulting short video from the Texas Tribune:
I believe higher education is a special case—without tenure we would not be Socrates’s “gadfly on the body politic.” But with gadflies increasingly unwelcome, our protections are in danger of being removed at all but the fanciest private institutions.
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I’ve never understood why tenure exists. I know professors that teach one class a semester (2 days a week for an hour each class) and then the rest of the time they write books and research papers (required to write one paper maybe once a year or so). These guys get paid at least 6 figures and why? Because they’ve worked at the same place doing the same thing for a number of years? Give me a break. A complete waste of money, and part of the reason why tuition fees are on the rise so much.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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A professor makes provides a lot of money to the university via research grants – the university overhead is around 40% – this means that they are getting this much directly (beyond the actual costs of the research) to run the university itself.
This impacts the quality of education directly – thus research faculty directly contributes to the equipment, staff, building costs, utilities etc. that go beyond the actual research.
So saying that a research does not impact the quality of education is foolish
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Tenure exists for some historical reasons (historically academics were from the upper class, and historically academia developed out of another tenured profession, the clergy), and then a straightforward socio-economic reason. Academics have always been a relatively small and well educated profession, and one where the different members were in close communication and infrequently in direct competition (both from being at different institutions and within an institution from teaching different disciplines).
Such a situation is a perfect environment for guild/union creation. And the first thing people typically do when they establish a bit of guild/union power is to try to and make sure their jobs are permanently secure.
Thus tenure…
as for the “claimed” reasons:
*Academic freedom (tenure theoretically protects those with unpopular findings from retributive action), whether it actually does this, and whether this is a special consideration academics deserve is an open question. (i.e. shouldn’t I have tenure as someone who reviews finances for large projects that are partially government funded? Surely my decisions are a lot more upsetting to powerful people then some academic, since my decisions actually cost them lots of money!)
**Cutting edge research demands the practitioners be freed from the concerns of everyday life (I call BS).
I say all this coming from a family whose patriarch benefited greatly from tenure (my grandfather was hard-working, but horrible at his job by all accounts), and has close friends who are currently benefiting from it in academia.
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The academic freedom argument is no joke and should be taken very seriously. Even on professions with strong union representation, it is not that difficult for management to find a way to get rid of “problematic” employees. Once someone is targeted for removal, management begins to build a paper trail based on minor rules infractions that are designed to be selectively enforced. At the appropriate time they just drop the hammer, citing the long paper trail as a history of improper work performance.
Without an ironclad guarantee of job protection there would be a very strong pressure for academics to either be selective in the sorts of topics they researched or outright compromise their results. Furthermore, like corporate profits, academics may be forced into concentrating on short term gains, instead of research topics that can take years or decades to pan out. Do we really want a world where questions go unasked simply because they take too long to answer?
So yes while tenure is not necessary for plain instructional Professoring and I am sure that schools can save all sorts of money finding ways to push out their high cost older faculty, you probably won’t want to put very much stock in much of the research that comes out of such a system. Sort of how political and funding pressures have turned Penn State into a giant shill for the Shale Gas industry.
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“The academic freedom argument is no joke and should be taken very seriously. Even on professions with strong union representation, it is not that difficult for management to find a way to get rid of “problematic” employees.”
So that is why public school teachers and major league umpires and other people in strong unions never lose their jobs? I have known dozens and dozens of schools teachers, and many have lost their jobs due to insufficient seniority, I have never known one who was fired poor performance. Even the atrocious ones.
“Without an ironclad guarantee of job protection there would be a very strong pressure for academics to either be selective in the sorts of topics they researched or outright compromise their results.”
This exact same type of pressure exists at almost all professional jobs, and yet many of them do not have tenure? How does the world cope? At the Universities I have experience with the administration is fairly academically minded and has a pretty light touch on the rudder. Compare that to the business world where the management frequently has a death grip on the rudder, and little to no sympathy for line employees if they are not giving the types of answers management wants to hear.
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Without tenure, admins have unseemly political power. With tenure, the entrenched faculty have unseemly political power. There is always political pressure, it’s just a matter of whose ox is being gored.
You worry about “very strong pressure for academics to either be selective in the sorts of topics they researched or outright compromise their results”. Have you looked at the political leanings of universities? How many conservative professors are there in any of the soft sciences? Remember the Sokal hoax? Don’t pretend there is no pressure with tenure. I imagine the only reason it is so liberal right now is a historical trend; it could easily be conservative faculty in 50 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
The “hoax” had nothing to do with tenure. He submitted a fake article to “test” how a journal would respond to a faux intellectual article.
Tenure has both its problems and its benefits. But let’s not be sidetracked from the primary issue, regarding previous posts, Teacher positions in primary and secondary education levels have nothing to do with Tenure, the inefficiencies that you’re citing are union and administrative issues (There are proper procedures when you attempt to fire someone from a teaching position for “bad performance”)
For our Universities, I would hope that people would like them to be apolitical. As institutes of Higher Learning, I would love for them to foster an open mind about all sources of learning. That being said, you do have Universities that are Conservative/Liberal. Does this matter? In the world of Academics, it shouldn’t. Academics should be allowed to go wherever their interests and their studies lead them to. That is a huge benefit of tenured faculty. They aren’t necessarily locked into any specific path that they’ve gone down.
And just to link some “controversial” subjects, I’d like people to wonder if these subjects/ideas would could be studied/discovered today /without/ tenure.
In vitro Fertilization
Heart Transplants
Evolution
And just to be really old school, Astronomy.
Would regular people need or even have the fortitude and strength of beliefs that kept Galileo from recanting while under house arrest?
Tenure allows for people that are on the cutting edge to test the boundaries of everyone’s beliefs, whether or not they’re popular/economical/practical. Does this mean that all tenured faculty use it for this? No. But to take away the option just because everyone isn’t a maverick is shortsighted at best.
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“Have you looked at the political leanings of universities? How many conservative professors are there in any of the soft sciences?”
No self-respecting conservative would be caught dead taking up a career in one of the typical soft sciences so its their own fault they ceded that territory. Besides, you don’t see me complaining that there aren’t any liberals at fundamentalist Christian Universities.
Anyway the point isn’t that all groups are bias free, but if a group is being biased by another that has absolutely nothing to do with the field. I would far prefer academics having their own independent source of power and biases than being bias from without. A group of learned academics have far more business running their own research than political leaders who may have no other qualifications aside from winning a popularity contest.
“Even on professions with strong union representation, it is not that difficult for management to find a way to get rid of “problematic” employees.”
I disagree. Mountains had to be moved to get rid of Ward Churchill, the poster child of “problematic” employees, and it’s still bogged down in litigation.
The vast majority of professors do not make six figures. While some may only teach one or two classes a semester, quality research takes up the rest of the time. If you want academics to stop researching than you are implicitly wishing that our civilization return to the dark ages.
Tenure arguably creates more job insecurity for aspiring university professors.
The “up or out” policies at most schools that provide tenure requires professors to produce research that is impressive enough to warrant tenure within a certain number of years of joining the faculty, or they lose their jobs.
Beyond pulling the professor out of the classroom, professors who are unable to meet this requirement become less and less hirable as other colleges become less interested.
This creates a very limited window of opportunity. If you don’t impress the first couple of universities with the quality of your research (irrespective of the quality of your teaching), you become increasingly unhirable.
The incentives seem out of whack to me.
(Though I do see the value of academia having some kind of intellectual immunity…better faculty contracts maybe?)
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University professors are hardly the “gadfly on the body politic” as they rely very heavily on grants from industry and government. This kind of relationship doesn’t lead to heavy criticism, let alone the Socratic type of alienation (they did kill him in the end).
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Tenure is a form of compensation to university faculty. (Probably 99% of tenured faculty are doing nothing that would require such strong “freedom of speech” protections.) It is a way for a university to attract human talent without paying them more. Indeed, the practice as it exists today traces its origins to WWII (surprisingly recent, many people find), when salary caps prohibited universities from competing for talent that way. Nowadays, it is a reason some smart people find becoming a professor more attractive than becoming a doctor, lawyer, or venture capitalist.
I think there are all sorts of problems with the tenure system. Before dispatching it, though — and maybe we should dispatch it — we should carefully think through what the effect will be on who becomes a professor under the new scheme.
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That’s a nice story, but it’s not true (any more, at least). Tenured professors have the highest salaries of anyone in the educational system. They get paid far more than non-tenured people to do far less teaching.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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This misses the point: tenured professors have higher salaries than others in the educational system, but that’s because they are not primarily educators.
Your typical tenured science professor at a major research university, for example, might manage a group of say 5 graduate students and 3 postdocs, raise funds from various federal and private sources amounting to $400k annually (150k would go to the university, 250k to the professor to fund this research). He or she has to read extensively to stay current in some field of expertise, give numerous research seminars, go to and organize conferences, review other papers in their field. That on top of designing experiments, troubleshooting daily technical problems, mentor their students and postdocs, analyzing data, and writing papers (perhaps half a dozen a year for a successful scientist).
Basically, this person has the job of someone running a small company with a highly technical product. They need to be a scientist and an entrepreneur . Oh, and they teach undergrads a little bit too.
To compare such a person to a teacher is a bit absurd. How well are they paid compared to people who do things similar to what they do?
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Well spoked and absolutely correct. Thank you!
Not counting football and basketball coaches, administrators are paid tremendously more than faculty.
Tenure, College Professors = lack of accountability to the client. Lets face it, higher education is a service to be purchased. The tenure system, which protects those who are fringe thinkers, ie Ward Churchill, is broken. The end purchaser, the student, and therefore the parents of students, can’t hold these fringe thinkers accountable for their absurd policies.
How often do we hear of professors of non political courses, creating a hostile environment for those people who do not agree with their political point of view. It is rampant. Tenure has created a culture of virtual oppression of free discussion on college campuses. Only one view allowed, all others are vilified as hate speech.
I have several college professors in my extended family, and my wife is a Elementary School teacher, and they all readily acknowledge this type of oppressive opinion is a daily occurance, and very heavy handed.
It has become so abused, I am in favor of completely eliminating tenure, and pushing to ensuring a balanced political orientation requirement for every department on campus.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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I’ll take a guess: Fox News and Glenn Beck are part of those balanced political orientations …
Research universities are founded in reality, there are no feelings, make believe and other bull. Unfortunately as it happens reality itself has a liberal bias…
Hot debate. What do you think?
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Naive and very telling, “Research universities are founded in reality, there are no feelings, make believe and other bull. Unfortunately as it happens reality itself has a liberal bias…”. Every human endeavor has all human failings, including “feelings, make believe and other bull” – thats why we things like courts, Ombudsmen, peer review and other such tools to adjudicate these universities founded in reality (with no bias no less).
Condescension does not make a good argument, and blindness to the one-sided bias does not make a virtue.
I will not make snap judgments of where you get your news, but I have never read/listened to Glenn Beck, nor do I follow Fox News. I follow many sources, from a variety of locations around the globe – for I have an open mind. Lets keep personal attacks out of the discussion – it only shows lack of respect for other points of view (and that is a liberal bias).
Hot debate. What do you think?
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Awesome post.
Talk to the hand Ayn Rand.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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The price of tuition is massively inflated, and we know human nature trends towards “resting on our laurels.” As for what would best serve the end-user (customer), it’s a no-brainer that everyone should be earning their job every day. No one has job security anymore, and when it comes to the art of knowledge sharing, we are artificially ignoring the fact that the cost of (and skill required for) sharing knowledge is getting infinitesimally low. It took manufacturing decades to realize they had lost their jobs to advances in technology, I think we’re seeing the same with education now.
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It would seem the height of hypocrisy for a economist to argue in support of a system that is not based on reward for performance. Once a professor is tenured the only incentive to remaining at his most productive is shame. Shame is a very poor incentive and only a slightly better deterrent.
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Social stigma is actually one of the best motivator’s out there. Most of what you do on a daily basis is determined by social cues and pressure. It might surprise you that not everyone is motivated by simple monetary rewards. In fact the sort of highly intelligent and talented people who choose academia over a more lucrative profession more than likely fall into that category. Therefore the best way to motivate them is a strong guarantee of professional freedom and autonomy.
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To follow-up on Mike B:
If you look at microfinance, some dude named Yunnus won a Nobel Prize by leveraging shame and social capital.
As the professor mentioned, a completely worthless tenured professor can be removed, without too much difficulty.
Mr. Hamermesh errs. He works for the University of Texas. He claims the problem is a lack of funding for public universities. Hamermesh’s university has $16.11 billion dollars available in trusts and endowment (2008 estimates).
$16.11 billion dollars is a lack of funding?! I think Mr. Hamermesh’s claim is spectacularly mendacious, because it comes from an economist who ought to know better.
Here is a much better defense of tenure by Jeffrey Miron: http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/Mirontenure.html
Miron both demonstrates why Mr. Hamermesh is wrong, and how tenure is beneficial to the university. I still find the case unpersuasive on balance, but at least Miron isn’t peddling mendacious arguments.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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This meatloaf is rather mendacious.
Eww, mendacious, that’s a big word. Was that O’Reilly’s word of the day?
Clearly the professor is talking about academia in general. Straw men are so easily thrown aside.