If there was ever a time when it made sense for economics professors to be given tenure, that time has surely passed. The same is likely true of other university disciplines, and probably even more true for high-school and elementary school teachers.
What does tenure do? It distorts people’s effort so that they face strong incentives early in their career (and presumably work very hard early on as a consequence) and very weak incentives forever after (and presumably work much less hard on average as a consequence).
One could imagine some models in which this incentive structure makes sense. For instance, if one needs to learn a lot of information to become competent, but once one has the knowledge it does not fade and effort is not very important. That model may be a good description of learning to ride a bike, but it is a terrible model of academics.
From a social standpoint, it seems like a bad idea to make incentives so weak after tenure. Schools get stuck with employees who are doing nothing (at least not doing what they are presumably being paid to do). It also is probably a bad idea to give such strong incentives pre-tenure — even without tenure young faculty have lots of reasons to work hard to build a good career.
The idea that tenure protects scholars who are doing politically unpopular work strikes me as ludicrous. While I can imagine a situation where this issue might rarely arise, I am hard pressed to think of actual cases where it has been relevant. Tenure does an outstanding job of protecting scholars who do no work or terrible work, but is there anything in economics which is high quality but so controversial it would lead to a scholar being fired? Anyway, that is what markets are for. If one institution fires an academic primarily because they don’t like his or her politics or approach, there will be other schools happy to make the hire. There are, for instance, cases in recent years in economics where scholars have made up data, embezzled funds, etc. but still have found good jobs afterwards.
One hidden benefit of tenure is that it works as a commitment device to get departments to fire mediocre people. The cost of not firing at a tenure review is higher with tenure in place than it is without it. If it is painful to fire people, without tenure the path of least resistance may be to always say you will fire the person the next year, but never do it.
Imagine a setting where you care about performance (e.g. a professional football team, or a currency trader). You wouldn’t think of granting tenure. So why do it in academics?
The best case scenario would be if all schools could coordinate on dumping tenure simultaneously. Maybe departments would give the deadwood a year or two to prove they deserved a slot before firing them. Some non-producers would leave or be fired. The rest of the tenure-age economists would start working harder. My guess is that salaries and job mobility would not change that much.
Absent all schools moving together to get rid of tenure, what if one school chose to unilaterally revoke tenure. It seems to me that it might work out just fine for that school. It would have to pay the faculty a little extra to stay in a department without an insurance policy in the form of tenure. Importantly, though, the value of tenure is inversely related to how good you are. If you are way over the bar, you face almost no risk if tenure is abolished. So the really good people would require very small salary increases to compensate for no tenure, whereas the really bad, unproductive economists would need a much bigger subsidy to remain in a department with tenure gone. This works out fantastically well for the university because all the bad people end up leaving, the good people stay, and other good people from different institutions want to come to take advantage of the salary increase at the tenure-less school. If the U of C told me that they were going to revoke my tenure, but add $15,000 to my salary, I would be happy to take that trade. I’m sure many others would as well. By dumping one unproductive, previously tenured faculty member, the University could compensate ten others with the savings.
It must not be that simple because few schools have tried, and my sense is that those that took a stab at it capitulated quickly and reinstated tenure. What am I missing?
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It’s a good thing that there are respected individuals who aren’t in the rat race. You might call their relative inactivity incompetence, but I would call it perspective. And I feel society benefits if economism (my coined phrase for the tendency of economists to see the world in only economic terms) with its attendant short-term focus, is put in its proper place.
— pparkmanlgProfessors with tenure have earned the right to smell the flowers, and many of us non-professors wish we could be as free from economics some day.
What about the incentive for a department to hire good people in the first place? Without tenure, existing people have less incentive to hire people who might replace them. I could be wrong, but I’m thinking that there was a JPE paper on this point. Ah yes: http://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jpolec/v96y1988i3p453-72.html .
In looking for it, I came across a nice thread on tenure: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/07/academic_bureau.html
— Snow_BillYes tenure is a problem. In India there are lemon professors in the University departments and in the absence of a hiring and firing system, they happily maximise their income.Their utility function include many items like perks,travel allowances, dearness allowances,scholarships through backdoor,foreign fellowships and travel grants earned through lobbying, book-publication grants, fellowships and endowments etc earned through strategic inter-professorial cartel like agreements (”you help me for this so that I will help you for that”; “you publish my paper so that I will publish your paper”; “you invite me for the international seminar so that I will invite you for a same event in my University” and the like policies ).They move across places within the country and between countries and make good amount of money.These incumbent professorial firms effectively limit the entry of newcomers and new ideas.
— G.V.VarmaYou miss perhaps the most important aspect of tenure: it allows someone to pursue a project for an extended period (years) relieved of the burdens constantly to publish and present. The tenure system obviously has its problems, and should be changed. But any change that did not allow us scholars some breathing room (say 5 years at least, mabye 10) would not be worth the benefits, I imagine.
— humbertSeems reasonable. I say this as the spawn of a tenured professor.
— evanThis idea of abolishing tenure for economists seems a little draconian and too unforgiving. Yes, you theoretically push the economists to work harder in their later years. But if you structure a contract in such a way that they get evaluated annually without any safety net, you may limit the types of research economists ever do. Economists may choose to avoid certain topics, no matter how helpful or insightful they might offer to society, because they feel the risk of not being able to publish something within a certain amount of time will lead to unemployment.
In theory, if this system is absolutely efficient with free flowing information where the hiring boards know all information regarding the professor, then this may not be an issue. But such is often not the case.
— bunnyblasterThere is no good reason for tenure - only post hoc rationalizations.
If we didn’t have tenure, it would never be introduced. If/ when tenure gets abolished, it will never be reintroduced.
The reason why tenure is near universal in academia relates not to education, nor to economics, but to the power of interest groups.
Tenure will go when, and only when, competition between universities increases - I mean real competition where those who fail go under. At present all boats are kept afloat by a rising tide of demand (and subsidy) - but that can’t continue forever.
— Bruce G CharltonPerhaps not a tenure/non-tenure situation, but one in which a professor’s ability to define and complete academic projects entitles him to get periods of tenure from his review board. This isn’t a contract, but a negotiation of value with tenure as a token of faith for future value. A bit like prison sentencing, but with a positive outcome. *grin*
— sinisterdexterityI have one another con:
In the short run, the effects Steven indicates might work so that the benefit will be exceeding the costs.
But in the medium-long run, the inflow of people into academia might decrease because of abolishing tenure. For some people the perspective of getting one is among the major reasons for commiting to academic world.
Hence I can imagine some really smart guys deciding on a margin between academia and industry would now rather stay away from research, should you cancel the tenure mechanism. And thus in some years the overall level in the profession might deteriorate.
Comments?
— k_golyaevI wonder if tenure works to reduce rather than increase the range of political opinions expressed in academia, particularly in the liberal arts. I wonder if people with contrary views simply select themselves out of environments in which they view potential backlash from the politically correct in crowd as too jeopardizing to their ability to get tenure.
— mistercaseyI think you are forgetting to look at this problem from the perspetive of the university’s real customer: the graduate student.
The tenure process not only creates large barriers to entry for the profession, but it also dramatically slows down hopping of professors from institution to institution, because of the cost of getting a consensus before hiring.
Graduate school can take six years or longer for many people, and students entering into such a contract do so at considerably greater risk if their faculty advisor does not have tenure. A university would not gain from abolishing tenure if all of the good prospective students shunned it in favor of the greater stability of the university next door.
I suppose that one could also either drop tuition or increase the salaries/stipends of the students in order to make up for that increased risk. But now the negatives from the professor’s standpoint (less cheap labor to work on grants) increase.
Tenure is a cost-saving measure, pure and simple. Yes, its inefficient. But in a world where a single faculty member can be expected to lecture to (and grade the papers of) 400 students, how could the increased costs of eliminating tenure be absorbed?
— seth#9 says one reason for tenure is that it creates an incentive for talented people to enter academia. The obvious response is that surely there are better ways to make academia attractive, salary subsidies for example.
#2 says one reason for tenure is that senior faculty choose which junior faculty to hire, and if the senior faculty have no job security then they have an incentive to hire bad junior faculty. This seems reasonable, but I wonder whether it might be possible to take hiring decisions out of the hands of senior professors.
The best reason for tenure, however, was alluded to by #4 and then stated more clearly by #6: the (best) reason for tenure is that it encourages people to engage in risky research–that is, research which has a small chance of coming to fruition but which has a big payoff if it does. (One dimension along which research can be risky is how long it takes: a long-term research project is riskier than a short-term one.)
Assuming academics are risk-averse, they would avoid risky topics while under the pressure to publish or perish. It seems the only way to counteract this is to remove the pressure (to publish or perish): in other words, tenure.
So, Levitt got it almost right in saying that the point of tenure is to protect (encourage?) controversial research. Just replace ‘controversial’ with ‘risky’, and you get it perfectly right!
(One example of controversial research: a recently emeritus philosopher told me that there is no way he would have written his most recent book on sexual ethics any earlier in his career than right before retirement.)
— majikthiseScience is all about creativity. If one observes people like Newton, Einstein and similar it is easy to conclude that the major ideas come before the age of 24. So, probably the dilemma of “To tenure or not to tenure” is not really that important. Or in Einstein’s style one should not use the plural (ideas). Once Einstein was asked by a journalist how is he keeping all his ideas organized. He replied that he had only one idea in his life.
Moreover if you really don’t like the tenure system that much, my suggestion to you would be that you quit your job and go to the financial industry or consulting since they pay the risk premium but don’t give the tenure.
— rashaHere in the farm state of Iowa there are regular calls to fire academics at the state universities who say anything unfavorable about pork or ethanol. I am afraid that without tenure the official line would be that pork is the ideal food in any quantity and ethanol is free energy.
— feuerThe problem with getting rid of tenure is that politicians don’t want to raise educators’ salaries in exchange for that job security (since, although tenure may predominate in education, if professors or teachers feel undercompensated, they’re free to do a job that pays them more). And since almost all the politicians I know of have seen getting rid of tenure as a one-off thing, I can’t blame unions and most teachers for opposing it. It’s simple economics–something beats nothing every time.
— msrpotusI had pretty much the same arguments about Computer Science faculty and tenure 10 years ago. I left for the business world and never looked back. At least if someone on my staff is underperforming I can get rid of them.
The other issues is a bit more complex: what about those academics who seem productive but actually are not? The ones who publish frequently but the quality of their work is marginal.
— MikeBI don’t think I’d bother being a prof if it wasn’t for tenure. And I don’t have it yet. If it was just about the job and $$ I’d be making 5x more working in the family business, and I wouldn’t have had to spend the last millenium getting to where I am. It represents an investment of 2 decades more or less (I worked my way through). If an institution doesn’t believe in me or trust in my work enough for me to be given tenure, then I’ll go do something else. My work and the time invested cannot be relocalized without taking 3-5 years to build up the social network and relationships required to do the job right. Tenure is a commitment on the part of the institution that doesn’t quite equal what I’ve put into it, but it is a good step. I can see how some fields are not linked to specific locations and research environments. I would say, sure, we don’t need tenure for economists… actually we don’t need economists at all (aside from the ones like you who see it as some form of twisted performance poetry that tells interesting stories about how our world works). And there are a lot of easily transferable fields. But you can’t take a fresh water limnologist and mover her work from northern Ontario to South Dakota. Same goes for people researching in Public Health, Education, Social Work and fields that actually are bio-regionally situated.
That said, we’re looking at this backwards… what is/was the purpose of academe. Is it a corporate institutional commodity. If so, treat it like one with quarterly reports, shut down the unprofitable sections and fire the bunnies you don’t need. Though if that’s the case, we should only keep the profs who the customers like anyway. I’d like that… I’d have my salary tripled because the students like me. As it is now, one of my courses has been cut because it is too popular, and we need students to be forced to enroll in a less popular course so it doesn’t get dropped. In the context of my school, I agree, but in the brave new world where the student is customer, that wouldn’t happen.
The university is a place of learning, inquiry and reflection. I’d rather let the corporate institutional commodity folks go; they can get snapped up by industry if they’re hot, and flip burgers if they’re not. Then we can dump all the courses that are about ‘getting a job’ down to the community colleges which have no research requirement. And the rest of us can stay in low-paying tenured jobs in liberal arts, basic science, and related centres where we can inquire and reflect and ‘be’ a university.
IMHO of course.
— jasonnolanPlease you are only thinking of yourself , not even the students who this system would be by far the unfair for .
— RandyfromCanadaLets say l know you are U.ofC. l apply to go there because l want to study under you , course Yale makes you an obscene offer and off you go and l am stuck at U.of C. in egretman’s class ?
course all you have to do is look at free agency in sports to see the “pain” this causes alot of home town fans .
I think there are several key points here as several people have already pointed out, but I think that RandyfromCanada is touching on another very important factor that no one has really covered in depth — by getting rid of tenure, you’re opening the market entirely.
Professors are supposed to be lifelong academics, but by turning them into typical corporate citizens you change them from learning-oriented to profit-oriented. They are free to hop from university to university as their pay increases. This would lead to “megaversities” (kind of like the megacorps we have now) that would soak up all the “good” professors with their enormous purchasing power. You might argue that’s the state of affairs now, but with tenure, you have something to offer the professor that is, in some ways, win-win: they get job security to pursue their academic passions, you get a quality professor for “life” — or, at least, there are larger barriers to his swift exit, since a competing university would have to offer tenure and (presumably) a better salary/position.
Of course, as you deftly point out, this system is very open to abuse. That might need some ironing out, but I think by eliminating tenure you’re killing an important part of academia: allowing creative and unbounded research.
— InvisibleJIt would be great if Beckner Posner would post on the same topic… See a couple of different views on this.
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
— proales13 - I want to say Dale Galenson has an article on this - I know he has something on this regarding abstract expressionist painters vs. the pop art artists of the 1960s, finding the average age of the AE painters to be considerably higher for the most valued paintings (he used auction data for that), but much younger ages for the pop artists. But I think he also extended that work to study the same kind of differences in economists - ie, those doing theoretical work and those doing empirical work. The more conceptual the work, the more it is like theoretical physics, poetry, and advanced mathematics in that the best work is done at early ages. But in economics, most of the profession has moved towards empirically-oriented work, where the returns to experience are more important and the best work does not skew towards the very young necessarily.
I am not sure what that means for tenure exactly, though. I would be interested in seeing a model showing how the different tenure and promotion regimes mattered depending on the kind of productivity-age profile you are describing, though.
— scunningI work for Southwest Airlines in a union position, and I’d say without a shadow of a doubt that I worked much harder those first six (non-union) months than I have the subsequent 34 months and counting …
— mattpantsLevitt wrote: “Tenure does an outstanding job of protecting scholars who do no work or terrible work.” This is certainly true in the way tenure operates at most institutions, but that is a problem of implementation. As the child of a (now retired) tenured economics professor, I can recall several conversations with my dad in which he talked about friends at other institutions wondered how to deal with someone who simply wasn’t doing their job. He always said “fire them for malfeasance.” I know his school did just that on at least a couple of occasions.
Tenure simply needs to be implemented in a way that means you have to do your job. One of the biggest barriers to this is that college professors are so reluctant to police their own, because most schools probably already have rules on the books which would allow them to fire for malfeasance. (As a side note, if more schools really took teaching skills into account in tenure decisions there would be far fewer difficulties as well.)
As several posters pointed out, it is not at all obvious that most schools could afford the increased cost of paying higher salaries. In Ohio every couple of years some politicians get press calling for an end to tenure and the current retirement benefits for teachers (the second has always seemed odd to me since the retirement benefits are independently funded and operated). So we have a teacher shortage here, and they propose making the profession significantly less attractive to enter. Then the only way to get more teachers is going to be fairly dramatic swings up in pay.
— mathkingAs Levitt asked what he may have missed and I haven’t seen it in the comments yet except for a mention of tenure boards, I just wanted to mention that from what I’ve seen all university administrators (president, provost, dean, department head and so on) are tenured. And when they leave their posts (willing or not) they return to their secure professorships (keeping whatever increases in salary they may have garnered on the way). What incentive would they have to listen to Levitt’s arguments?
— dphI’ll close with a reminder that Adam Smith covered this ground long ago.
Although the jury is out on University level tenure (mostly due to type of research possible), it really needs to go at grades K through 12. There are some truly awful teachers in many schools that the schools cannot get rid of. My daughter has had the worst science teacher in 8th grade I have ever seen - it has turned her off science forever; the school has had nothing but complaints, but is powerless to get rid of her. These teachers do far more damage than University professors, since University students know to avoid classes and/or rely on TAs and others to work around bad teachers. If the tenured professor is just bad at research, but still a good teacher, it will not hurt the University, other than lack of publications from that one person (and they often have young pre-tenured ones making up the difference). Further, many tenured professors are moved to only teach classes in their interest area, where they are likely more effective. So, step one is to deal with tenure at the lower grades, as Levitt suggests.
— pkimelma