The Chronicle of Higher Education
Date: October 25, 1996
Section: Personal & Professional Concerns
Page: A12
By Courtney Leatherman
Along with many people outside academe, more junior faculty members are questioning the system of tenure that professors have for years called sacrosanct.
Junior scholars have always expressed skepticism about tenure. After all, they don't have it. But the reservations of many young professors are now attracting more attention.
Their opinions are the basis for much of a recent book that calls for "a dramatic overhaul" of the tenure system, and for forthcoming papers on tenure and its alternatives. Even ardent supporters of tenure are paying more attention to the next generation of scholars, who say groups like the American Association of University Professors simply haven't made the case for keeping tenure as it is.
"Junior faculty find the tenure process mysterious, random, highly politicized, and often inequitable, in their judgment," says Richard Chait, a tenured professor of higher education at Harvard University who has long studied alternatives to tenure.
Suddenly, he says, he is no longer alone. "I don't think we'd see as much of a movement as we have toward post-tenure reviews and a longer probationary status if there wasn't some fairly widespread discontent among faculty members," he says.
As evidence, he notes that he was recently invited by the University of Houston's Faculty Senate to talk at a day-long conference on the tenure system. Mr. Chait gets lots of invitations to speak about his ideas, to be sure, but they usually come from trustees.
The heightened scrutiny of one of academe's most venerable traditions has been prompted partly by political reality. Professors sense that, at the very least, they had better discuss tenure, to keep outsiders, like state lawmakers, from taking matters into their own hands. Already, many professors see higher education's growing reliance on part-time and adjunct faculty members as an end run around tenure.
The tenure system's internal critics also say that deep personal concerns account for their willingness to put the subject on the table. They are worried about the tough academic job market, the glut of unemployed Ph.D.'s, the end of mandatory retirement, and the growing fiscal constraints on institutions.
They are especially worried about their junior colleagues. Recent surveys have shown that junior professors are most skeptical about tenure and most in favor of some form of evaluating the performance of tenured professors. In conversations with full professors about the status of tenure, the plight of the junior professor almost always comes up.
A 1995 survey of faculty attitudes provides more than anecdotal evidence of professors' concern about tenure. In the survey, conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, more than a third of the roughly 34,000 professors interviewed agreed "strongly" or "somewhat" that "tenure is an outmoded concept." That proportion was slightly higher than in 1989.
When, for the first time, the U.C.L.A. survey asked whether "tenure attracts the best to academe," only 54.3 per cent of the professors agreed. The largest proportion of those who believed that tenure was outmoded were faculty members under the age of 35. Many observers say it's always been the case that younger faculty members hold a dimmer view of tenure than do their senior colleagues. But the 1995 survey suggested that older faculty members were beginning to listen. It showed that the proportion of scholars with the biggest increase in skepticism about tenure since the 1989 survey were professors aged 45 to 54.
Hardly anyone turns down tenure when it's offered. And few professors believe that tenure should be abolished. Ideas for revising the present system include lengthening the probationary period for tenure beyond the average seven years, and conducting post-tenure reviews. Some academics favor offering alternatives to tenure, such as renewable contracts with higher salaries. Proponents of changing the tenure system say they still believe in academic freedom; they just don't think that tenure is the only way to protect it.
Few of these ideas are novel, but the level of attention they are attracting in academic circles is new. Over the past few years, dozens of faculties have adopted post-tenure reviews, and groups such as the American Association for Higher Education have begun projects to study tenure and its alternatives. Even at the University of Minnesota, where the faculty and the Board of Regents are locked in a battle over the tenure code, professors say they are willing to embrace change. They have proposed a new post-tenure review policy, but the regents want more. They want to be able to fire tenured professors whose programs are eliminated or restructured.
Defenders of tenure say it protects academic freedom for the entire professoriate and prevents universities from relying entirely on cheap labor. P.D. Lesko, head of the National Adjunct Faculty Guild, says: "More people are looking at adjuncts and saying, 'There but for the grace of tenure go I.'"
The American Association of University Professors, a staunch supporter of tenure as it is now understood, has argued that actions like those by the regents in Minnesota are a wake-up call.
Jordan E. Kurland, associate general secretary of the association, doesn't think the Minnesota regents will gut tenure. But if they weaken it enough, he says, the university will have a tough time recruiting professors. He also says that "for every institution we see moving away from tenure, we see another institution moving toward it. It just doesn't get the same sort of attention."
David W. Breneman, dean of the education school at the University of Virginia, doesn't foresee the abolition of tenure, but he does expect "a vastly more diverse array of options." He has come to that conclusion because, he says, tenure is "a very difficult concept to support any longer."
Mr. Breneman has never been through the tenure process, though he received it with his appointment at Virginia last year. Still, he says, when he was president of Kalamazoo College, he regularly defended tenure against attacks from trustees. In the 1980s he could argue that most businesses, the government, and the military offered the kind of job security that was tantamount to tenure. But that has changed, and "I can't say there's some obvious reason why higher education should be immune to it," he says. "To have to argue that it's entirely because of academic freedom doesn't sell. People view that as the crassest form of self-delusion."
As a participant in the American Association for Higher Education's project on tenure, Mr. Breneman has been given the assignment of writing a paper on how to sell the idea of alternatives to tenure to the next generation of professors.
He may have an easy job. While his arguments are seen by some old-guard professors as attacks on the academy, they ring true with many younger ones who view tenure as elitist, a holdover from the days when the academy was viewed as an ivory tower.
Jonathan M. Gilligan, a research assistant professor of physics at Vanderbilt University, is among those who believe that "tenure is becoming obsolete" and has created a two-tiered system of haves and have-nots.
Chief among his complaints is that tenure squelches creativity. For example, he says, "interdisciplinary work is death to tenure prospects," because such scholarship is tougher to evaluate than work that is more narrowly conceived. Young academics may steer clear of some of the hottest areas of research for six years, he says, until they secure tenure and have the freedom to pursue their real interests. Some would argue that such freedom is the whole point of tenure: After a short probationary period, scholars can spend the bulk of their careers pursuing challenging and controversial ideas, without losing their jobs.
Mr. Gilligan himself recently turned down a tenure-track job elsewhere to take the post at Vanderbilt, where his wife is in a tenure-track slot. He works under a three-year contract that is supported largely through research grants.
He rejected the other offer, he says, because he saw the tenure track as too steep. "I talked to them about their expectations for tenure in that job, and I felt they were completely unrealistic and couldn't be met." That department hadn't tenured anyone since the 1960s, he notes, and "I thought I would be no exception."
Other critics say that with so many Ph.D.'s to choose from, universities have been able to ratchet up the qualifications they require, making the standards for achieving tenure nearly unattainable. What's more, institutions have failed to make allowances for young scholars who are working in a financial environment far different from the one their mentors started out in. These young faculty members are judged on whether they can secure grants, in an era when the competition for funds is more intense than in the past.
Either way, says Tim Karr, an assistant professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, universities have managed to raise the bar for tenure. "You can raise the bar by lifting it," he says, "or by digging a hole under it." He was denied tenure by the University of Illinois a few years ago, then was hired by Chicago in an accelerated tenure-track program. At Illinois, where he shared a grant with another professor, his denial was related, he says, to his inability to secure a grant solely for his own research.
Dr. Karr does not see the efforts to revamp the tenure system as a threat to academic freedom. "Because I'm a scientist and I have to work to get federal funds, I don't feel I've ever been academically free," he says. "I feel I've always been a slave to how I should write my specific aims" on grant proposals.
Like many of his peers, Dr. Karr supports the idea of merit reviews for tenured professors.
The sentiments of young scholars like Dr. Karr figure heavily in a new book by two education professors at the University of Southern California. In the book, Promotion and Tenure: Community and Socialization in Academe, William G. Tierney and Estela M. Bensimon conclude that "the promotion and tenure system as it exists in the late 20th century is in need of dramatic overhaul."
Mary Burgan, general secretary of the A.A.U.P., sees the books, conferences, and studies calling for "reviews" of tenure as thinly veiled efforts to abolish it. She is worried about the pressures facing junior professors, however. "I would agree,"she says, "that the squeezing of junior faculty by applying ever more demanding criteria to them for tenure is not tolerable." But she adds: "That does not mean that tenure is at fault. That means that institutiona vanity is causing tenure to be less and less attainable. Tenure is not supposed to be a kind of perk for superstars."
Arguing that tenure should be changed simply because there is no job security anywhere else in America is counter-intuitive, Dr. Burgan says. She's in favor of job security -- in all sectors.
Some young scholars, such as Tom Foster, a doctoral candidate in education at Minnesota, agree. He is also president of the university's Council of Graduate Students, which this month passed a motion supporting the more modest set of changes in Minnesota's tenure code proposed by the Faculty Senate.
Three years ago, Mr. Foster wrote a paper for a graduate course in which he argued against tenure. (He got an A on the paper. His professor worked in the university's general counsel's office.) But he has reconsidered his position. While he favors some form of post-tenure reviews -- as a helpful measure to improve the performance of professors, not to punish them -- he now argues that short-term contracts could destroy academe as we know it.
"I'm a little dubious about this idea of being a gypsy faculty," he says. Universities, he notes, build their reputations on the names of the professors they tenure. The idea that professors work under contracts reminds him of the National Football League draft, where fans never know where their favorite players will end up.