Nearly 40 years have passed since James C. Wetherbe worked his way through graduate school by maintaining campus computer systems. Yet some of what he heard from tenured professors back then remains stuck in his craw.
He recalls having the exchanges in the middle of his workdays as director of computer services at Texas Tech University and, later, at Idaho State University. Some tenured professors would not just tell him they were headed home, but would do so in a manner that suggested they were gloating over their freedom to knock off work early.
He remembers thinking that neither the university nor the professors themselves were well served by their being “that cavalier about their position.”
Mr. Wetherbe went on to earn a doctorate from Texas Tech in management-information systems, organizational behavior, and computer-science management, and to succeed in both business and academe. His life with one foot in the accountability-focused business world caused his reservations about tenure to grow stronger over time. He gave up tenure as a professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in the mid-1990s and has not sought it since.
Now, as a professor of management-information systems at Texas Tech’s business school, Mr. Wetherbe has been waging a tenure-related legal battle that upends many common assumptions about relations between colleges and their faculty members. In a world in which many faculty members sue over tenure denials, Mr. Wetherbe is suing over the right to reject tenure without harming his career prospects in academe.
He sees himself as charting a new path for academics at a time when the share of the professoriate working on the tenure track is on the wane.
His federal lawsuit accuses Texas Tech of violating his First Amendment rights by holding his views on tenure against him in denying him both a post as the business school’s dean and an honorary professorial title. Texas Tech is arguing that what has disqualified Mr. Wetherbe is his lack of tenure rather than his opinion of it.
The case is headed for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit as a result of the university’s decision last month to appeal a lower-court ruling that found some basis to Mr. Wetherbe’s claims. The decision also denied qualified legal immunity to one defendant, Robert Smith, a former provost at Texas Tech.
Since taking Texas Tech to court last year, Mr. Wetherbe has become a vocal and high-profile opponent of tenure, attacking it in opinion pieces for Huffington Post and business publications as mainly a means of providing job security that some professors abuse.
“I am trying to debunk that tenure is about academic freedom,” he said in an interview. Speaking of his own experience in academe, Mr. Wetherbe, a highly rated instructor and the author or co-author of numerous books, said, “I think I have been a better professor—a better scholar, a better teacher—operating without a net.”
Security Concerns
Mr. Wetherbe, 65, describes his views on tenure as being formed by his experiences in both academe, where he has taught at a series of universities since the mid-1970s, and in the business world, where he has prospered as a manager, consultant, paid speaker, and board member for companies such as Best Buy.
He says he can cite only one colleague in his career who actually needed tenure’s academic-freedom protections in a campus speech controversy. “What I saw more of,” he says, “is people using tenure to allow them to get away with not adding as much value as they were capable of adding.”
In 1993, as a tenured professor at Minnesota, he was told he would have to relinquish tenure to simultaneously take a second professorial position at the University of Memphis. Facing that choice was a blessing, he says, because he had not known that giving up tenure was an option.
One of his Minnesota colleagues, Gordon B. Davis, now an emeritus professor of information systems, recalls Mr. Wetherbe describing tenure as hindrance to relationships with business leaders who looked askance at it, and taking pride in telling them he had given it up.
Nicholas P. Vitalari, who worked with Mr. Wetherbe as a Minnesota graduate student and now runs a consulting firm, says “everybody knew his personal views” on tenure, even though he did not push others to oppose it.
Neither Mr. Davis nor Mr. Vitalari, who spent time as a professor at the business school of the University of California at Irvine, oppose or passed up tenure themselves, a reflection of how valued it remains in the professoriate.
“It is very simple, really,” says Gregory Scholtz, director of the American Association of University Professors’ department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance. “Academic freedom doesn’t really exist for people who can be let go on somebody’s whim.” Although he disagrees with Mr. Wetherbe’s views on tenure, he says the professor’s ability to express them should be protected.
Mr. Wetherbe acknowledges that his financial success in business makes going without tenure easier. “I always managed my skills and my experiences and my network so that I was not totally dependent on a career at any particular university,” he says.
He argues, however, that professors in other fields should similarly be trying to build financial security for themselves by achieving success in ventures outside their regular jobs.
If the point of tenure is job security, he says, then there are better ways for colleges to provide it, such as by offering three- to five-year rolling contracts to faculty hires. He works on a renewable annual contract himself.
His rejection of tenure was noted by Texas Tech in its February 2000 letter telling him he had been hired there. It did not become a source of controversy until his recent employment dispute.
Costs and Benefits
Business schools are known to select business leaders without any academic background, much less tenure, as their deans. Such hires, however, have been the exception and are becoming rarer as such schools struggle to adapt to growing market pressures, says Robert S. Sullivan, dean of the management school at the University of California at San Diego and chairman of AACSB International: the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.
Kenneth Kring, who has helped about 60 business schools hire deans over the past 10 years as co-managing director of the global education practice of Korn/Ferry International, says candidates from outside academe are almost always considered among an initial pool of applicants. But “we don’t often have them in the finalist pool.”
Mr. Wetherbe’s lawsuit against Texas Tech hinges heavily on statements made last year by Mr. Smith, who was then provost, in relation to the university’s search for a business-school dean and the awarding of its highest faculty honor, the Paul Whitfield Horn Professorship. In a deposition last year, Mr. Smith testified that he believed Mr. Wetherbe’s views on tenure precluded him from both. Mr. Wetherbe’s lawsuit accuses Mr. Smith of overruling committee recommendations in removing Mr. Wetherbe from contention.
The university has argued that Mr. Wetherbe was denied the deanship and honorary title for reasons other than his tenure views. The reasons include his lack of tenure itself. Texas Tech officials also have characterized his philosophy toward business-school management as being at odds with the university’s needs, even without any declaration by Mr. Wetherbe of plans to change the school’s tenure policy.
For both sides, the dispute has had costs well beyond lawyers’ fees. Mr. Wetherbe has accused the university of threatening his continued employment and of stripping him last spring of a position as associate dean of outreach. He learned of that decision in a lecture hall built with money he had donated to Texas Tech.
And last year, Bobby G. Stevenson, co-founder of Ciber Inc., an information-technology company that has had Mr. Wetherbe on its board, rescinded at least $9-million in gifts to Texas Tech to protest how the dean search was conducted.
In a ruling denying the university’s request for summary judgment against Mr. Wetherbe, Judge Sam R. Cummings of the U.S. district court in Lubbock, Tex., held that the professor’s views on tenure were protected by the First Amendment because they deal with not just a contractual matter but also a matter of public concern.
The decision, issued in September, said the integrity, quality, and public financing of higher education “are of political and social interest in any community because education is a social good and public universities are financed, in large part, by tax monies.”
Mr. Wetherbe, who has rejected a university offer to fast-track him through the tenure process, says he does not want tenure to be part of any legal settlement. “At this point,” he says, “I would feel hypocritical.”
