How Tenure for Professors Helps Students

A week before classes began this semester, I got a lesson in why tenure matters.

George Washington University’s administration had just quietly announced that the main library on campus would no longer be open 24 hours a day. For an urban college that doesn’t have much of a traditional campus, and in a city where there aren’t many public wee-hour spaces for students other than bars, limiting the library’s hours was a big deal. YikYak, Twitter, and Facebook exploded with frustration.

I thought closing the library was a really bad decision. I recalled how, as a student, I made some of my best friends and wrote some of my worst papers in late nights at the library. I worried that the shorter library hours might weaken a sense of campus affiliation, and at a university that has a historically low alumni-giving rate, this didn’t seem like a good idea.

So I said something. Over Twitter. I tweeted at the dean of student affairs:

@GWPeterK Count me as faculty bitterly opposed to the library hours reduction. That’s a political statement from a non-tenured prof! Rare!

And then I panicked, worrying I had just doomed my chances at tenure. Now, would I be labeled as a troublemaker standing up to the administration?

The tweet got favorited 33 times and retweeted 11, by students I had never met. Twitter’s stats tell me that 2,004 people saw the tweet. Maybe not a ton by Twitter standards but still enough to make me panic even more. Would something this small, over library hours, compromise my general no-comment policy on campus matters?

Well, nothing happened, but I did have a major realization: This is why tenure is important.

Students come and go, with undergrads cycling out every two or four years and master’s students every two. Even doctoral students eventually leave. It’s unlikely that the next batch of students would even know that the library was once open 24/7. (Fortunately the university later reversed its decision to close the library.)

But that’s where professors come in. We are the adults in the room, and we have the lasting, institutional memory to know what makes our campus environment conducive not just for students’ learning but also for their overall higher-education experience.

We have an obligation, as a result, to use that institutional memory to speak out on behalf of students — echoing their concerns but also occasionally guiding their concerns — to know that beyond just losing a space to study when the library closes, the next generation of students to come down the pipeline four years later will really be missing those 24-hour spaces. Moreover, we have the ability to see the larger consequences for the university as a whole.

But how can professors actually say anything to have an impact on student life if they worry about retribution from the administration?

I wasn’t worried that the administration was going to come after me, but I was worried that I might have overnight gotten a reputation I didn’t want. And posttenure, I know I will be far less worried about speaking out on behalf of students.

Those who defend tenure often cite academic freedom. And it is true that tenure gives us the protection not only to say what we want to about political issues, research questions that may be unpopular or perhaps just fail to provide any meaningful results, or speak about our own quibbles with wider university politics (think divestment, for instance).

But we often forget our power to be students’ advocates and our ability to think about the student experience. Perhaps one of the most powerful arguments, then, that we can muster for the case of tenure is not academic freedom in the sense of freedom to think, study, speak and do research — but the freedom to make the higher-ed experience better for our students.

Nikki Usher Layser is an assistant professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University.