Is higher education in the same position as health care—ripe for reform by the federal government? Both sectors certainly face similar challenges to the established protocol: higher costs, diminished resources, uneven access, inconsistent quality, inadequate means of defining and evaluating results, greater demands, and expensive technology.
We must voluntarily initiate substantial changes. One central piece of the puzzle concerns the tenure system, hatched in another era by a generation of mostly white males with stay-at-home wives, who came of age in the 1930s and 40s. Like the work rules of newspaper guilds and auto workers, the tenure system does not fit contemporary economic realities, nor does it accommodate those Generation Xers and Millennials who work within the system under very different, and increasingly complex, conditions. At best, we tinker with traditional tenure systems through incremental changes such as stop-the-clock provisions and paid leaves, mentor programs, and part-time tenure tracks. Meanwhile, some 14,000 tenure-track faculty respondents to a workplace-satisfaction survey conducted by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (based at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education) have registered widespread confusion and exasperation with the system.
At the same time, the percentage of tenure-track and tenured faculty members has declined from approximately one-third of all instructional staff in 1997 to just over one-quarter in 2007, according to a recent report from the American Federation of Teachers. Without fundamental changes, the tenured professor may become as much a relic as the self-employed primary-care physician who makes house calls. The old tenure model no longer works for too many individuals and institutions.
But what if we could start from scratch to design a more flexible employment system? What would the next generation of scholars create?
Why not ask them?
In a Harvard Business Review article published in 1996, Gary Hamel, a scholar and expert on business strategy, wrote that every industry has “rule makers” who built the industry (such as, at the time, Merrill Lynch and United Airlines); “rule takers” who follow established norms (Smith Barney, US Airways); and “rule breakers"—innovators and radicals “shackled neither by convention nor by respect for precedent” (Charles Schwab, Southwest Airlines). The rule breakers rewrite the rules and thereby gain competitive advantage.
Place this in the context of the academy: The rule makers met under the auspices of the American Association of University Professors in 1940 to write “rules” that govern promotion and tenure policies. Many of the rule takers are four-year colleges and universities—a vast majority of academe—that abide by the AAUP code. With the exception of some nontraditional institutions (such as Evergreen State and Hampshire Colleges), many community colleges, and the ever more popular and powerful for-profits like DeVry, ITT Educational Services, and the University of Phoenix, there are few rule breakers. Most conform to the rules for tenure-track faculty members established some 70 years ago.
To pursue strategy as revolution, Hamel suggested that organizations first identify the 10 to 20 core assumptions or beliefs that dominate one’s industry or profession. For the academy, these might include professorial autonomy, employment security, shared governance, peer review, independent scholarship, a three-rung promotion ladder, and disciplinary departments. Hamel encouraged organizations to then ask what new opportunities might arise if those beliefs were relaxed. He cautions that people at the top of an organizational pyramid (in academe, full professors) have the “least diversity of experience, the largest investment in the past, and the greatest reverence for the industry’s dogma.” It is very difficult for those who rank lower in the organizational hierarchy to challenge the combined forces of precedence, position, and power precisely when changes are most needed. Among other ideas, Hamel recommended inviting Generation Xers (born 1964-1980) into the conversation.
Back to the academy. To state the case plainly, the current faculty-employment system conflicts with the attributes Generation Xers value most. To cite just a few differences: Generation X prefers collaboration to competition; openness to secrecy; community to autonomy; flexibility to uniformity; diversity to homogeneity; interdisciplinary structures to disciplinary silos; and family-work life balance to 24/7 careers.
When, if ever, will the next generation of scholars have a chance to reconsider, and perhaps rewrite, the rules? Will the canon simply pass unquestioned and unexamined from one generation to the next, even as adherence to dogma reduces the tenured ranks? Will academe adapt to new members, or like some organized religions, will orthodoxy persist even as congregants leave?
In a Harvard Magazine article published in 2002, Richard P. Chait, a research professor of higher education at Harvard, and I proposed a “constitutional convention” at which a representative sample of faculty members, selected to mirror the diversity the academy presumably desires, would convene to rethink tenure policy. We asked, “Would the document that emerges essentially paraphrase or materially depart from the 1940 AAUP Statement of Principles on Tenure and Academic Freedom?” Based on what I have since heard from hundreds of junior faculty members over the past 15 years, with ever more desperation, I think the rules would be different.
How? Some features of a newly imagined faculty workplace might include variable probationary periods, with extensions for parenthood, rather than a fixed seven-year up-or-out provision for tenure; a tenure track for faculty members focused on teaching; a nontenure track that affords a meaningful role in shared governance; interdisciplinary centers with authority to be the locus of tenure; broader definitions of scholarship and acceptable outlets and media to “publish” research; tenure for a defined period of time; and the option to earn salary premiums while forgoing tenure entirely. Fresh perspectives are likely to generate fresh ideas. Unless we ask, we’ll never know.
So, how might this “constitutional convention” work? There are several approaches that could produce both ideas and results. Aided by one or more national foundations, an alliance of national organizations or disciplinary associations could solicit suggestions online from early-career faculty members, cull the best, and invite the proponents to a two- to three-day summit to draft new rules on a blank slate. Or a foundation could underwrite a particular conference or consortium to convene a representative cross section of early-career faculty members for the same purpose, with sizable incentives offered to institutions that actually adopted some of the proposed reforms.
Academe cannot continue with business as usual. In fact, inertia has produced, almost indiscernibly, a new status quo where tenured and tenure-track faculty members are an endangered species. Will traditionalists, attached to outdated assumptions and detached from market realities, ensure that tenure dies a slow death, or will the academy enable the next generation of scholars to write new rules that accommodate new values and new times? It’s time to reconvene, only this time the attendees should be the guardians of the future, not the custodians of the past.
