When he was first offered a position at Florida Gulf Coast University, in 1997, Michael McDonald was hesitant. The opportunity to get involved with a new institution was enticing, he says, but everything he knew about higher education told him to avoid a place where tenure would never be offered.
“The way the profession was presented to us as students was that you shouldn’t accept a position that isn’t tenure-granting,” says McDonald, now a professor of anthropology and president of the Faculty Senate. Florida Gulf Coast was his first job after earning a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh, but he almost didn’t take the offer. With tenure comes respect and prestige, he says; without it, “you risk your professional credibility.”
As colleges cope with tight budgets and pressure from state legislators, the proportion of full-time faculty members who are not on the tenure track has grown. Non-tenure-track appointments grew from 10 percent of all full-time faculty positions in 2008-9 to 27 percent in 2018-19 at the 870 institutions that participated in the American Association of University Professors’ Faculty Compensation Survey in both years.
Few institutions with established tenure systems have abandoned them altogether, but 56 percent of full-time and part-time faculty members at four-year public institutions and 66 percent of those at four-year private nonprofit institutions were not on the tenure track in 2017. Other sectors have steered clear of tenure, with only two-year public colleges having an appreciable number of tenured and tenure-track faculty members, at under 20 percent.
Florida Gulf Coast, a master’s institution whose first students enrolled in 1997, takes a different approach to faculty evaluation and retention. Aside from a few remaining professors who brought their tenure status with them when they transferred back then from the University of South Florida, no one on the faculty has tenure. Instead, professors get continuing three-year appointments. If a faculty member performs satisfactorily during a given year, his or her contract is renewed, and the three-year period restarts.
Greg Scholtz, director of the department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance at the American Association of University Professors, says that while multiyear contracts provide more stability than the one-year contracts that many adjuncts contend with, they still deny professors a “presupposition of competence.”
“The problem with any kind of term appointment is that you’re always on probation,” he says. “For the sake of society and the common good, faculty should be afforded more freedom and autonomy to pursue knowledge and truth and to serve society.”
There is a rift in academe between those who believe that tenure must be protected, to ensure colleges’ quality and reputation, and those who prefer that it fade away. Opponents of tenure associate it with high salaries and embarrassing statements by faculty members. Legislators in Missouri and Iowa have gained attention by introducing bills to abolish tenure, whether for new hires or all faculty members.
Faculty members worry about death by a thousand cuts as adjuncts are hired to replace experienced faculty members who move to other jobs or retire. Those cuts are already happening.
In spite of outside pressures, more than 2,000 two- and four-year colleges had tenure systems in 2017. Of those, more than 350 had one tenured or tenure-track faculty member for every 20 or fewer full-time-equivalent students in 2016-17. Liberal-arts institutions — like Williams, Harvey Mudd, Pomona, and Swarthmore Colleges — predominated among private nonprofit institutions that had the most tenured or tenure-track faculty members for full-time-equivalent enrollment. The public institutions that ranked highest on that measure were a mixture of medical and health-profession schools, and doctoral, master’s, and baccalaureate institutions.
The University of Alabama at Birmingham, a doctoral research institution, stood at No. 9 among public institutions on the list. Nearly 59 percent of its full-time faculty members are tenured or on the tenure track.
Jamey Worrell, an associate professor of accounting there, says none of the institution’s progress since it gained full autonomy a half-century ago would be possible without a strong commitment to tenure.
The academic freedom that comes with tenure “means you can tackle those interesting problems,” he says. “You can teach and talk about those difficult situations that are going on in our community or in our society right now.”
Earning tenure in 2014 brought Worrell peace of mind, he says. “I can do what’s right, without fear of reprisal.”
The sense of assurance allows scholars to take on projects they might normally avoid. Worrell quotes the expression, “Fail often to succeed often,” which he says is crucial to Birmingham’s track record for medical discoveries.
Faculty members are not alone in advocating for tenure, though they may be its main beneficiaries. Some campus chief executives openly support the system.
“We think tenure and tenure-track faculty are the most important component of what makes Harvey Mudd, Harvey Mudd,” says Maria Klawe, president of the institution, which is a member of the Claremont Colleges collective, in California. The college ranks No. 10 among four-year private nonprofit colleges for the low number of students it has per tenured or tenure-track faculty member.
In any given semester, Klawe says, about two-thirds of courses are being taught by tenured or tenure-track professors. The reason for the commitment is twofold, she says: to ensure strong faculty governance and to promote high-quality teaching.
At Harvey Mudd, she says, students are promised “better teaching than you’ve encountered your entire life.” They are invited to provide letters of support to faculty members seeking tenure. Klawe says the majority of adjuncts and visiting professors there enter the tenure track over time.
Kyle Grace, a rising junior studying computer science and economics at Harvey Mudd, says he never paid much attention to tenure. When choosing a college, he says, students like him pay more attention to the teaching quality and style of individual professors.
What students do notice, says Adrianna Kezar, co-director of the University of Southern California’s Delphi Project, which offers faculty support, is when their instructors don’t have time to mentor or offer advice, or when their favorite professors leave the campus altogether.
“That’s where the loss is for students,” Kezar says.
Other losses are not so easily detectable. Higher education’s shift away from tenure has proved harmful to student retention and graduation rates, according to studies cited in a report by the Delphi Project. Kezar says the working conditions of adjunct faculty members are associated with higher course loads and lower salaries, the consequences of which trickle down during instruction.
Scholtz adds that the burden is especially heavy for part-timers.
At Florida Gulf Coast, administrators think they have achieved stable employment for faculty members. “If you perform satisfactorily, then you always have a contract,” says James Llorens, the interim provost. “It always keeps faculty aware of their need to perform at a consistent level over the years.”
The contract system gave the university “flexibility” at first, as it developed undergraduate programs and sought to define itself, he says. Research is still valued, but forgoing tenure allowed the institution to focus on undergraduate teaching.
Florida Gulf Coast has had no trouble recruiting faculty members, Llorens says, even attracting them from tenured and tenure-track positions elsewhere. He believes they are drawn to the opportunity to focus on pedagogy and mentoring students.
Twenty-two years after he took the job, Michael McDonald, the anthropology professor, believes the system is “humane and forgiving,” providing job security while encouraging faculty members to work hard on teaching.
“We’ve got excellent teachers here, and that isn’t always the case at tenure-granting institutions, because they prioritize research,” he says.
On the other hand, many institutions and scholars still believe tenure is a vital factor in shaping an academic community. For the AAUP’s Scholtz, who is helping his own children decide where to attend college, the most reputable institutions are those with greater proportions of tenured faculty members.
“I believe they would receive a better education at an institution that valued tenure and learning enough to put most of its faculty on the tenure track,” he says. “It’s hard to hold a line on academic standards without tenure.”
Teghan Simonton is an intern at USA Today, working on the data-and-investigations team. She has also worked for Pittsburgh Magazine and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Follow her @teghan_simonton.
Ruth Hammond contributed data analysis for this article, which introduces the Profession section of Almanac 2019.
