Outside of higher education, tenure is a four-letter word. Academe is the only profession in which employees can hope for such thorough protection from termination. As such, tenure is a source of irritation for politicians like State Rep. Rick Brattin, a Missouri Republican, who in January 2017 introduced a bill to eliminate the practice at Missouri State and nullify the protected status of already-tenured professors. As he put it, “In the academic world, you can get away with literally anything and taxpayers are paying their salaries — not to mention students being burdened with millions and millions and millions of dollars of debt.”
Such right-wing attacks on tenure are legion, so it might seem mean-spirited to pile on an already-beleaguered institution. But in the current period of extreme contraction — especially in the humanities — tenure raises serious concerns quite different from those of its conservative detractors. Tenure promotes unjust labor relations; discourages risky and innovative thinking during scholars’ most productive years; and intensifies the tendency of faculty to reproduce themselves, not only by area and interest, but also by gender, race, and class.
The tenure system is particularly vulnerable to unconscious bias.
Tenure was practiced de facto since the mid-19th century, and in the early 1900s top American universities and eventually the American Association of University Professors articulated the principles behind it. While the freedom to pursue truth was the institutional reason for the development of tenure, the job security that it affords has always been a driver for young academics to endure the gantlet required to attain it.
Jump to the present: College faculties have grown, but the number of tenured positions has plateaued or, in many cases, dwindled. In 1970 less than a third of college professors were part time; in 2011, 50 percent were, while another 20 percent held non-tenure-track titles such as lecturer.
The rewards of tenure might strike observers outside of academia as unfair, but those observers are usually unfamiliar with the uniquely punitive consequences of failing to attain it. Failure to achieve tenure does not mean that one simply continues working without special protections. Most contracts stipulate that, without tenure, a professor will be terminated at the end of the seventh year of employment.
At a few elite universities, tenure is rarely if ever given. Junior faculty are expected to teach and research for a set term and then go on the job market in the full expectation that they will not be tenured. I once heard an assistant professor at Stanford report that a dean had warned junior faculty that unless they are among “the top one or two” researchers in their field, they should prepare to move on. What other profession tells its new employees to expect to be fired, not if they fail to do their job, but if they fail to be the very best in the world at their job?
The mechanics of granting tenure vary from institution to institution, but the basic structure is similar: A faculty committee including members from outside the candidate’s field considers a thorough dossier composed of statements by the candidate, samples of research and teaching, and external letters of assessment from experts in her field. At Hopkins, where I teach, that committee is called the academic council, and it consists of 12 full professors elected from arts and sciences and engineering. Only a tiny minority of council members are from any given field, but the whole council votes on every case. Naturally, council members from distant disciplines tend to grant a great deal of authority to the one or two members who are closest in field to the candidate.
As a chair and vice dean, I have seen up close how such a structure can lead to grossly unjust decisions. Brilliant young scholars lose their jobs or are separated from their families in order to stay employed elsewhere; sometimes, marriages break up. Less frequently, I have seen the opposite happen: the conferral of tenure — a largely irrevocable decision — on faculty who abuse the privilege by ceasing to do any research and devoting themselves instead to terrorizing the untenured.
The standards for granting tenure can be vague to the point of meaninglessness. A single professor on a powerful committee can point to a line here or there in an external letter of assessment and torpedo a junior scholar’s career. Under pressure to show that tenure is a rigorous process, administrations have little incentive to challenge negative committee decisions.
The perils of tenure review cause young scholars to hew to the tried and true. Knowing that a single raised eyebrow in a single letter could derail a strong case, untenured professors have every reason to keep their research as focused as possible on the most narrowly defined set of questions and to avoid upsetting those whose judgments could be their undoing. This fear of treading into uncertain territory can increase disciplinary insularity and encourage trivial scholarship.
The inherent conservatism of the tenure system is particularly vulnerable to unconscious bias. Despite record numbers of women and minorities entering certain disciplines, white men continue to be overrepresented on college faculties. Given that the decision of whom to hire and grant tenure to lies with senior faculty, it’s easy to see how nonacademic criteria, like “fit,” could end up weighing against assistant professors whose race, gender, or class diverge from the historical norm in a field. While it is difficult to prove bias in specific cases, studies have shown persistent gender and race discrepancies in the granting of tenure. Stephen Jordan, who retired last year as president of Metropolitan State University of Denver, instituted a reform of the tenure process when an analysis revealed that black and Hispanic professors were being tenured at rates startlingly below that of white faculty. The sociologist Kate Weisshaar has shown a persistent gender gap in the granting of tenure even in fields with high representation of women, like English.
In two of the most egregious cases I have witnessed, failed tenure candidates were members of minority groups whose work dealt explicitly with questions of marginalization. Comments I was privy to led me to believe that some faculty tended to discount the work in large part because of its perceived “political” focus. How often do well-meaning committees, charged with upholding the academic quality of their school’s faculty, allow the prejudices of established representatives of a discipline to subtly maintain the status quo — not only of knowledge production, but of the demographic makeup of the academy?
If we want to retain tenure’s vital mission, we need to ensure its fairness. We need to abolish those tenure review practices that encourage the hoarding of privilege and the abuse of the powerless. One way to do this would be to reform how assistant professors are hired and how departments are governed. Rather than have a separate, do-or-die tenure track, lecturers and assistant professors could both be hired on renewable contracts with the understanding that renewal rests on periodic and positive evaluations of teaching, research, or both. Tenure and a research-enabling teaching load would be earned by those who demonstrate sufficient quality and productivity of research as measured by a committee of external, arms-length readers. Likewise, a period of research inactivity would trigger a return to a more teaching-intensive status, without thereby removing the protections of tenure. Finally, the tendency of departments to be governed exclusively by tenured professors should end; teaching and research are equal partners in our universities’ missions and should be respected as such.
Safeguarding intellectual freedom is an indispensable goal, especially today. But in an age when intellectuals are increasingly demonized and when knowledge and truth themselves are under fire, we need to ask whether processes that give cover for arbitrary and politically motivated personnel decisions, reproduce arcane power structures, reinforce disciplinary insularity, and undermine our best attempts at diversifying the academy are really fulfilling the sacred mission of protecting truth from the contagion of power.
William Egginton is a professor in the humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Splintering of the American Mind, just out from Bloomsbury.