This Guy Got Tenure. You Probably Won’t.

One of three very bad things is poised to happen to the institution of tenure.

In a worst-case scenario, it perishes in a quarter-century. Some will claim it died of natural causes. Others will argue that the professoriate’s suicidal tendencies were to blame. Still others will allege that tenure was waterboarded by neoliberals. When 2040 rolls around, we’ll all observe the centennial and passing of our constitution, the “1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure.” There will be a moment of silence, followed by a musical interlude and personal reminiscences.

A second possibility is that tenure endures exclusively in high-toned places. Only scholars employed by the wealthiest, the most powerful, and the most prestigious schools will be eligible for this distinction. U.S. News & World Report will publish a breathless annual survey of the top TGs (i.e., tenure-granting institutions). The list will read like a shimmering Nasdaq 100 of the most preposterously well-endowed seats of learning in America.

Yet the likeliest future for tenure in the liberal arts is that everything will stay the same — and somehow gradually get worse. Let’s think of this in terms of the Academic Misery Index. My metric refers to the percentage of doctorates in one field graduating in a given year who will never land a tenure-track job. If current trends continue, I’d estimate that the AMI will rise from something like 65 to 75 percent for the class of 2016 to maybe 85 to 90 percent in a few decades.

If my prediction is sound — and I’d love to be dead wrong, to issue a humbling retraction, to be dressed down by some quanty labor historian — then bear this formula in mind: 10/30/60. In 25 years, 10 percent or so of our Ph.D.s in the liberal arts will ride the tenure line. Thirty percent will hold full-time non-tenure-track positions — a category that has experienced a conspicuous growth spurt in recent years. The remainder will be adjuncts, exploited and expendable. Thus, our present dispensation of roughly 30/15/55 will strike some as the Good Old Days.

Under the new dispensation, a sinister division of professional labor will become the industry standard. The reasonably compensated elect (i.e., the tenured) will be responsible for research. The unreasonably compensated Contingent of the Damned will provide the teaching and mentoring of undergraduates.

None of this, of course, is what the guild-minded architects of the tenure system wanted. The aforementioned “1940 Statement” assumed that all “full-time instructors” at a given school would undergo a probationary period. Most scholars, it supposed, would get a crack at tenure. A college trustee, clad in banker’s stripes, will tell us that this surmise was absurd, the naïve conceit of a simple era. Yet the conceit had an undeniable integrity, a communal concern. It aspired to guarantee stable employment to the majority of scholars in the United States.

Now tenure is a refuge for a small minority. It has become an asylum for talented, hardworking individuals who are, above all, very lucky. To be hired to one of the few tenure-track positions in your field is like receiving a green card. To be promoted to associate or to full professor is akin to being granted citizenship in a liberal democracy. All unlucky others — graduate students, postdocs, contingent faculty, or those denied tenure — are stateless. A disturbingly high percentage of them are talented and hardworking as well.

Certain disciplines and fields might experience more bleakness than others. The dystopia described above ought to worry resistance fighters within the academy’s non-STEM cells, be they humanists or interpretive social scientists. How can they navigate a career path when tenure, the one fixed star in the academic constellation for over half a century, is imploding?

The course of study required to complete a doctorate in the humanities takes, on average, about 10 years. Along the way, one’s well-being is assailed like a lemon tree amid surging lava. The aggravations and indignities are well known. The graduate student accrues considerable debt. She or he will live in a garret and often consume ramen. There is an abundance of physical and mental isolation. None of which conduces to spending time with friends, family, and persons of interest. The loneliness, the expense, the dreary decade — is it any surprise that a recent study at Berkeley found that 64 percent of its trainees in the humanities “reached the threshold considered depressed”?

Of those who embark on the long, slow transoceanic journey to the Ph.D., only half arrive at their final destination. Doctorate in hand, they’ll then go whitewater rafting into the academic job market. Insofar as tenure-track positions are exceedingly difficult to procure, most will capsize. There does not seem to be a viable job market, but what Emory University’s Marc Bousquet once called a “‘job market’” — thereby employing the most meaningful shudder quotes in current research on American higher education.

This raises an important question: What the hell are today’s graduate students in the liberal arts thinking? Why do they expend a decade’s worth of priceless professional and personal capital when their return on investment is likely negligible? Couldn’t they have selected a vocation in which there is an actual need for their skills and talents? Don’t they understand basic math?

When I raise these objections with younger scholars, they always respond with the same flimsy justifications. First, they express unbounded love for their subject matter, be it 1970s African-American cinema, or Weimar-era fiction, or the philosophy of fill-in-the-blank. Then they reason thusly: “Very few scholars of my generation will ever be granted tenure. But who’s to say I won’t be one of them?” In other words, they like their odds!

I’d mock this rationale if it weren’t precisely what I told myself in the 1990s. True, it was a less pessimistic era: Back then the professoriate was experiencing what we thought was a passing virus, not a wheelchair visit to the lake’s edge during hospice care. But there is no denying that most of us who are tenured and under 50 years of age were no less cocksure than today’s graduate students.

This reminds me that any sage counsel that I, and those of my generation, wish to share with the next is: (1) unsolicited, (2) oh so much humble-bragging, and (3) likely greeted with a raised, tremulous middle finger. Does the lottery winner subsequently write a how-to book? Noncontingent people have no business dispensing life lessons to contingent people, especially with a “job market” so full of contingencies.

Which is why Stephen Walt’s self-help column, “How to Get Tenure,” strikes me as particularly misguided. Published in Foreign Policy as what its author calls a “public service,” the article offers tips for the tiny minority of young doctorates that makes it on to the tenure track at R1s.

“Tenure’s purpose,” the Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor observes, is to permit scholars to “write or say controversial things without worrying that doing so might cost them their jobs.” As regards the subject of tenure, however, Walt has nothing controversial to say. Who could possibly quibble with the claim that tenure committees “want to see evidence of scholarly momentum and an upward trajectory”? Can any one take issue with the assertion that tenure candidates “are judged primarily on the quality and impact of their research” (emphasis in original)?

One can almost hear Walt filing his nails as he urges junior faculty to write “books and articles that present new ideas or new evidence that changes how we think about key topics in the field” (emphasis in original). The same holds true for Walt’s rule No. 3: “You need to do important research” (emphasis in original). “If you write books and articles that future students have to read in order to be considered literate or knowledgeable,” counsels Walt, “you are by definition helping to shape the field.”

Yet it’s Walt’s point No. 7 that exposes some of the contradictions not only of his advice but of the tenure system whose presuppositions he never questions. “Being a good teacher,” he opines, “is its own reward, and people who really hate time in the classroom and who suck at it probably ought to be in another line of work anyway” (emphasis mine). The author never reconciles an inconsistency. As regards teaching, how could a junior scholar, changing how we think, doing important research, shaping the field, accelerating in an upward trajectory, pounding out books and articles, not suck at it?

Given the preternatural research feats Walt demands from rookies, how are they ever supposed to focus on their students? Prepare their lectures? Stay abreast of developments in pedagogy? Cognizant of the kill-or-be-killed relation that exists between research and teaching at R1s, Walt instructs: “And above all: Don’t let the desire to teach well become a convenient excuse for not doing one’s own research.” I guess Walt really does believe that being a good teacher is its own reward.

“How to Get Tenure” ends on a discordant note, Walt’s own raised middle finger to an entire generation of scholars. Reflecting on the vagaries of academic hiring, Walt proffers recommendation No. 10: “Departments are sometimes irrational; the system rarely is.” He then clarifies: “What I’m suggesting is that I know of hardly any accomplished scholars whose virtues were not eventually recognized and who didn’t end up in a pretty good position, even if it wasn’t their first choice.”

Other than its staggering lack of empathy, what is astonishing about Walt’s thought is how at peace it is with the status quo. But the status quo, as far as I can tell, is not serving nearly three-quarters of American scholars particularly well. And they aren’t the only ones.

The AAUP’s aforementioned “1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure” has done right by countless scholars. For three-quarters of a century, its precepts have granted these professors a combination of perks that rarely coincide in any other vocation. To wit, job security, reasonable income, and considerable expressive liberty. If American institutions of higher education are — still! — the world’s envy, then surely the AAUP deserves its share of the praise.

Shrewd and humane, the AAUP’s manifesto was by no means omniscient. The document earnestly believed that its protocols would benefit students by benefiting professors. “Academic freedom in its teaching aspect,” it reasoned, “is fundamental for the protection of the rights of the teacher in teaching and of the student to freedom in learning.” The flow-charty logic was compelling: Secure lifetime employment for a scholar (i.e., tenure) guarantees “the free search for truth and its free exposition,” which results in direct educational advantages for undergraduates. Makes sense to me.

The hitch is that the text says nothing about what it takes to achieve tenure. No criteria whatsoever detail what a scholar needs to accomplish during the probationary period that “should not exceed seven years.” It’s a silence so complete, profound, and crystalline that contemporary readers rarely recognize its import. It was thus Time, not the “1940 Statement,” that would tell us what it takes to achieve tenure. And Time’s answer would sever the essential link between professors and their students envisioned by the AAUP.

Little does the “1940 Statement” know that within a few decades tenure decisions will hinge mostly on the quality and/or quantity of one’s published research. Nor does it know that a scholar’s record of pedagogy will typically play a nugatory role in the promotion process. For whatever reasons, the logic of tenure did not evolve in a manner that rewarded the teaching of undergraduates. Which is unfortunate, because it just so happens that the primary purpose of most institutions of higher education is the teaching of undergraduates!

Were they alive today, the authors of the statement would be gobsmacked by many developments. Cellphones would probably blow their minds. They’d be disturbed, as am I, by the unchecked proliferation of a cappella singing groups on campuses across America. Yet nothing would puzzle them more than this: Nowadays the ideal tenured professor is a researcher, not a teacher (there used to be a debate about this, but now the assumption is unquestioned). Tenure has become increasingly disarticulated from the students to whom it was once theoretically linked. For tenure’s midcentury architects, however, a professor was a creature who taught. It’s not a coincidence that derivations of the word “teach” appear no less than 21 times in the 796-word constitution of 1940.

Our tenure system, I argued above, does not really serve the interests of most scholars. My strict constructionist reading of the 1940 Statement now leads me to doubt the benefits it provides students. We may indeed be bottoming out toward 10/30/60. By the time we get there, the talented tenth will be completely estranged from anyone seeking a bachelor’s degree.

These are the gloomy givens that compel me to offer my own counsel to young scholars. My advice is, as noted above, unwelcome. Too, it is, admittedly, bad advice; counsel retrieved with yellow latex gloves from the compost heap of my daily insights and inspirations. Then again, when things are falling apart, counterintuitive wisdom always has a certain luster, a credibility born of despair.

So, to the novice liberal artists of the nation I proclaim: Cultivate your teaching skills and research skills in equal measure! Channel your inner “1940 Statement.” Envision the professor you will one day become as an expert and an educator. Don a fedora. Wear your victory rolls. Focus on the classroom as you blast the Mills Brothers’ “You Always Hurt the One You Love” from the phonograph.

I offer this (undoubtedly awful) instruction for reasons that are pragmatic, moral, and pragmatic in a moral sense. As for pure pragmatism, the peculiar truth is that the one broadly marketable skill a humanist might acquire in graduate school is the ability to teach. American colleges and universities need teachers — they have to stick someone in front of all those undergraduates. Meanwhile, there are many high schools that are eager to employ someone with a doctorate, certification, and an ability to help students learn.

A free spirit who takes my recommendations to heart would reframe what the graduate-school experience is all about. She or he would view it as a chance to develop an area of specialization and skills in the lecture hall. This means the prospective student might select doctoral programs in this light: Where will I find the best opportunities to train for the teaching jobs that await me?

The free spirit would pose a slew of subsidiary questions: Does this school have a coherent approach to integrating scholarship with pedagogy? Is there a teaching center on campus? Is it staffed by serious people or by the sad saps that the provost did not know what else to do with? Will I be paired with a mentor who can help me improve my performance in the classroom? Is there any way to receive teaching certification en route to the doctorate? Does the school have a record of placing people in colleges and, less ideally, in high schools?

This last bit about high school brings us to the moral dimensions of my terrible exhortation. Teaching well and conscientiously, on any level, is a noble, even holy, act. There is no dishonor in being an educator. For those who enter academe with the hope of making the world a better place, well, here’s your chance! Truth be told, accepting a high-school teaching position (in a public school at least) will likely make more financial sense than taking one as a contingent faculty member. The secondary institutions offer salaries, benefits, and security that the postsecondary ones can’t match.

For those who don’t want to work at a high school, there are countless teaching opportunities in higher education. The problem is that for the nontenured the opportunities are awful. The posts are temporary, the salaries are risible, the benefits nonexistent, and the level of institutional disrespect accorded scholars with advanced degrees unconscionable. It is an outrage and a moral failure; rectifying this problem is the biggest challenge that confronts us as a guild.

For decades, the AAUP has tirelessly and bravely sought to remedy this problem, as have numerous learned societies and advocacy groups. Tragically, nothing seems capable of staving off the political, economic, and even cultural factors arrayed against us. Too, the fact that there is no “us” — we are incapable of concerted group action — is not helpful. In the meantime, we must address the aforementioned outrage. And if it means radically rethinking or even sunsetting our ailing tenure system for the greater collective good of scholars and students, so be it.

Which brings me to the pragmatically moral application of my exhortation. I’ve discussed the wall of separation that has steadily arisen between professors and undergraduates over the past half-century. By this I mean a debilitating apathy, a mutually shared lack of interest, a sense that the former and the latter have little in common. Surely a sophomore nowadays appreciates a professor or two, but not the professoriate in general. Similarly, many scholars have a student whom they treasure, but not students in the abstract sense.

How the wall got there is complicated. The usual macro-culprits (e.g., greed, political shortsightedness, national anti-intellectualism) played their part. Yet the wall’s presence is not unrelated to the factors discussed above; placing such a premium on research has estranged us from our students. God bless these kids, but they sure do have the irritating habit of standing between us and our next peer-reviewed “work product.”

My sense is that at some period in American history there was no such barrier. On most campuses, I think, the professors were, in fact, teachers. No one disputed that what was bad for them was also bad for the students. When a political regime, college president, or trustee threatened one column, the other felt its interests were also under attack. This outcome still prevails in many European countries. There, cuts to higher education catapult both students and scholars into the street. The ensuing protests often descend into total pandemonium replete with water cannons and hairy young men chucking water bottles.

So I save my worst advice for last. If we want our vocation to persevere, we had better serve our students, first and foremost. Morally, for humanists at least, it’s the right thing to do and true to our traditions. Pragmatically, it’s the only thing left to do. We need allies. We need an ethical justification for our very existence. We need to be forced to recalibrate the balance between research and teaching. We need to show that students are our work product. How tenure fits into all of this is now an open question.

Jacques Berlinerblau directs the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University. His forthcoming book, Professed and Confessed, will be published by Melville House in 2017. He wishes to thank Joshua Shinbrot and Tiana Baheri for their editorial and research assistance.