Ending Tenure: It’s Time

Perhaps the greatest attraction of teaching at a college or university is the possibility of obtaining tenure. What is tenure? For all intents and purposes, tenure means lifetime job security for those few faculty members who publish extensively, and have networked successfully enough, to gain sufficient votes from other tenured faculty and administrators. Notice I did not mention teaching evaluations – they are part of the process, but in practice, they rarely match the importance of a professor’s publishing record.

Professors seeking tenure (note: they all want it) will do virtually anything to obtain tenure, because once it is obtained they become untouchable. It is extraordinarily difficult to fire tenured faculty, and the pressures of publishing and the importance of teaching (especially undergraduates) diminishes considerably.

And that’s really the problem.

College or university professors are like everyone else, they operate under a set of incentives that if channeled appropriately can lead to dramatic gains/setbacks for students both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. A professor who is seeking tenure usually spends extraordinary amounts of time and energy to publish, to present their papers at seminars and colloquia, and to engage in seemingly endless networking with important faculty at their campuses to make the right connections. Unfortunately, this leads to the phenomenon known as “Publish or Perish.” There are countless cases around the country of professors who have received sterling teaching evaluations, but have been roundly rejected by their faculty for tenure because they did not publish sufficiently to an academic audience.

I don’t know about you, but I’m the parent of two college-bound children, and I think the notion of tenure is ridiculous. I don’t really have any desire to spend tens of thousands of dollars to have my children attend schools that prioritize publishing over teaching quality. Many colleges and universities, of course, will argue that they can have their cake and eat it too. They will claim that there is no trade-off between faculty who publish extensively and the quality of classroom teaching. In fact, they will argue – quite reasonably – that engaging in research and publishing actually helps to enhance the quality of teaching in the classroom. Fair enough.

However, after talking to literally hundreds of students over the years and having attended prestigious colleges and universities in United States, I can tell you that there is a trade-off. When faculty aspiring for tenure prioritize conferences, colloquia, and research, often for obscure journals which have a very limited readership, that is time that they are not spending on teaching quality. It usually means outdated syllabi, limited office hours, or minimal contributions to campus clubs and organizations. I’ve also found, especially as a graduate student, that many tenured faculty spent so much time off campus attending international conferences, testifying before Congress, or advising the government of Burkina Faso, that I often wondered why they bothered to have an office on campus.

I think it’s time to explore eradicating tenure from college campuses. I don’t see why anyone is entitled to what amounts to lifetime job security just because a person happens to publish extensively. Don’t get me wrong – I want extraordinary faculty to have long and illustrious careers at their colleges and universities. I also believe strongly, coming from a union family, that firing faculty should be an extraordinarily rare event only justified under unusual circumstances.

However, the system of rewards and penalties that we have put in place in higher education seems to have forgotten one slightly important actor in all this: the student.