Columns
The Trouble with Tenure
Apr 19, 2010
By Scott Cawelti
By Scott Cawelti
“Tenure,” the policy of offering academics a job for life, has come under attack since its very inception in 1940, when the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) published its “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure.”
The same complaints recur, ad infinitum:
(1) Academic tenure protects incompetents, a.k.a. “dead wood.”
(2) It removes incentives for continued faculty engagement in teaching and learning.
(3) It fosters arrogance among a group of elite untouchables.
Anyone who has attended college even for a short while has likely experienced professors who taught from ancient notes using even more ancient teaching strategies, and who seem proud of their attachment to the old days and ways. Chalk-dusted dinosaurs.
However foolish and out of touch they seem, they can’t be fired unless they commit some truly heinous act, or blather to the point of incoherence. Professorial
senility does occur. I know of two professors about whom students complained so much that the professors were politely asked to retire. If they had refused, they would have been let go.
So tenure does offer unique job security. But should it be abolished?
No. Without that high level of job security, faculty who publish unpopular research findings, who write outspoken critiques, or who outrage easily offended students may well get fired, ending their search for truth. Abolishing tenure will make that always-risky search even more risky.
As a writing professor I have always felt the need to write in public in order to practice my craft. Over the years those writings have occasionally offended either the public or my immediate administrative superiors. And at times readers warned that because I held beliefs with which they didn’t agree, I deserved oblivion, death, and unemployment.
As taxpayers, readers felt they had a direct say about my working at a state university. Without tenure, I may well have been fired. Almost as bad, I would never have written anything to displease anybody. Happily, that hasn’t happened. There’s something about freedom from getting fired (for publishing one’s ideas) that’s liberating.
During the fifties at the University of Northern Iowa, a beloved professor named Josef Fox required undergraduates to read and understand Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Due to the red scare hysteria, state legislators called for his job. Thanks to tenure, Fox continued teaching Marx in his humanities courses, and to my knowledge, nary a single UNI student converted to communism, ever. However, they did learn that Karl Marx’s Anti-capitalistic stance held a small connection to reality, hysteria be damned.
So it’s a balancing act. How can we throw out the bath water—incompetence in research and teaching—without throwing out the baby—academic freedom?
I would opt for keeping tenure, but add more incentives to keep up with new knowledge, technology, and teaching strategies. Currently the only incentive amounts to promotion after five or six years in rank, or a pitiful amount of “merit pay,” often barely enough to buy a bag of groceries a week.
I would add a major element to academic incentives: post-tenure review.
Professors should know that they can’t get by with shabby work forever. At some point, their profession needs to hold them to account, and that means a rigorous peer assessment of their engagement with teaching and research.
Lest anyone think that the AAUP would never support such a policy, in fact they do. Back in 1983, they offered guidelines for universities who wanted to start post-tenure review. Here is part of it:
“Post-tenure review must not be a reevaluation of tenure, nor may it be used to shift the burden of proof from an institution’s administration (to show cause for dismissal) to the individual faculty member (to show cause why he or she should be retained). Post-tenure review must be conducted according to standards that protect academic freedom and the quality of education.” (Post-Tenure Review Guidelines, AAUP, 1983)
In other words, it’s not a new idea, nor does it fly in the face of preserving academic freedom, according to very organization that codified tenure and academic freedom some seventy years ago.
I say it’s long overdue. There’s no trouble with tenure that can’t be solved with a well-considered post-tenure review policy.
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Scott Cawelti taught literature, film, and writing courses at the University of Northern Iowa from 1968 to 2008. He now lives in Cedar Falls as a freelance columnist, nonfiction writer, and singer/songwriter.
