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Tracking
Tenure in the '90s
At
many institutions of higher learning, the ancient tradition of permanent
employment for senior faculty is under new scrutiny. At Yale, the
majority view is that, while the system may have its flaws, the
debate actually reconfirms tenure's virtues.
by
Jennifer Kaylin
December 1994
Jennifer
Kaylin is a freelance writer whose work regularly appears in the Yale Alumni Magazine.
In this
era of fiscal austerity, colleges and universities are taking the budgetary knife to virtually
everything from library hours and dining hall access to athletic
programs and health benefits. But one component of academic life
has remained all but immune to cost-cutting: the institution of
tenure, or the granting of lifetime employment to senior faculty
members.
Based on the belief
that qualified academics should be free from political reprisals
and the vagaries of intellectual fashion, tenure has been an article
of faith at American universities for more than a century. But now
that economic pressures and downsizing throughout institutional
America have eliminated any semblance of job security for most of
the work force, even tenure is coming under scrutiny. The Chronicle
of Higher Education regularly publishes pieces examining the
merits and demerits of the system (a recent Chronicle cartoon showed
a car whose rear bumper was embellished with a sticker reading,
"Just say 'no' to tenure"), and in October the Wall
Street Journal ran a special section on higher education that
included an article whose headline nicely summed up the matter:
"Tenure: Many Will Decry It, Few Deny It."
At Yale, the number
of people publicly decrying the practice remains remarkably low,
and the University seems nowhere near ready to join the small number
of institutions that deny it. However, senior faculty members say
that informal discussions of the issue are increasingly common,
and that the national debate has focused attention not only on the
practice in general, but on Yale's own version of it.
At the
heart of the discussions over tenure lies
the question whether it is fair for any segment of the population
to enjoy a guaranteed job for life while everyone else lives with
the pressure of regular evaluations and the fear of layoffs. A related
question is whether, when the cost of higher education is steadily
rising, educational institutions can long afford to offer the privileges
that almost always accompany tenure, such as substantial salaries
(an average of $80,000 at Yale), sabbaticals (every seven years),
and minimal accountability. A new federal law prohibiting mandatory
retirement on the basis of age has only strengthened the argument
for a fundamental reexamination of the practice. As one senior Yale
professor who was forced to retire at 70, just before the ban went
into effect, put it, "Now I'll have to watch my idiot colleagues
go on forever!"
"I loathe and despise
tenure," says Osborne Elliott, former dean of the Columbia
University Graduate School of Journalism and a former member of
Harvard's Board of Overseers. "It institutionalizes mediocrity,
brutalizes the junior faculty, and ties the hands of the administration."
Elliott, who retired from the Columbia administration in 1986 as
a full professor with tenure, is also critical of the process by
which tenure is granted, which he calls "unpredictable, arbitrary,
and extremely political." Tenure, he says flatly, "is
a terrible institution that ought to be abolished."
Another prominent individual
who is concerned about the negative aspects of tenure is Connecticut's
commissioner of higher education, Andrew De Rocco. "When you
consider that human capital is always the largest single cost a
university faces, and that every tenure decision is a multi-million-dollar
investment that can last 25 years or more, it's legitimate to ask
whether tenure still makes sense," he says. "I personally
am disinclined to say it ought to be preserved at all costs."
The dialogue
reached a new level last June,
when Bennington College announced that in the face of rising costs
and a shrinking student body, it was firing almost a third of its
faculty, eliminating its version of tenure, and would cut tuition
by 10 percent over the next five years. Although Bennington is a
small school and has a reputation for going against the educational
grain, its dramatic restructuring earned it a cover story in the
New York Times Sunday magazine entitled "Reality Bites."
Bennington's director of communications, Andrea Diehl, says the
pressures her institution is facing are hardly atypical. "I
don't care if it's Bennington or someplace else," she says.
"With what's going on today, a situation where people are guaranteed
a job for life is just not justifiable anymore."
There is "a strong
anti-tenure wind blowing through the halls of academe these days,"
concedes Walter Metzger, a retired Columbia history professor and
tenure expert who is a strong supporter of the existing system.
"And if Bennington can get away with what they did, then you're
going to see this wind blowing much more strongly at other institutions."
Tenure foes argue that
the system encourages sloth, arrogance, and aloofness on the part
of senior faculty, saddles schools with "dead wood" scholars
who are no longer productive, and clogs departments trying to rejuvenate
their faculties with energetic young scholars who are potential
leaders in their fields. "In a place where growth and change
is encouraged, does it make sense to have people who are there forever?"
asks Frances Halsbrand, former dean of the Pratt Institute's School
of Architecture. "You have to question whether tenure offers
an opportunity to develop creatively, or simply lifetime health
insurance."
Advocates of the tenure
system counter such arguments with examples of research that might
not have been undertaken were it not for a policy that guarantees
continued employment over time. At Yale, retired psychology professor
Irvin Child's decade-long search for evidence of extra-sensory perception
is often cited. "He didn't find much, but I'm glad he looked,
and I question whether he would have kept his job if he hadn't had
tenure," says Peter Salovey, a tenured associate professor
in the psychology department. Other frequently mentioned examples
include John Boswell's research into the history of homosexuality,
which he began at a time when hostility toward homosexuality was
widespread, and biology professor Alvin Novick's community work
with AIDS patients, which could have been challenged on the grounds
that it was only marginally related to biology. Still others are
psychology professor William McGuire's unusual study of left- and
right-handedness, and political science professor Edward Tufte's
research on the artful display of data on a computer screen, work
that surely stretches the definition of political science.
"Tenure gives people
the freedom to range over the full intellectual spectrum,"
says John Goldin, director of Yale's Office of Institutional Research.
"Academic freedom is more than just a cliche,"
adds Salovey. "Already, there are enormous constraints on what
someone can choose as a research topic: What's fundable? What's
publishable? Tenure says: Pursue your passions, and you'll be safe,
even if your work is unpopular, out of the mainstream, or fails
to produce results over a short span of time."
Yale College dean Richard
Brodhead, who also serves as the Bird White Housom Professor of
English, says that questioning the viability of tenure "is
like asking whether parenthood has outlived its usefulness."
It is essential, he says, to "protect scholars from a balance-sheet
type of thinking," as well as "transitory swings in popularity."
He cites as an example the current curricular trend known as multiculturalism.
"Without tenure, teachers of the Western canon could be laid
off," he argues. Similarly, he says, "If you take the
Western tradition as an article of faith, might those who teach
an alternative lose their jobs?"
Tenure's
promise of job security
also serves the important function of enticing people to forego
far more lucrative professions in the private sector in favor of
a scholar's life. "It is the backbone of higher education,"
says John Hoy, director of the New England Board of Higher Education.
"It is that anchor to windward which permits men and women
to ply an academic career, even though they realize what the salary
ceiling will be."
Finally, defenders of
tenure argue that the current sentiments against the system represent
a short-sighted, anti-intellectual stance that ignores the subtleties
of how a university operates. "Tenure is one of the best systems
ever devised for quality control," says Walter Metzger. What
critics fail to understand, he argues, is that in an academic environment,
the fear of job loss is superfluous. "Salary raises, the corner
office, invitations to review work in scholarly journals, funding
for sabbaticals-there are lots of different carrots and sticks besides
the fear of losing your job," he says. "And as a tenured
professor, the penalties for non-effort can be enormous." Moreover,
the honor of receiving tenure serves as a safeguard against lethargy
for many professors. "It's a privilege to be given tenure,"
says Salovey, "and implicit in that is a moral obligation to
be as creative as possible."
Much
of the debate over tenure
goes forward in ignorance of its sources, which date back to medieval
Europe. At that time, according to Metzger, universities were run
by consortiums of scholars, much as a group of partners governs
a law firm today. When a new scholar was accepted into the group,
the appointment was made for life. Tenure first surfaced in the
United States at Harvard, in the late 19th century. It came about
when administrators sought to upgrade their faculty beyond the covey
of inexperienced tutors who were using the university as a way station
between divinity school and the pulpit. In an effort to entice a
distinguished mathematics professor and a divinity scholar to relocate
from Europe to Massachusetts, Harvard offered both men positions
for life, rather than for the customary term of three years.
From those simple beginnings,
tenure has become a sacrosanct yet somewhat inscrutable privilege
of academic life. Different universities administer it in different
ways, and the exact methods by which tenure operates remain somewhat
mysterious. In 1965, Yale's provost, Charles H. Taylor Jr., attempted
to explain the practice. "There are not official university
documents defining the privileges of tenure," he wrote. "Fundamentally,
tenure guarantees a professor the intellectual freedom to pursue
his own vision of the truth. Having tenure, a faculty member need
not fear for his security if his views are not pleasing to his colleagues
or the administration."
President Kingman Brewster
elaborated in 1972: "The policy of granting tenure must be
made as though it were virtually a guarantee of appointment until
retirement, not as though it were a privilege easily subject to
qualification or revocation. Even in extreme circumstances, there
is a deep reluctance to compromise the expectations of tenure. For
both human and institutional reasons, it is the practice to ride
it out even in cases where performance has fallen way below reasonable
expectations."
Most
colleges and universities have what is known as a "tenure track,"
which means that a junior professor who is on the track can assume
that if he or she performs well for five years or so, tenure will
automatically be granted. At Yale, where a "slot" system
is used, no such assumptions apply. When a tenured position opens
up, the widest possible net is cast to seek out the best candidate.
That means junior faculty members who are interested in the job
must compete not just with each other, but with every eligible scholar
from anywhere in the world who also wants the position. Although
the intent of this approach-to ensure that the best person is hired
for every opening-is laudable, slotting only adds to the overall
controversy surrounding tenure.
"There's a real
perception that no one from the junior faculty ever gets tenure
at Yale, which can serve as a disincentive to get involved in the
life of a community that most likely will reject you down the road,"
says Richard Gerrig, a former junior professor in the Yale psychology
department who is now a tenured professor at the State University
of New York at Stony Brook. Gerrig acknowledges that turnover among
junior faculty allows the teaching staff to renew itself with young,
motivated scholars, but he says that many junior faculty see Yale
merely as a transitory experience.
As an example, Gerrig
recalls an incident that he feels illustrates the revolving-door
nature of junior faculty life at Yale. When he was a Yale undergraduate,
he developed a close working relationship with a junior faculty
member. Several years later, when he was offered a junior faculty
post at Yale himself, he received a telephone call from his former
teacher, who had moved on to another university. "Congratulations,"
she said. "You just got my old job!"
Despite
the commonly held belief that "nobody gets tenure at Yale,"
Goldin says that,
among the 340 tenured members of the faculty of arts and sciences
in the 1993-94 academic year, 62 percent got there via internal
promotions, and 22 percent of assistant professors appointed in
1981, 1982, and 1983 received tenured appointments. "There's
a real gap between perception and reality," he says. "In
the past it may have been true that it was nearly impossible to
get promoted from within, but it's gotten much better."
Brodhead also refutes
the claim that junior faculty are reluctant to invest in the life
of the University, and says that although they may not be able to
count on tenure, they enjoy many other advantages including "excellent
students, generous leave policies, stimulating colleagues, and a
good track record for landing jobs elsewhere." Still, Yale's
practice of deferring tenure decisions for up to ten years (rather
than five, as most other institutions do) continues to draw the
ire of many junior faculty. "It's somewhat exploitive,"
says Charles Brown, another former junior faculty member, who is
now an associate biology professor at the University of Tulsa. "I
don't know if that's a conscious strategy, but it ends up that way
because of the pressures to achieve tenure. There's a real tendency
to hang on, figuring, 'Maybe if I just produce a few more publications,
it might make the difference.' "
The specifics
of granting tenure to any particular candidate are always confidential,
but the overall process is fairly consistent. To be awarded the
privilege at Yale, a candidate must first survive two rounds of
letters submitted by distinguished scholars in his or her field.
Several more hurdles, including a vote by the tenured faculty, the
Tenured Appointments Committee, and the Yale Corporation, must then
be cleared before tenure is granted. Although some say it is a political
process that can hinge more on whom you know than what you know,
others stress that Yale has incorporated checks and balances to
make the system as apolitical as possible.
Emily Nelson '95, a
former editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News, says there
is a feeling among undergraduates that the process puts too much
emphasis on research and not enough on teaching. (A recent News
editorial lamenting the loss of two popular professors was entitled,"Yale
Must Rework Tenure Selection.") "Teaching is what we're
most affected by," Nelson says. "If a professor publishes
a book, that's great, but that doesn't necessarily make him a good
lecturer." However, she says that the other commonly held criticism
of tenure-that it begets inaccessible superstars who rarely teach
and are forever on leave-is not a significant problem at Yale. This,
says Brodhead, is because teaching loads are monitored by the department
heads. "The amount of teaching varies from department to department,"
he says, "but in general, it's not much different from the
teaching load of the junior faculty. There used to be a significant
difference, but it's been equalized."
Although
the rumblings of discontent over tenure
appear to be growing louder beyond Yale's precincts than within
them, even detractors of the system agree that the basic tenet on
which it was founded-the preservation of academic freedom-should
not be sacrificed. Therefore, suggestions for what to "do"
about tenure tend to be cautious and freighted with safeguards.
One of the more popular recommendations calls for replacing tenure
with long-term contracts providing for periodic reviews after five
or ten years. But President Brewster addressed that issue two decades
ago when he wrote, "I have not been able to devise, nor have
I heard of, any regime of periodic review with the sanction of dismissal
which would not have disastrous effect. It would both dampen the
willingness to take long-term intellectual risk and inhibit, if
not corrupt, the free and spirited exchanges upon which the vitality
of a community of scholars depends."
At Yale, another frequently
mentioned proposal is the implementation of more of a "farm
system," so that a larger number of junior faculty members
can look forward to being promoted from within.
Across the country,
colleges and universities have recently had to contend with two
new factors in the tenure equation. The first is how to deal with
the new ban on mandatory retirement, which theoretically allows
tenured professors to teach indefinitely, despite what may be declining
skills and energy, and regardless of the blockage they may create
for younger-and less expensive-scholars. (The rule of thumb at Yale
is that a tenured position costs the University twice what a junior
faculty slot does.) The second is the increasing tendency of candidates
for tenured positions at some institutions to claim discrimination
and sue should the privilege be denied.
Some universities are
responding to those concerns by circumventing the tenure question
altogether. Through such means as extending the probationary period
for junior faculty and increasing the use of visiting lecturers,
part-time instructors, and clinical professors (techniques that
John Goldin says Yale has not made significant use of), they are
simply awarding tenure to fewer professors. But while these measures
may help hold down the high costs associated with tenure, critics
say they threaten to undermine one of the fundamental features of
academic life. Rather than risk the outcry a formal reevaluation
of tenure would surely generate, these institutions are opting for
steps that may serve gradually to erode the practice. The way things
are headed, it may well be that tenure in the future will still
be regarded as an essential element of higher education, but will
become an even more coveted—and elusive—prize than it already
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