Tenure Trouble

...These kinds of things happen...

...These statistics (from the U.S...

...Moody's warned the school that its "ongoing financial viability" reqiiired an entering class of around two hundred...

...The Minnesota victory "builds credibility with society that tenure is a very good thing," said university president Nils Hasselmo...

...Academic freedom —the justification for the tenure system— is not part of this reasoning...

...Those who dream of a world without tenure argue that nobody should have a guarantee of lifetime employment regardless of performance...

...Official Bennington spokespeople have recently declared that, among the faculty today, no one is complaining about the new system (is anyone surprised...

...The alternative to tenure that Chait has in mind is the limited-term contract, under which professors would be hired for three or five years, with no promise of renewal...

...and that there is a "new sense of excitement" among the faculty who remain (excitement about who will be fired next, perhaps...

...But those hoping for reappointment to a second limited-term contract also face pressures: they may need to say and do the things the boss likes, which can be more arbitrary and oppressive than the tenure review process...

...News & World Report to the Los Angeles Times to the Washington Post, powerful voices are asking that question, and answering that tenure in academia has become obsolete...

...Schuh told me what happened: "The president told the governor, 'I can't fire Ed, he's got tenure.'" "That's exactly the kind of thing tenure was designed to protect," Schuh said...

...News, for example, declared that tenure could be "avoided" only at brand new institutions where it never existed—like Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, which went into operation this fall, and offered most of its faculty multiyear contracts in place of tenure...

...faculty have a right to a hearing if they receive a disciplinary reprimand...

...Self-censorship would be the inevitable result of the end of tenure, more insidious and more damaging than the intermittent attempts of angry politicians or outraged parents or Republican regents to silence critical or dissenting voices...

...In 1940, half of American colleges and universities were appointing faculty on one-year contracts...

...So the Minnesota academic senate fought the regents with surprising skill, and when the faculty came close to forming an AAUP union—which would have been a first at a major research university—the regents backed down...

...Society needs to know that I'm not forced to lie as a scientist or as a researcher in order to keep my job...

...The tenure code approved in June by the faculty preserves tenure and provides for post-tenure review...

...Before the purge, total student enrollment was six hundred...

...At Minnesota and many other institutions, professors have tenure only in their departments...

...The university lawyers would respond that the dean had many good reasons for not renewing these appointments...

...Even those who have reached the top of the salary ladder are still required to be reviewed every five years...

...Opponents of tenure also point to the problem of deadwood...

...faculty who repeatedly are found not to be performing satisfactorily can be dismissed...

...Faculty feared that administrators could get rid of professors they regarded as troublemakers— or as too expensive—by abolishing the programs in which they taught, like medieval history or social psychology...

...It doesn't always work, he conceded...

...He is now dean of the Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, former deputy undersecretary of agriculture, author or coauthor of six books and a hundred scholarly articles...

...He recommends that all faculty members be given contracts that include "a legally enforceable right to academic freedom and due process...

...After Minnesota, opponents of tenure concede they will henceforth have to propose "less drastic measures...

...last year it was half that...

...He's been quoted all over the place during the last year...

...But without it, we're dead...

...Besides, the former professor's teaching wasn't that good—class enrollments hadn't been increasing at the required rate, and a couple of students complained that their grades were too low...

...Even among fulltime faculty who do not have tenure, only about 40 percent are eligible to apply, in comparison to 60 percent twenty years ago...

...A department with one tenured professor (the chairman) paying part-timers $1,500 per course can give you eighty courses per year for about $170,000...

...Chait's argument is simple...

...Of course tenure should not protect them, and usually it doesn't...

...professors dissatisfied with their review panel's ruling could appeal to "an external panel of trusted academic experts...

...And the former professor's research lacked sufficient distinction—his last book got some unenthusiastic reviews, and he publishes in DISSENT / Winter 1998 61 journals read by very few people...

...At this point I must acknowledge that I am a professor with tenure —at the University of California...

...Here the crucial arguments have been made by another tenured professor, J. Peter Byrne of the Georgetown Law Center...

...It's like moving your factory to Mexico, except that your workers all speak English and have Ph.D.s, and you never even have to leave town...

...Regular review and special disciplinary hearings can lead to demotion and termination in cases of incompetence, misconduct, or neglect of responsibilities...

...if programs are cut, tenured professors can't be fired if they accept reassignment...

...Department of Education and the AAUP) led the New York Times to conclude that tenure is "withering of its own accord...

...The 1996-1997 entering class numbered only 120...

...The struggle focused on the circumstances under which tenured professors could be fired...

...Bennington had a presumptive-tenure system—faculty members held five-year contracts with the understanding that they would be renewed until retirement...

...The regents drafted their policy with the help of Richard Chait and a Washington law firm, Hogan and Hartson...

...Of course the part-timers don't get benefits, so they're even cheaper...

...Without tenure they would get rid of me...

...The academy, they argue, should submit to the logic of the market: because university managers need flexibility, because more cost-effective ways must be found to deliver educational resources (like replacing senior professors with new people who will work for less...

...There is one big difference: American colleges and universities can't be moved to Mexico and their workers have the right to organize and form unions...

...No major university or college has followed the Bennington example...

...Meanwhile, as professors at elite institutions are angrily debating Chait, college and university administrators everywhere are quietly hiring more and more temporary and part-time adjuncts, instructors, and lecturers who will never have a chance to earn tenure...

...The bottom line, the university lawyers would argue, is budgetary: the new priorities of the institution as it faces the challenges of the twenty-first century mean that the professor's services are no longer required...

...Then university administrators and trustees and state legislators would be able to fire the undesirables, and professors wouldn't have any basis for objecting...

...Each would exercise his right to appear before a review panel to state his belief that his teaching and research had been good, and that the reason he hadn't been renewed was his unpopular position—on farm price supports or homosexuals...

...but if universities would simply guarantee academic freedom to professors, they wouldn't need tenure any more...

...A system little more than fifty years old is hardly invulnerable to abolition—consider Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which lasted about sixty years, until Bill Clinton came along...

...The basic principle of the tenure system is that professors can't be dismissed without good cause...

...Few petitioners are going to be able to refute arguments like these—especially when peer-review panels would consist of other faculty members with limited-term contracts instead of tenure, who themselves would have to worry about whether they would be reappointed if they displeased the administration...

...Unlike some critics of tenure, Chait recognizes that academic freedom needs protection...

...The key to Chait's argument is the claim that academic freedom can be "guaranteed" in a way that makes tenure unnecessary for its protection...

...Chait assures us that faculty members on limited-term contracts say that their work situations are "agreeable, collegial, and free from the pressures that the search for tenure —and its attainment—create...

...Recently, right-wing professors have been claiming they too need the protection of tenure in left-dominated universities...

...At the University of North Carolina –Chapel Hill, two tenured professors have recently been fired—a law professor after his second shoplifting incident in five years, and an English professor for having sex with students (he resigned before he was fired, which is what typically happens when charges of misconduct or incompetence are brought...

...she put the remaining faculty on one- to five-year contracts...

...Minnesota might have been next: the University of Minnesota became the focus of the national debate on tenure when the regents proposed in the fall of 1996 to make it easier to lay off tenured faculty, cut their salaries, or discipline them for not maintaining a "proper attitude of industry and cooperation...

...He served as a paid consultant to the University of Minnesota regents in their recent unsuccessful attempt to abolish tenure— which led some to describe his occupation as "hired gun" and "hit man...

...Richard P. Chait, who has tenure at Harvard (in the School of Education) is that professor...

...But a group of fired faculty members sued the college in 1996, seeking $3.7 million 62 DISSENT / Winter 1998 in damages as well as full reinstatement...

...64 DISSENT / Winter 1998...

...He knows that waves of political hysteria have intermittently crushed dissent and led to purges of university faculties, preventing the teaching of unpopular ideas...

...It is not a protection for poor performance, nor is it an obstacle to necessary change...

...That "proper attitude" clause more than anything else mobilized the Minnesota faculty— which consists of three thousand professors in more than two hundred departments, virtually all of whom went into revolt, opposed to the regents' proposals...

...During World War I, professors who opposed the war on pacifist or socialist grounds were fired—one of them was Pete Seeger's father, fired from the University of California at Berkeley in 1917...

...Opponents of tenure point to the problem professors, the ones who seldom come to class, or who come to class drunk, or who practice sexual harassment...

...Periodic post-tenure review of teaching by peers ought to help here—although administrators are more likely to use periodic review to penalize those who don't increase enrollments rather than those who don't keep up with their fields...

...But other teachers also face threats: at the University of Minnesota, a decade ago, an agriculture school professor named Ed Schuh came out against farm subsidy payments at 90 percent of parity...

...It's true that there are professors giving the same lecture today that they gave twenty-five years ago, who have failed to keep up with or have stopped caring about the literature in their fields...

...those who don't are subject to demotion or other penalties...

...That year the AAUP and the American Association of Colleges together adopted for the first time a "Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure," which set out the basis for the current system: after a probationary period of not more than seven years, all academics must be given job security or dismissed, and termination before retirement is permitted only in cases of demonstrated incompetence or misconduct...

...Competent people can be hired at lower salaries...

...The stunning fact is that only about one quarter of America's 1.2 million college teachers have tenure...

...Collective bargaining seems like the best way to defend college teachers—at least at public colleges—against politically motivated firing—as the logic of the market, and the administrators who embrace it, undermine the freedom of teachers to teach...

...When we think about the people academic freedom protects, usually we think of the lone faculty radical teaching Karl Marx—or lesbian literature—somewhere in the boondocks (although often the problems arise at places like UCLA, where the University of California regents tried not so long ago to fire Angela Davis...

...Another alternative he recommends is "the chance to serve indefinitely as senior lecturers or clinical educators"—year-to-year appointments that could be renewed as long as the administrator in charge liked you or didn't prefer some60 DISSENT / Winter 1998 body else...

...each must show evidence of excellence in teaching, research, and university service...

...Delivery of educational resources in a free-market, high-tech society is undergoing dramatic changes...

...But tenured professors at the University of California, and most other universities, face reviews of their performance every two or three years...

...The Adjunct Problem Although many believe with the Washington Post that tenure is a "reward that dates to the Middle Ages," in fact the tenure system as we know it is of very recent origin...

...In Texas, for example, during the last five years, the University of Texas, Texas A&M, and the University of Houston systems have fired eight tenured professors, three for poor performance...

...The elite Vermont college brought in a new president, Elizabeth Coleman, who solved the school's financial problems by firing a third of the full-time faculty...

...layoffs are permitted only if a financial emergency is declared...

...You need tenure not so much to protect individual faculty members, but to protect the integrity of the university," he said...

...Rights would be adjudicated by "a peerdominated review panel" that would hear complaints...

...even people who have tenure are not always willing to take on the powers that be...

...Of course it won't happen again...

...Besides, his contract explicitly said he had no right to be reappointed...

...Whereas virtually all four-year colleges and universities have tenure systems, today almost half the faculty at four-year colleges are part-timers...

...JON WIENER (JMWiener@UCI.edu ), a contributing editor of the Nation, teaches history at the University of California at Irvine...

...Local Battles Three years ago, Bennington College abolished tenure...

...Guarantees How exactly would the "guarantee" of academic freedom protect someone like Ed Schuh or Thomas Reeves—if they had five-year contracts instead of tenure and at some point were not renewed...

...Regents and administrators at other institutions no doubt learned the lesson of Minnesota: a mobilized faculty can successfully defend tenure in their institution...

...Intolerant liberals dominate academia," he said...

...The greatest threat comes from DISSENT / Winter 1998 63 the inexorable trend toward staffing colleges and universities with part-timers, adjuncts, and instructors...

...Professors say tenure is necessary to protect academic freedom...

...if a department is abolished by the university administration, the tenured jobs there are abolished as well...

...When this happens, Minnesota won't be troubled any more by professors challenging the conventional wisdom on agricultural price supports...

...At two-year community colleges, part-timers make up 65 percent of the faculty...

...But many academic programs consist of only a few professors...

...Nationwide, about fifty professors are fired each year, according to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP...

...Meanwhile, Bennington is not attracting enough students to make it financially, according to Moody's Investors Service, which downgraded the school's bond rating to "B" after the faculty purge...

...And since college and university professors know this scenario, few would be willing to risk losing their jobs by writing or saying things that were controversial...

...Farm price supports are as sacred in the Midwest as the word of Joseph Smith at Mormon schools—so the citizenry was outraged, and the governor went to the university president and demanded that Schuh be fired...

...The university development plan calls for downsizing and cost cutting in traditional fields like agriculture and history, and investing resources instead in money-makers like management or careers in corrections (or, in southern California, screenwriting...

...After the war, administrators and faculty senates pledged to uphold freedom of speech and thought on campus, but thirty years later, when the McCarthy era began, universities again fired tenured professors who refused to sign loyalty oaths...

...Thomas Reeves, a tenured historian at the University of Wisconsin at Parkside for twenty-five years, told me that his conservative views on homosexuality and affirmative action "can get you into trouble...

...Yes, the pressure on assistant professors to publish and do the other things required for tenure is intense and can be oppressive...

...Most of what we take for granted in academic life derives from it, as Louis Menand writes in The Future of Academic Freedom: "from the practice of allowing departments to hire and fire their own members"—the chancellor can't just give his nephew a job in the economics department —"to the practice of not allowing the football coach to influence the quarterbacks' grade in math class...

...That's not quite right: tenure has been undermined by administrators who have adopted the logic of the market...

...they argue that tenure, in the words of the Christian Science Monitor, "protects the unproductive and insulates professors from pressure to update skills...

...But academic freedom protects more than the expression of unpopular ideas...

...Schools can save a lot of money by replacing tenured professors with part-timers...

...Since there are black pundits who oppose civil rights and women who denounce feminism, it was inevitable that there would be a tenured professor who's against tenure...

...The dirty little secret of the tenure system today is how many college teachers are denied its protections...

...The Minnesota regents wanted expanded powers, including the power to fire tenured people when "programs" were abolished...

...The greatest threat to the teaching of unpopular ideas today is not coming from frontal attacks on the tenure system from rightwing regents...

...The arithmetic is easy: a department with twenty tenured professors each earning $50,000, and each teaching two courses per semester, gives you eighty courses per year for $1 million...