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From The Editor
Even editors make mistakes. This issue came into being as the result of a serious editorial gaffe with regard to an article scheduled for publication in the January-February issue of Academe.
Ellen Schrecker
The piece described Louisiana State University’s attempt to regularize its off-the-ladder faculty appointments by creating new positions based on long-term rolling contracts. As the article moved through the copyediting stage, several AAUP staff members noted that the LSU proposals conflicted with the Association’s insistence that no full-time faculty member should serve more than seven years without a tenure decision. Since it was too late for revisions, I pulled the piece and asked its authors to rework it to explain why they had not recommended tenure. It did not seem appropriate for the AAUP’s official magazine to appear to endorse an arrangement that could undermine its most basic principles.
The incident was unnerving. Besides having to face the article’s justifiably irate authors, I was shaken by my own failure to recognize the implications of the LSU plan. If someone as presumably sophisticated about academic life as I thought I was did not understand what was wrong with the proposed long-term faculty contracts, then perhaps other academics might be similarly confused. Given the hostility toward tenured professors that suffuses today’s popular discourse, such confusion is a luxury we cannot afford.
We can no longer rely on unexamined assumptions. Few external critics or hard-headed insiders find the traditional language about protecting academic freedom and professional autonomy persuasive. They want something much more concrete. If tenure is to remain integral to the academic profession, we must show how it benefits everybody on campus—not just a dwindling cohort of alleged "deadbeats" who cling to it. In order to help its readers understand how tenure strengthens American higher education (and to provide ammunition against the critics of that peculiar institution), Academe asked several experienced and thoughtful individuals to discuss the issue.
Almost every one of them insisted that tenure was essential for maintaining the quality of higher education. It creates a stable cadre of senior professors, who, Linda Carroll and Catharine Stimpson explain, supply leadership in both governance and curricular matters. Moreover, brutal though the process of earning tenure can sometimes be, it provides a rigorous peer-reviewed form of quality control that, Lawrence Poston points out, alternative arrangements, like renewable contracts, do not. As for the common contention that tenure fosters deadwood, our authors found considerable evidence to the contrary. In fact, once scholars receive tenure, they often take on the more ambitious long-term projects that the time constraints of their probationary periods precluded.
Actually, the main problem with tenure is its scarcity. As current academics retire, their tenure lines often go with them, to be replaced by a growing number of temporary and part-time appointments. But eliminating tenure, Matthew Finkin insists, will not resolve the current job crisis. It will only lower the quality of future professors. And it will impede diversification, for, as JoAnn Moody found out, few women and people of color will trade tenure for access.
Still, tenure remains contested. In an increasingly corporatized society, where university administrators, talking finances and flexibility, refuse to create permanent lines, perhaps the arrangements Ravi Rau and his Louisiana State colleagues worked out are the best we can get. But as someone who could have earned tenure in an off-the-ladder teaching position at a major research university, I don’t think so. Nor does Martin Snyder, the AAUP’s program director for academic freedom and professional standards. In the first number of what will become a regular column in Academe on the state of the profession, he explains why real education is not for sale. It’s an explanation that we all need to buy.
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