Tenure & Academic Excellence

Tenure creates stability—the prerequisite for shared governance and creative scholarship. Managerial administrators who try to undermine that stability endanger their institutions.

By Linda L. Carroll

By vesting the faculty with wide autonomy in pedagogy, research, and institutional governance, tenure serves this function. In addition, faculties confer tenure to recognize the mature professional status of colleagues who have given sustained evidence of an ability to work independently. The American university system’s leadership in research and its ability to attract first-rate faculty members and students from all over the world prove the excellence of this combination of academic freedom and professionalism.

History’s most famous academic freedom case is instructive. After teaching for several years at the University of Padua, Galileo was offered a tenured position there by the Venetian Republic. The republic wanted to reward him for having developed the telescope that would help Venice’s efforts to regain maritime preeminence as a link between the Mediterranean and northern Europe and between Europe and the East. But Galileo, tempted by the prospect of a higher salary and the desire to return to his home state of Tuscany, turned down the offer and became the court mathematician of the Medici.

What he failed to realize was the extent to which the Catholic Church and Aristotelian philosophers would react adversely to the information about the heavens that his telescope revealed. Stung by blame for the Protestant Reformation heaped on earlier popes, especially Leo X and Clement VII, and fearing the challenges that Galileo’s discoveries posed to the authority of the Bible and the scientific texts of Aristotle, Popes Paul V and Urban VIII, together with the Inquisition, twice silenced him. If Galileo had remained in Padua, the Venetian Republic could have protected him. At the time, it was the only state on the Italian peninsula independent enough to resist the church, having been vigorously defended by Galileo’s friend, the political theoretician Paolo Sarpi, during a recent papal interdict. The Medici could not, and Galileo’s work was lost to the University of Padua and to the world.

Like similar cases before and since, Galileo’s experience shows that systems of oversight are often imposed in times of contraction and weakness, not in those of expansion and strength. In the United States, the recent trend toward accountability—which is the chief characteristic of what I call the "managerial university"—appears to result from a period of weakness.

Managerial University

In the managerial university, top-down control, short-term contracts, and limits on faculty governance effectively curb the scope of faculty research and the range of faculty professionalism. These practices suppress precisely those features of the American university system that have produced the excellence for which it is known throughout the world.

One way in which the managerial university erodes educational quality is by driving away talented faculty. The relative independence of academic work is one of its greatest attractions for potential faculty members. Many accept considerable financial sacrifice in exchange for the freedom to accomplish their work in the manner they deem best and to act together with colleagues to build an educational community. If academic life ceases to offer this breadth of action, its attractiveness to the most creative and responsible individuals will decline, and the obstacles blocking good work by those who continue in the academy will increase. And if, as expected, faculty salaries remain low compared with those of other professionals, not to mention those in the business world, academic life will lose much of its appeal.

Managerial universities weaken tenure and erode faculty autonomy in several ways; one of the most important is post-tenure review. Under post-tenure review, faculty members may not feel free to undertake lengthy projects that cannot be completed in time for a periodic evaluation. And they may not even be free to choose the venue for publishing their work, given that some institutions now deem only certain kinds of scholarly publications acceptable.

By imposing collective, external oversight structures, such as department- and college-level review committees, universities nullify the two core activities of faculty members: thinking autonomously and teaching others to think autonomously. Further, the universities thus declare that professors cannot be trusted with their own work and imply that it is suspect or valueless. Some universities that have instituted post-tenure review or other means of restricting the protections of tenure have inadvertently shown how loss of autonomy decreases the attractiveness of academic life: excellent faculty members have left their institutions for others offering the full protections of tenure and a strong faculty role in governance, which the professors see as ensuring their academic freedom against such incursions.

Another feature of the managerial university is excessive use of adjunct or multiyear contracts. A university that views its faculty as short-term or part-time employees, gives them little or no say in governance, and subjects them to continuous outcome checks blunts its competitive edge by encouraging timidity and conformity among its faculty. Although short-term and part-time faculty as a group are dedicated to their profession, their institutions provide them with few tools for achieving excellence, in comparison with those available to tenured and tenure-track faculty. The role of the classroom laborer imposed on contingent faculty by their institutions precludes long-term, committed service, sustained contributions to programs, and a role in university governance. Instead, those working under such conditions must focus their attention on securing their next contract or job.

Constant turnover robs programs of stability and direction, as a parade of short-term faculty members with different academic backgrounds alters course selection and content. It also damages the relationship between faculty members and students that is critical to the quality of higher education.

Professors build ties with students over the course of years, through interactions in and outside the classroom. Eventually, fragmentation of the faculty-student relationship will lead to the erosion of institution-alumni relations and will drive potential students away. The traditional postgraduate contact between faculty and alumni (requests for letters of recommendation, advice on career choices, information exchange, and so on) will decline, diminishing alumni loyalty to institutions. Disconnected alumni will probably not give generously to their alma mater or encourage others to attend. Fundraising campaigns organized around "great teachers" and brochures depicting beloved faculty members, now a reliable staple of university development offices, will also falter. A drop in fundraising will produce a further decline in educational quality.

Recent research refutes the charge that the absence of oversight results in poor faculty performance. The Faculty Work Project of the Associated New American Colleges recently conducted a national study with support from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The study found that faculty members work an average of 53.6 hours a week, with 34 of these hours devoted to student-connected activities (teaching, advising, and the like), 10 to research, and 9 to institutional service.

Barriers to Creativity

Indeed, the shoe is often on the other foot: it is often not faculty members who fail in their obligations to their institutions, but the institutions that fail in their responsibilities to the faculty.

Post-tenure review and other incursions on tenure often occur at institutions that underemploy the positive incentive of raises. Some institutions, after creating nontenured positions, find that they can make the positions attractive only by increasing pay, an ironic reversal of the original intent to decrease costs. Declarations that institutions need more flexibility than the tenure system permits also curiously invert the facts. Managerial universities lacking in tenure do not achieve excellence; instead, they condemn themselves to passivity and susceptibility to fads. The direction of the managerial university does not come from faculty who create their fields through independent research and the training of the next generation of scholars. On the contrary, these universities must follow the trends set by the leading universities, whose tenured faculty members perform this vital work.

Recent studies have shown that tenure and faculty governance are strongest at large, private research universities, which also tend to have great prestige. Not coincidentally, these institutions are the most in demand by prospective students and their parents. As other colleges and universities have undercut the role of the faculty member, interest in the kind of education that these prestigious universities offer has increased.

The weakening of tenure also threatens the quality of research. Good research requires much time and some risk taking. Obsessive checks on outcomes will favor small, safe projects with predictable results over the daring, conceptually complex projects that have produced cutting-edge research in many fields. At stake as well are extended, comprehensive works. I think of major studies in my own field that have required as many as thirty years of careful preparation, and I worry that such vast and erudite syntheses will be impossible in the future. How many of us published material too soon under the pressure of the tenure clock? The weakening of tenure would make this practice characteristic of our entirecareers.

Unsatisfactory Substitutes

Some people argue that tenure is unnecessary because courts protect free speech. This argument is flawed; the guarantee provided by tenure is not the right to free speech but the protection of one’s job in the exercise of it. Moreover, it is dangerous to transfer the authority over academic issues to outside parties affected by the political process.

Other factors also make courts a poor venue for protecting academic freedom. Courts are often unfamiliar with the academic world and may not make decisions appropriate to it. Further, faculty who have been dismissed from one institution will hesitate to pursue legal remedies that could jeopardize future job prospects, and, finally, the legal process is costly, time-consuming, and uncertain in its outcome.

Tenure was abolished in Britain over a decade ago. The events of the ensuing years confirm faculty members’ fears about the deleterious effects of its absence. As Adam Fairclough reported in the July–August 1999 issue of Academe, academics in the United Kingdom have witnessed many firings and layoffs while coping with greatly increased enrollments.

Teaching is subjected to numerical rating, while grade inflation is rampant and the quality of student work declines. The practice of counting publications is leading to the abandonment of certain types of research. Other sources report that faculty members go so far as to hold back publications, coordinating their release with the rigid review schedule.

To protect the traditional excellence of the American academic system, faculty members must fight to preserve academic freedom, the professional status of the faculty, and the faculty role in university governance. Doing so means safeguarding tenure. The tenure system is like democracy: it is not perfect, but it is light years ahead of any alternative.

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