The Campaign Against Tenure

Don’t worry about the direct assault on tenure. The indirect threat—from post-tenure reviews and contingent appointments—is much more serious.

By Matthew W. Finkin

The second, though less edifying, reason for the failure of the attack lies in the fatuousness of the New Pathways Project. The opening shot was fired by Harvard education professor Richard Chait in a 1995 article, "The Future of Academic Tenure," published in AGB Priorities. I attempted to unpack Chait’s argument in my book, The Case for Tenure.

Interestingly, Chait predicted that prominent research universities, flagship state campuses, and elite private liberal arts colleges would not abandon tenure: "[T]here is no compelling evidence," he wrote, "that elite institutions have been ill served by traditional tenure systems." Nor is there any evidence that "nonelite" institutions were ill served, either. Thus the whole point of the project was dubious from the outset. It drew the distinction between the elite and the masses, and with verve; but it never explained why the distinction was merited. Instead, ideas were floated, and then floated away:

• The AAHE argued to the flexible career tracks of doctors employed in HMOs as a model alternative to tenure. But then the press revealed that the doctor-models we were supposed to emulate labored under "gag clauses" that forbade them, on pain of discharge—lacking tenure—to tell patients what was going on; and our models have now proceeded to unionize in significant numbers. I don’t hear the AAHE talking much about HMO-employed physicians anymore.
• A linkage of tenure to course registration was proposed. So, for example, a 10 percent drop in one’s enrollment for more than two years would expressly be made grounds for discharge. One needn’t dwell on this risible scheme, for it hasn’t been mentioned again.
• Financial inducements to forgo tenure were also proposed. This incentive has actually been introduced at a few places, but I expect it will soon find display space in the Museum of Folly.
• And we have been urged to let a thousand flowers bloom: why should the professoriate labor under a single "one-size-fits-all" model of probation and tenure? Let the parties contract as they will—"Let Bennington Be Bennington." A slogan substitutes for thought; a contract of indentured servitude becomes as good as any other, so long as it has been agreed to.

All this would be comical but for the project’s darker side, for it attempted to conquer by division. Younger faculty were appealed to on the ground that the tenure process was often arbitrary or worse; they were thus summoned to disbelieve any profession by their seniors to the contrary as self-serving, if not cynically manipulative. Women and minorities were appealed to on the ground that incumbent white men were a bottleneck to their careers. And local and regional colleges were urged to separate themselves from any other orbit of comparison. So did the project pit the masses against the "elite," women against men, blacks against whites, the young against the old. The arguments underlying these appeals were spurious; the appeals demagogic.

Even so, two developments adverted to by the project are serious, and the AAUP has consistently expressed its concerns about them. The first is the development of systems of "post-tenure review," often as the result of administrative, regental, or even legislative pressure. How these systems will play out has yet to be seen. I suspect many of them will evolve into a routine of relatively harmless, if time-consuming, paper shuffling; but, at their worst, they hold the potential for abuse and injustice.

I expect a fuller texture of exposition by means of investigations of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure as these post-tenure pigeons come home to roost. The follow-up report published in the January–February 1998 issue of Academe on events at Bennington College, whose administration the AAUP censured in 1995, is instructive. The late Neil Rappaport, an instructor of photography and an active opponent of the new Bennington administration, was given a "post-presumptive tenure" review after twenty-two years on the faculty and was dismissed for want of "collegiality."

The second disturbing development is the increase in the use of "contingent," or part-time and non-tenure-track full-time, faculty. This development parallels the rise of a contingent workforce in the economy as a whole, a matter occasioning much study by scholars of industrial relations, labor economics, and employment law. In higher education, this situation is the product of thousands of discrete decisions by departments and deans, each of which may have seemed defensible, even beneficial, at the time, but that in the aggregate have worked significantly to reduce the core of tenured faculty. We have our work cut out for us.

A description of one effort to address the problem, at Louisiana State University, appears on pages 38–41 of this issue of Academe. The thoughtfulness and purity of purpose of that effort is obvious. But the LSU proposal—to identify instructorships as "teaching-only" positions to be placed on renewable-term contracts—is vexing. Tenure, according to the 1940 Statement, is a means to a certain end: to ensure faculty members, as citizens of the academic enterprise, of freedom of teaching and freedom of internal speech, as well as freedom of research and publication. Historically, that protection has proven especially important for teaching-oriented faculty at teaching-oriented institutions. The idea that tenure should apply only to those who both teach and do research, but not to those who only (or primarily) teach, is theoretically unsound and potentially threatening.

Much more useful, however, is the LSU proposal to cap the number of renewable-term appointments. This recommendation coincides with the observation of economist Fritz Machlup, a former president of the AAUP, that the percentage of faculty with tenure should be as large as the institution can maintain consistent with achieving other ends.

Despite its flaws, the LSU proposal, unlike the New Pathways Project, recognizes that the solution to the "contingent faculty" problem will require a clarification of the valid uses of such faculty and the elimination of the misuse of them, not an abandonment of tenure. Engaged teaching, significant research, and sustained public service cannot thrive on the backs of a faculty treated as a disposable factor of educational production, and no cheerleading to the contrary can make it otherwise.

Matthew Finkin is Albert J. Harno Professor of Law at the University of Illinois and editor of The Case for Tenure (Cornell University Press, 1996).

 Printer-Friendly Page