The Incredible Shrinking Faculty

Lawrence Poston, professor of English and senior associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has been dealing with tenure for years. Academe editor Ellen Schrecker asked him to assess the current controversy over it.

An Interview with Lawrence Poston

Poston: Tenure should not be blamed for what is really the result of a failure to fund higher education adequately. One reason there are fewer full-time positions is that many institutions are converting tenure lines vacated by retirements into non-tenure-track and part-time positions. In other words, it is not the institution of tenure that is making the job search harder for young scholars, but the erosion of positions suitable for them and on which in an earlier era they might have been more able to rely. Candidates for tenure-track positions who come through my office want to know that the University of Illinois has a tenure system, and they want to know what steps they must take toward getting tenure. If we did not have tenure as one of our recruitment tools, we would lose our best prospects to institutions that can satisfy that need, and believe me, it’s always a seller’s market for those best candidates.

Where I sit now as associate dean, I’ve seen more than one example of how, once given tenure, a young faculty member becomes much more invested in the institution. At my university, we’re rebuilding a faculty depleted by resignations and retirements to strengthen existing programs and cultivate new initiatives. In two cases this year, recently tenured faculty have come to me to say, "Now that I’m tenured, I’m really ready to put some time into this project." If that is what is meant by tenure’s being a luxury, it seems to me that it’s a luxury we can ill afford to forgo. I’d prefer to describe tenure as a necessity for long-term institutional health, because it serves as a device for building institutional loyalty of just this sort.

In short, the question posed here seems to me the wrong one. We should instead ask what the implications are for educational quality when a university begins systematically defunding tenured and tenure-track positions. And I’d suggest that students and their parents have a stake in the answer, especially in large public institutions already rife with complaints that students never see a "real" professor.

Schrecker: There’s a related concern here. Doesn’t the increasing unavailability of tenure threaten to transform the academy into a two-tiered system, with a shrinking core of full-time tenured people at the top and a growing number of part-time or off-the-ladder appointees at the bottom? And doesn’t that situation make it increasingly difficult to attract talented or ambitious students to academic careers?

Poston: This is already happening, and it follows from my previous comment that unless changes are made in the funding of higher education, it will be difficult to attract the best students. Graduate education is a hefty investment. Who wants to make it if all that awaits at the end is a series of part-time or full-time but non-tenure-track positions that pay about a third of what one might make in the lower reaches of the computer industry the first year after the B.A.?

Schrecker: Similarly, doesn’t tenure impede diversity within the faculty by locking up faculty lines that could be used for hiring people of color and otherwise diversifying the faculty?

Poston: The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 1996 on an interesting study by the Ford and Spencer Foundations on just this question. A survey of minority faculty taken at that time found strong support for a tenure system, on the grounds that the kinds of scholarly and pedagogical issues that concern many of these faculty are exactly the sorts of concerns that need and deserve the protections of tenure if they are to be explored with some sense of safety. We do a disservice to heretofore underrepresented groups by making the dissolution of tenure the cost of their entrance into academic life. Are they never to have any of the advantages their mostly white, male predecessors had in the academic profession? I should add parenthetically that it doesn’t make much sense to talk about tenured lines "locking up" anything, when in absolute terms such lines are themselves disappearing even as we discuss these issues.

Schrecker: What about the argument that tenure decreases the flexibility that academic institutions need in order to adjust to new types of knowledge by fashioning interdisciplinary programs more in tune with the contemporary world? Isn’t this particularly the case now that there is no mandatory retirement age within the academy? In short, doesn’t tenure protect deadwood?

Poston: This is pious talk from administrators for whom flexibility means freedom to cut lines, not freedom to "adjust to new types of knowledge." Like the other arguments, this one is driven by a steady-state employment market in which few new positions are opening up and funding for tenured and tenure-track positions is going down. Of course, under those conditions you’re cutting off the flow of good younger people into the tenured ranks anyway, so the argument is really a species of self-fulfilling prophecy.

I’d suggest another take on the question, however. If we really are interested in these new directions, then let’s see if we can inspire some faculty members who might profit from taking a new direction in their own academic careers—and believe me, if you have tenure, you can afford to think about that kind of risk taking. Let’s get beyond the ageism that is implicit in this kind of argument. We have all known young faculty members who are wed to older models of research and older faculty who have continued to be flexible and open to newer styles of inquiry.

And let’s keep the retirement question separate. I have yet to see any clear and massive evidence that the end of mandatory retirement has meant a dramatic increase in the numbers of elderly incompetents clinging to their tenured positions. Creative retirement alternatives can address that problem where it exists, although I might add that unfortunately such alternatives are also a blandishment to excellent older faculty members whom a campus has every interest in retaining.

Schrecker: Why not put tenure to the test of the market and allow faculty members to choose long-term contracts orsome other alternative to tenure in return for a higher salary, lighter load, or more sabbaticals?

Poston: The "market test" of tenure is a newer fad, in keeping with the current worship of the market, and one which I think is a bit more devious and subtle than some of the older broadside attacks on tenure. We’re starting to learn of cases in which the hiring institution offers a prospective appointee (say, someone just out of graduate school) a choice between a tenure-track appointment and a renewable-term contract, the latter accompanied by such temptations as a higher starting salary, a lucrative summer grant, a lighter teaching load, or whatever. The problem is that this "choice" is usually advanced in terms that make it quite clear that the candidate may be disadvantaged if he or she opts for the traditional tenure track. That is, it’s not really a free choice at all. It signals that the institution prizes its own definition of flexibility over the career of the individual faculty member, and the offer is usually couched in glowing terms as an opportunity for the candidate to demonstrate that he or she is a creative risk taker, who is above paltry considerations of job security. This is a particularly cruel hoax to which to subject an entrant to the academic profession, because it capitalizes on the desperation that so often attends the job search and trades on the candidate’s naivete.

A variant of this approach occurs when an already-tenured faculty member is persuaded, enticed, or perhaps pressured into the voluntary renunciation of tenure, again with the promise of compensating advantages. Here the appeal may be to a long-standing tradition: "You’ve always been able to trust us." But we’ve seen instances in which the advantages conferred by the acceptance of such an offer have been withdrawn later, and the faculty member, sometimes of many years standing, is out on the street. Remember, too, that a tenure system needs to survive the incoming and outgoing administrators and faculty members who preside over its operations. It cannot be suspended simply on the basis of an appeal to the traditional ethos of the place. Allowing that, to put it bluntly, is the way you get the kind of slaughter at Bennington College that led to the AAUP censure in 1995.

The entire theory of trading your tenure for some other market advantage rests on a fundamental misapprehension that tenure is a property right to be bartered rather than a protection for all—not just for the faculty member but for society itself, which benefits from the function of the college or university as a haven for the free exchange of ideas. Now, we do recognize certain kinds of barter, if you want to call it that: for example, a negotiated retirement agreement in which both the institution and the individual agree to sever the relationship for a gain that serves the interests of both parties. That’s a long-established practice in academe, and an appropriate one when the individual has paid into a fair and soundly administered retirement system from which he or she can now draw the expected rewards of long service. But that’s quite different from the newer market tests you’re talking about. I might add that the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure will consider a draft policy on just this issue at its meeting this coming June.

Schrecker: What’s wrong with long-term contracts? Can’t they be written to give their holders all the procedural guarantees that the tenure system provides without the adverse publicity? Moreover, given the likelihood that they will ordinarily be renewed unless the individual performs badly, don’t they actually offer the same kind of protection that tenure does?

Poston: Over the years, I’ve had opportunities to talk about tenure with nonacademic audiences, and I’ve found that for them, the concept of tenure can often be demystified once you explain that the theory of tenure is based on the burden-of-proof principle. That is, during the probationary period, the burden of proof is on the individual to demonstrate competence at the level required to achieve tenure at a particular institution. After the award of tenure, however, the burden of proof for his or her discontinuance rests on the institution, which must show a cause sufficient for dismissal and provide a full due-process hearing in which the adequacy of the cause is demonstrated successfully to a body of faculty peers.

Under a system of renewable-term contracts, by contrast, no matter how long the term, there is no point at which the burden of proof shifts in the same way. As long as the institution is free to renew or not to renew, the burden of proof rests on the individual to show cause—at repeated junctures—why he or she must be retained. Under the "worst-intentions" scenario, this reduces the individual to the position of a humble supplicant rather than a professional officer and representative of the institution.

The second way in which I try to explain tenure to persons outside academe is to link it to the idea of quality control. Let us suppose that an institution designs a renewable-contract system, not with the hostile intentions implicit in the first scenario, but indeed with the most benign of intentions: for example, the presumption that the contract, in your words, "will ordinarily be renewed unless the individual performs badly." But that is a very modest standard to bring to bear on the question of contract renewal, and, in practice, it is likely to lead to the deferral of just the kind of hard-nosed decision that is required at a single moment in time, namely, the decision whether or not to award tenure. It’s one thing to say, "You have to be extremely good to expect the assurances conveyed by a tenured appointment." It’s quite another thing to say, "You have to be extremely bad ever to be fired." Under which of these statements can one expect to get and retain the best faculty?

Schrecker: The AAUP’s traditional defense of tenure has long been that it promotes academic freedom. But nowadays most people who claim their academic freedom is being violated rely on litigation. Can’t the courts protect our rights?

Poston: I don’t have the empirical evidence to justify the assertion that most people in such a condition are going tocourt. But while the courts may be a source of protection for constitutional rights, academic freedom may be violated for reasons that have nothing to do with constitutionally protected free speech. Disagreements over workplace conditions, such as the state of faculty governance or the right of a faculty member to express public disagreement with an administrative judgment, are not by and large matters of interest to the courts.

Past that, routine recourse to the courts, aside from being expensive, is a sign of serious institutional dysfunction. To invite the intrusion of the courts is to introduce a two-edged sword into the dynamics of academic life. I’m not saying it’s never necessary, but I am saying that our colleges and universities are in pretty bad shape if they cannot solve these issues on their own. My guess is that court intervention will whet already well-attested legislative appetites for intervention.

Schrecker: Recently, we’re hearing the argument that tenure actually restricts academic freedom. Not only does it establish a two-tiered system that makes it impossible for people in non-tenure-track jobs to exercise their academic freedom, but it also discourages junior faculty members from engaging in controversial activities during their probationary years, accustoming them to a passivity they may never be able to reverse. Given such a situation, wouldn’t the cause of academic freedom be strengthened by abandoning the defense of tenure and taking a stronger stand in support of all faculty members?

Poston: I’ll resort here to the old truism that protecting the academic freedom of younger faculty should rest in the hands of the tenured faculty, and where a department’s senior faculty violates that trust, there ought to be an avenue of appeal to a committee of tenured faculty at a higher level of review. Now, having said that, I must acknowledge that the theory isn’t always borne out in practice, though in some thirty-five years of teaching I’ve seen triumphant instances where it has been. It is hard to understand in any case how academic freedom could be better protected if no one had tenure, if everyone held contracts at will or under limited terms. The dangling participles of the question ("by abandoning" and "taking a stronger stand") suggest an absence of agency: under such conditions, exactly who would be doing so?

Schrecker: It has also been suggested that since most faculty members are primarily teachers and rarely need the kind of academic freedom that tenure protects, it might be advisable to limit it mainly to professors at research universities, where intellectually cutting-edge work takes place. Is this a viable option?

Poston: This is indeed something I’m hearing more frequently, and frankly, I think it’s the devil’s own polity. When Dick Chait [Harvard education professor Richard Chait] gets up at a meeting of the American Association for Higher Education and says we need tenure at Harvard but we don’t need it at lesser schools, his premise strikes me on its face as counterintuitive. Does the record show that the faculty is less safe at Harvard than at a San Diego State or a struggling sectarian institution? For that matter, is the top tier of institutions—however that is defined—the only tier that has any publication requirement?

But what’s really wrong with this argument is that it betrays a hopelessly diminished view of academic freedom. Does academic freedom extend only to conditions where "intellectually cutting-edge work" is taking place? Is there no such thing as academic freedom in the classroom? Is there no such thing as academic freedom in the arena in which questions of institutional policy, curricular matters, personnel decisions, and other faculty-related questions are being discussed?

The 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure provides a bedrock of standards for the academic profession, not for one category of institution over another. (So far as I am aware, the only standard the Association imposes in its investigative case work is that the institution under examination be accredited.) It is the ugliest sort of elitism to suggest that only research institutions "need" a system of tenure, rather like saying the First Amendment applies only to U.S. citizens whose property holdings meet a certain minimum financial standard.

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