A Dean Looks at Tenure

A former faculty member and current dean assesses the pros and cons of tenure: it promotes stability and independence, but it can also prevent change.

An Interview with Catharine R. Stimpson

Schrecker: Recently, as you know, tenure is coming under attack from both in and outside the academy. We’re even hearing suggestions that, because there is so little public support for higher education, the academic community might well be advised to abandon tenure altogether. As an administrator and former faculty member, what do you think?

Stimpson: Ellen, you and I are old friends, so we can afford the luxury of irony. Let us imagine a parody of the evil administrator. What would the evil administrator think about tenure? The evil administrator might think that academic freedom is an overrated value. And the evil administrator would want a flexible work force that could be moved from position to position. Without tenure, a faculty would lack the long-term and stable leadership that could give it a sense of being a body of integrity. That would benefit the evil administrator, whose self-interest would be served by having teachers (let’s call them "content providers") on short-term contracts, which could be manipulated according to the demand of the students. Let’s call them "customers," or "clients."

And think, too, of the administrative savings. You wouldn’t need "promotion and tenure" committees. You wouldn’t have to write all those letters asking for tenure and promotion evaluations. You wouldn’t have to read all those books and articles in order to make judgments. Life would be clean and simple.

Schrecker: Obviously, you don’t buy into the evil administrator’s scenario. As a presumably more enlightened administrator, you have a more favorable view of tenure, don’t you?

Stimpson: I’m a strong believer in faculty governance. Faculty governance is not simply how the faculty controls certain aspects of institutional life, particularly the curriculum. Faculty governance also means consultation on a wide range of issues. It has to do with the spirit of the place, the ethics of the place. You can’t have faculty governance, good faculty governance, unless you have a sense of stability in the faculty, and unless you have people who are seasoned faculty members within the institution. Tenure helps to create those conditions.

Now, institutions need seasoned faculty members for a lot of reasons. One of them is to counteract the effect of thecurrent star system in academia, under which a professor’s allegiance is more to the discipline and to the individual career than to the institution. There’s no doubt in my mind that there’s been a loosening of the ties that professors feel to the institution as an institution.

Be that as it may, faculty governance will not work unless we have faculty members who have a strong and long-standing interest in an institution. Such faculty members begin as junior professors, learn the ropes, accept increasing responsibility, and then become the wise counselors within the institution and the guardians of the principles of faculty governance, along with administrators. I would add parenthetically that one of the obligations of graduate schools (and I’m not sure how well we’re doing this) is to professionalize graduate students into governance. Graduate students should serve on committees within departments and within the university as a whole.

Schrecker: Your argument, here, as I understand it, is that tenure is necessary for effective faculty governance. But the traditional defense of tenure has always been that it protects academic freedom. One is a collective guarantee, the other an individual. Can they be reconciled?

Stimpson: They’re compatible. Faculty governance works best with academic freedom. Obviously, I prefer to think that the administration and the faculty can work together in an atmosphere of congeniality and civility. But there are cases—and I’ve encountered them—when a faculty member has to stand up and say "get lost" to a president or a dean without fear of retaliation. This is where academic freedom protects you. It protects you not only in the expression of ideas, but also in the reasoned expression of discontent with the governance of an institution, be that with an interim administration, donors, or legislators.

As for the traditional defense of tenure as a protection for academic freedom, my view is not merely theoretical; my own career has been affected. I was an early practitioner of both women’s studies and gay and lesbian studies. I have also been outspoken on other issues, or I flatter myself that I’ve been outspoken. I’m not sure I could have done that without academic freedom. I have no faith in my own courage. And, as we all know, behind the defense of academic freedom is an enlightened belief that if you speak freely you have a better chance of speaking truly. And if you have a chance to speak truly, there will be benefits for society, for the advancement of knowledge, and for your own conscience.

In turn, faculty members must not abuse this precious legacy and confuse academic freedom with acting out or abuse.

Schrecker: Of course not. But isn’t that the case with all free expression? How does academic freedom differ from the freedom of speech that all Americans supposedly enjoy?

Stimpson: I sympathize with the argument that you can have all the freedom of speech you want, but if you don’t have access to the public, it doesn’t count. It’s rather different within the academic community, because ultimately the faculty has some access to the community "forum." As a professor at New York University, I can’t guarantee that my views will be taken up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation or Time-Warner. I have no access to Charlie Rose or to the op-ed page of the New York Times. I have freedom of speech, but that doesn’t mean I have access to what has become the marketplace of ideas.

But I can send out an e-mail to faculty members. I can ask to write for the student newspaper. I can stuff mailboxes. I can stand up in faculty meetings. The academic community is perhaps closer to the classical notion of the marketplace of ideas than contemporary society has become.

Schrecker: That’s an intriguing notion. Of course, it’s not hard to make a case that will persuade our fellow academics of the need for academic freedom so that we can speak out within the university. But on the outside, in the rest of society, how can you make a case that professors require the kind of special protection that tenure now allows?

Stimpson: The question I asked myself when I was at Rutgers, especially when AT&T was "laying off" thousands and thousands of workers is this: if I worked for AT&T, if I were middle management, and I was laid off, and I had kids, and I knew that my taxes were going to support the tenured Rutgers faculty members, how would I feel? And my answer was I’d probably feel pretty lousy, and I’d ask myself why I should pay taxes to support a professor when I, myself, was so vulnerable. Especially if that professor might be saying nasty things about people who worked for corporations.

So, we need to show why tenure matters. We need to find an example of a situation in which someone has had an unpopular or unconventional idea and then that idea has turned out to be valuable to the community of inquiry and to the community at large. Can we actually make empirically demonstrable connections between academic freedom and the advancement of the social good?

Now, if we are talking about First Amendment issues, we could look at certain stories—say the Pentagon Papers story. It was clearly demonstrable that the truth needed to be known about the war. It helped people make better policy decisions. It made a better-informed citizenry. Can we do that with some academic freedom cases? Cases in which academic freedom protects not just my right to eat pizza and say things about Madonna, but where it protects me if I were to say something unpopular that ultimately turned out to be helpful. You can make that case, for example, for women’s studies. When you look at it, you see a flow of information that’s been beneficial to education, to women’s health, to our understanding of women’s political processes.

Schrecker: Sure, but isn’t a lot of the current public opposition to tenure less a matter of hostility to the unpopular ideas of individual professors than it is a result of the perception that tenure protects people who are over the hill and slacking off? As an administrator, do you believe that is a valid argument?

Stimpson: I think the strongest case against tenure is the deadwood argument. Look, deadwood happens whether there’s tenure or not. The deadwood question becomes particularly intense in an academic setting not only because there is tenure, but because a faculty must be on the front lines of knowledge. If you have deadwood in a research university, you are cutting against the whole purpose of that university.

The deadwood question is, of course, exacerbated by the law that took away mandatory retirement at the age of seventy. I am ferocious about the consequences of the loss of mandatory retirement. I believe that if people do not retire at an appropriate time, there are several consequences. One is the possibility that they’re not as fresh and vigorous as they once were (and that’s not an ageist thing to say), and the second is, they do block the movement of younger faculty.

Now, I was once brought up short when I made this argument. I was questioned severely by a woman faculty member at a community college, who said that she, like many other women, joined the faculty in her forties, and she simply couldn’t afford to retire at seventy. That’s a fair argument, and I think in this case, when you’re preparing what are called retirement packages, you have to take that into account, and perhaps put a lump-sum payment into people’s retirement plan to make it possible for them to retire. You have to push the questions about health insurance, as well. At NYU the problem of housing is acute. So one has to be sensitive to the future that retiring faculty members face—in material terms and in terms of doing valuable work. There are all sorts of ways to take advantage of retired professors in the classroom, or as advisers. My support of tenure is accompanied by a strong belief that tenure is not a lifetime privilege.

Faculty members can be their own worst enemy in terms of defending tenure. They can be so by making tenure into a lifelong job, no matter what their particular mental condition, by slacking off after they get tenure, or by behaving in unethical ways. And their faculty colleagues have to take responsibility for dealing with the slackers and predators within their ranks.

You know, the institution to which the university is most similar is the church. It gets itself into a lot of trouble when the clergy, either men or women, do not behave according to the highest ethical ideals of the institution. We can’t see having tenure as the equivalent of selling indulgences.

Schrecker: I know the AAUP doesn’t agree with you here. We strongly supported the abolition of mandatory retirement. And in any event, is the deadwood problem really so serious? Are there really so many incompetent faculty members refusing to retire?

Stimpson: We need more data here, and a definition of incompetence or destructive behavior. Even if it’s a small problem, it’s an acute problem because of our need to welcome younger faculty members.

Schrecker: Let’s look at those younger faculty members. With so many tenure lines being eradicated and people being hired as adjuncts or on short-term contracts, aren’t we really fooling ourselves about providing opportunities by eliminating so-called deadwood? And aren’t we also fooling ourselves about the existence of academic freedom in an institution where so many of its members teach part time?

Stimpson: Academic freedom is the first and most traditional defense of tenure. However, it is possible for a well-run institution to extend academic freedom to everyone who teaches. That’s easy. The adjunct question is very difficult. It’s going to blow up unless institutions confront it squarely and look at the conditions under which adjunct faculty are teaching. It’s very easy to say "convert all those positions to full-time ones." But some people want to do adjunct teaching, and some programs use adjuncts in ways that are perfectly appropriate. Take our graduate program in computer science, for example. Here in New York, we have all this brilliant talent down in Silicon Alley; it’s a wonderful opportunity for adjunct teaching. Creative writing is another opportunity.

The difficulty arises when adjunct and part-time teaching is used for cost-effectiveness and only for that. I know it’s wrong to have adjunct and part-time teaching because you want to cut economic corners. On the other hand, in a private institution you can have enormous economic pressures. You can’t make tuition $100,000 a year. You can’t make tuition so high that it deprives poor kids of the opportunity to come here.

Schrecker: Kate, if we’re talking about part-time or contingent faculty members, shouldn’t we also look at other ways in which some people are thinking about restructuring academic careers to eliminate tenure and gain flexibility? I’m sure you’re aware of the recent discussions about possible alternatives to tenure like long-term contracts that reward faculty members with higher salaries or more frequent sabbaticals. The AAUP, as you know, has opposed those initiatives. As a dean, what do you think of them?

Stimpson: Well, it’s equivalent to the charter school movement in public education. It’s an experiment. Let’s try it. Let’s see what happens. What it means is you’ll have some institutions that have teaching assistants, long-term contracts, and regular tenure simultaneously. There might be some awkwardness and impurity there. Two difficulties one might anticipate are that, ironically, the long-term contract would become de facto tenure. And, second, what happens if someone comes in and cancels the contracts? A long-term contract is still not the same as tenure. But I’m all for the experiment. Because with education today, you can’t just sit and say that you’re "going to just do everything the way it’s always been done."

The other step that’s been suggested is, of course, to have one- or two-year performance reviews and then to tie merit increases, or perhaps any sort of pay raise, to those performance reviews. If you institute that system, you have to make sure that the faculty is thoroughly involved and a part of the performance review, setting the criteria.

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