July-August 2002

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From the General Secretary: Tenure Now

By Mary A. Burgan

This is another tenure column. I’ve said it once, but I need to say it again. The problem with tenure is that there is not enough of it, and the diminution of tenure is partly the faculty’s fault. The central administration may be happy with the decline of tenure, the board may approve the buildup of contingent faculty, the state legislature may act as if tenure doesn’t matter—but it’s the faculty that decides. Faculty rigidity in decisions about tenure can give the whole process a bad name. Faculty engagement in the notion that every colleague must be a "star" can buy into the idea that tenure is a perk for a few, special faculty. And faculty passivity before decisions to increase nontenure appointments helps erode tenure for all faculty.

Everybody in academia knows the figures. Here they are again from a May 16, 2002, San Francisco Chronicle article entitled "Tenure an Impossible Dream for Nearly Half of New Faculty Hires": in 1970, 22 percent of faculty held adjunct appointments; in 1982 the figure was 32 percent, and in 1993 it was 42 percent! According to other estimates, a majority of all recent hires have been off the tenure track.

Behind these grim statistics lies a decade of economic pressures—to downsize, outsource, and unbundle the faculty. But where has the tenured faculty been in countering these managerial moves? On the whole, there is a curious passivity among the faculty. They don’t want to upset a dean or provost who has just come in and wants to make a mark. They don’t know how to respond to the president’s sudden ambition to push them into the top rankings by requiring tenure standards that match those at Harvard—as if those at Harvard were sacrosanct. They think the dean’s letter to outside referees is embarrassing in its implication that the local department’s judgment is suspect, but he’s their dean, and they don’t want to accuse him of intellectual vulgarity to his face. And they figure that if a senior professor has a problem with an assistant professor, there’s no use fighting it.

Everybody knows that the tenure process has become so demanding in many of our schools that it can distort the other values of the institution. Everybody knows that perfectly good teaching institutions can come to neglect the undergraduates and grind up the idealism of young academics because the faculty, or deans, or provosts want to come up in the world. And even the old-line, skeptical faculty can accommodate such ambitions, tempted by the promise of added status and goaded by self-doubt about the value of their own careers.

Sadly, the newly hired junior faculty can also join the blood sport of tenure. Having measured up through ceaseless striving, ardent networking, and a fervent focus on the next publication or grant, they can be expected to enforce such measures rigidly when the next generation of colleagues must be judged.

Meanwhile, the star system goes on its mechanical way. Star-seeking deans even complain about how hard it is to hire new senior faculty, as if the academic job market is crowded with picky choosers. Such complaints are particularly obnoxious to those untenured faculty who roam around the margins of academia, eager to tell a hiring department that any offer is an offer they can’t refuse.

And yet, I think, many faculty members harbor an inward sadness about gifted peers who could not get a first job, or who lost a first job. Even though most faculty want to change the system, when they look at a tenure case that requires a little faith to vote for, they know that any shadow of a risk will bring a negative vote.

That’s why positive tenure decisions need to be celebrated. Let me offer one bright case where the faculty banded together to protect tenure prospects for a new colleague. Last spring, Laura Kalman (a member of our Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure) got 140 of her fellow historians to support an aspiring junior faculty member whose book publication was stopped by the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore after it had been accepted by the Johns Hopkins University Press. When asked why, Kalman responded, "I’m tenured, and my mom always says that just as people helped me get there, I should help the people who follow."

Bryn Mawr has now relented, and Hopkins intends to publish. The author, Andrea Hamilton, a part-time faculty member at Southern Methodist University, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that this event has restored her "belief in the decency and courage of people in academia." Now all she needs is a tenure-track job.