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Teaching Without Tenure: Policies and Practices for a New Era
Reviewed by Lawrence Poston
Roger G. Baldwin and Jay L. Chronister.
Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, 224 pp.
Teaching Without Tenure proposes that institutions of higher education formalize a full-time non-tenure-track category accompanied by all the dignity, if less of the security, awarded to tenured and tenure-track faculty. Though the authors declare that they are not enemies of tenure, they recite uncritically the familiar arguments for its abolition. Their book is replete with breathless "new era" proclamations of growing societal demand for accountability, quality, and flexibility, all bracketed by a cheerful assertion that many faculty members would gladly embrace the option they propose. The authors admit that "institutional leaders" have regarded "the two most important reasons . . . for hiring full-time non-tenure track faculty" as being "the need for flexibility in staffing and the ability to respond to financial fluctuations." Baldwin and Chronister try to soften the ominous implications of such remarks by mounting a case for more attention to undergraduate teaching, better treatment of women and minorities, and more acknowledgment of the need for flexibility in individual careers. All of these goals are quite uncontroversial, but also quite attainable within the existing tenure system.
Although this book casts little new light on its subject, it does aspire toward new frontiers of illogicality. An early example is the authors’ apparent endorsement of the view that the existence of non-tenure-track faculty will convince the public that an institution is serious about teaching. The buried premise appears to be that such teaching is better than what one can expect from tenured and tenure-track faculty. To show a commitment to undergraduate education by hiring non-tenure-track faculty who have no assurance of ever securing a permanent position seems a very curious way indeed of proving institutional bona fides. But this early argument is the merest foretaste of what is to come.
Full-time non-tenure-track faculty members are likely to fare better under AAUP standards than under the modest proposals of Teaching Without Tenure. Baldwin and Chronister evince no interest in integrating full-time non-tenure-track faculty into the ranks of the tenured faculty, for example, through institutional encouragement to apply for tenure-track positions for which they are qualified. Indeed, the authors rather dismissively characterize those who do apply as "tenure-track ‘wannabes.’" They do not discuss ways in which reliance on non-tenure-track faculty might, over time, be reduced. They nowhere evince any interest in the possibility that a non-tenure-track professor might, after a number of years of service, lodge a claim for treatment appropriate to tenured status, though more than one AAUP investigation has been triggered by such an anomaly. Nor do they ask the profession to reflect on the standards by which tenure is awarded. Why? Presumably because engagement with such questions would call into doubt their governing premise: that full-time non-tenure-track faculty, if only they are treated fairly and equitably, need not be discontented with their position.
The book’s title reflects a more fundamental misconception. Baldwin and Chronister seem to assume that the protections of tenure are more appropriate to faculty members engaged in the full panoply of teaching, scholarship, and service than to those whose primary mission is to teach. But any lively acquaintance with published AAUP case reports would have made it clear that the classroom is the site most likely to be invaded by administrative, legislative, or even community forces. What do the authors propose by way of protection? They approvingly cite a policy at one institution "for protecting the academic freedom of long-term non-tenure-track faculty." Under this policy, an individual with seven years of full-time service may appeal a nonrenewal to a faculty appeals committee by demonstrating that the reasons for nonrenewal are without merit and that the nonrenewal constitutes a violation of academic freedom. But such a policy, far from affording the protections of tenure, places the burden of proof on the faculty member to show cause for his or her retention rather than on the administration to show why he or she should be terminated.
The authors argue that certain non-tenure-track appointments could be appropriately continued as long as, or even longer than, the one envisioned in the previous example. On the basis of the unsupported assertion that "the traditional full-time tenure-track faculty model is no longer meeting the educational needs of a complex dynamic society," Baldwin and Chronister lament that "a two-class faculty system has emerged in American higher education." They deplore the fact that "many institutions with long-term needs are treating full-time non-tenure-track faculty as short-term solutions who are expendable and easily replaced." Instead of acknowledging that this unhappy state of affairs is the logical consequence of surrendering to the over-riding priority of "institutional flexibility in a period of rapid change," the authors propose a "probationary period" followed by multiyear contracts. This, of course, is a preposterous abuse of the term "probationary." Life itself, certain moralists inform us, is one long probation, but at least some theologies presuppose the award of tenure in the hereafter.
Indeed, the closer one draws to something that looks almost like tenure, the more the argument for a nontenure track erodes. In decrying a "class system" that attributes less worth to the contributions of non-tenure-track faculty than to those of tenured and tenure-track faculty, Baldwin and Chronister ask institutions to reward the contributions of the former in the same ways that they do "the diverse achievements of tenure-class faculty." The problem is that the authors want to have it both ways: flexibility for the administration, and reasonable security of contract for the faculty member. We are told that "in a transitional period, full-time non-tenure-track positions buy institutions time and flexibility to respond to the diverse forces that are reshaping higher education." How much time and flexibility? If a non-tenure-track faculty member turns out to be needed for twenty years, what has been gained by withholding the protections of tenure?
The authors claim that the present tenure system was designed in an era in which Caucasian males dominated American faculties, but rather than emphasizing the need for changes in the existing tenure system, their heart seems to lie in "carefully designed alternatives." In fact, practices that the authors elsewhere decry (unstoppable tenure clocks, for example) have long since been widely modified by institutions concerned with ensuring that women and minorities have equal access to the protections of the traditional tenure system.
The authors’ objectivity is at best a patina. One interviewee who likes not having to seek tenure "appreciates" her status, while another who dislikes it merely "feels" that she has been put at risk. Apparently, a grasp of objective reality makes it possible to accept the blessings of the new order, while dissenters can’t see beyond their own self-interest. Elsewhere, the pretense of balance is dropped entirely. At one juncture, Matthew Finkin’s The Case for Tenure is dismissed in one sentence, while a respectful seven sentences of summary are devoted to David Breneman’s working paper "Alternatives to Tenure for the Next Generation of Academics." Finkin’s withering critique, in his 1998 Sociological Perspectives article, of Breneman’s historical assumptions and economic arguments is absent from the bibliography of this book.
The omission is predictable, for proponents of such views, most of them writing from tenured positions themselves, never really engage in the de-bates they claim to want. Breneman’s paper was part of the "New Pathways" project of the American Association for Higher Education, undertaken with the laudable design of re-examining faculty career patterns but unhappily distracted by various antitenure guerrilla actions. That project is now apparently being consigned to well-deserved oblivion, but this book is its ideological heir.
Lawrence Poston is dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago and consultant to the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.
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