May-June 2003

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From the General Secretary: New Pathways

By Mary A. Burgan

Waiting in the airport for a delayed plane the day after Washington's Big Storm last winter, I ran into an administrative colleague from a Texas university. He had just been snowed in at the American Council on Education (ACE) meeting, and he was eager to bring up one of the things he'd heard there.

"What's this about the new 'clinical' faculty positions without tenure?" he asked me. "The word at the ACE was that they're going to be the wave of the future." I asked who was saying that, and he fished out the ACE program. It featured two presentations by the Harvard Graduate School of Education Project on Faculty Appointments. I recognized the source immediately. It started out in the mid-1990s as the "New Pathways Project"of the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE). Funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, this project sought to devise, justify, and promulgate alternatives to tenure in higher education. I was invited to be on a panel at the AAHE's initiation of the project in 1995, and my reaction was, predictably perhaps, negative. My main question then, as now, was with tenure gone, what would take its place?

I observed that tenure was not really a free ride for faculty, but that it involved a complex personnel system—one that protected the faculty's autonomy by enforcing a very tough regime of initial and ongoing peer review in the process. The faculty's consent to it constituted an extraordinary submission to professional standards—which traded high salary levels for intellectual independence, security, and continuity. Where were both the monitoring of and the protections for faculty to be found if that system were dismantled? I mentioned unionization as one answer, and was later informed that one of the panelists had found my observation uncalled for in a civil debate.

The New Pathways project has now moved to Harvard where its director, Richard Chait, is located. The panels at this year's ACE meeting featured staff from that project, as have presentations at the annual meetings of many other higher education associations in the past half dozen years.

Researchers from the project regularly present at faculty development days and at retreats for boards of trustees across the country as well. Chait has served as adviser to boards in such places as the Universities of Arizona and Minnesota when the trustees considered cutting back on tenure. In those situations, Chait has tended to defend tenure mainly on the basis of its competitive importance in hiring research faculty: his defense impresses boards not only because it strikes an entrepreneurial chord, but also because it does not close the door to nontenured positions at lower levels. The AAUP's position is occasionally included in debates about the Harvard project; I've debated Chait at meetings of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Association for the Study of Higher Education, the Association of American Law Schools, and the AAHE. Our conversations have been respectful and personally cordial.

But I continue to be skeptical. At one point in my career as a faculty leader, I began to wonder whether deans, presidents, and board members went to summer camps; they must go somewhere to pick up the issue du jour to bring back to the campus. There must be some source for them all to take the same line and in exactly the same vocabulary—asking for total quality management, or strategic planning, or excellence, or service learning, or learning communities. "How come they all use the same lingo with the same rapt enthusiasm of the newly converted?" I asked myself. I have found the answer here in Washington in the case of New Pathways. The multiple annual meetings of institutional leaders are like summer camps; there the frustrated administrator, overwhelmed with daily problems, will hear the current solutions—packaged with graphs and tables and focus groups and the glittering promise of the latest thing out. The Harvard project offers all of these features in its promise of new ways to appoint—and disappoint—faculty in the twenty-first century. I have had to admire the persistence and penetration of the project's concerted effort to persuade academe that, at long last, it can dispense with tenured faculty.

Faculty members don't go to the same summer camps as administrators and trustees, and so they hear only the echoes and threats in New Pathways. That's why I introduce you to the project now. And that's why I am going to spend my next two columns examining some of its problems in detail. Stay tuned.