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From the General Secretary: Tenure and Its Discontents
By Mary A. Burgan
In recent columns, I have tried to counter several of the arguments against tenure that have been offered by its current critics. Turning the tables now, I think it is important to acknowledge problems that have inspired some of the criticism of tenure, for I believe that there are features of the system as it is now practiced that justify discontent. Further, I suspect that the discontent is extremely vivid within the ranks of the junior faculty and thus casts a shadow over the future of the profession.
Although few new Ph.D.'s are willing to renounce tenure and the security it promises, many graduate students and assistant professors with whom I have spoken fear that access to tenure positions has been closed out by an emphasis on hiring only the stars—filling in with adjuncts in the meantime. They worry that the research demands of a tenure-track position might foreclose their interests in pursuits that are either too new, too old fashioned, too theoretical, or too applied to be acceptable within their disciplines. And the women among them have a conviction that taking a tenure-track position means holding off on starting a family. In short, the demands made by the current tenure system have become so excessive that many ordinarily bright and committed beginning academics wonder about the price they might have to pay to meet them.
"Publish or perish" is not a newly coined phrase. The catch has been around at least as long as I've been an academic. I first heard it in graduate school when I noticed the sad and silent disappearances of assistant professors who were rumored to have no bibliographies to offer the promotion and tenure committee. And tenure anxiety may have explained the condescending dismissal of Walt Whitman for not being T. S. Eliot by an aspiring junior professor in the only "English Journal Club" meeting I ever attended. An older and wiser graduate student friend informed me that such presentations were prelude to tenure, but only if they were in tune with current fashions.
As things turned out, my own experience of tenure was more rational. In the large English department I joined as an assistant professor, tenure could be gained by utility players who could write, teach, and run a curriculum committee. This canny department hired its assistant professors with the intention of keeping them—believing that it could make shrewd judgments about whether a junior professor was energetic and intelligent enough to be useful throughout a whole career. If the book didn't materialize, or if it flopped, such a candidate could do other things, like run the first-year program or teach the sophomore lecture classes or work with the undergraduate education majors. And so amid the inevitable anxieties of being on probation, I also had a sense that my department would be reasonable, and that the campus committees that reviewed its choices would be respectful of them.
The problem with tenure now is that the expectations are not always reasonable. The proportion of tenure to nontenure lines has diminished partly because the expectations for filling them have become impossibly grandiose. The Modern Language Association has pointed out that nowadays, two books may be expected in English and language departments, even as university presses—pinched by the economy—can no longer publish monographs. In scientific fields, the ante is up as well: the institution may pay lavishly for start-up research costs, but only if the new faculty member brings promise of a grant that ensures a return on investment.
There are always complaints about what such inflated research expectations have done to undermine teaching and service in our schools, but I worry as much about their power to undermine research. If a tenure decision is seen to impose the unbearable consequences of making a mistake on the part of departments, then their natural aversion to risk will limit their choices to "the sure thing." The AAUP has always defended tenure as an economical way to develop the profession as a whole; it has advocated institutional commitments to a broad community of excellent scholar-teachers as a wise and affordable trade-off for astronomical salaries to a few superstars. The assumption in this equation is that the community it fosters actually enables the stars to shine, that intellectual discovery is the result of collective as well as individual excellence. Once tenure becomes a rare perk, however, research becomes a commodity that is open to the highest bidder. And that is one of the greatest threats to academic freedom in our time.
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