Save Tenure Now

The privileged few with tenure cannot continue to ignore everyone else.

By Mary Burgan

I begin by asserting that tenure does have a future, even though cultural and economic trends in American higher education have brought it to near annihilation in the past decade. But I am sorry to say that it has survived these trends for one troubling reason—tenure is the ultimate employment perk for very successful members of the professoriate. Without the lure of tenure, it is doubtful that ambitious universities and colleges could compete for the best and the brightest among the new PhDs. Without tenure, they could hardly participate in the game of raiding one another for superstars. Money would never be enough. Without the promise of tenure, some small liberal arts colleges or regional state campuses could not hope to retain faculty to teach on their relatively remote campuses. Of course, without tenure, the American academy’s promise of academic freedom for teaching would be compromised, but that hardly seems to matter when so much undergraduate teaching is being performed by unprotected contingent faculty; few of the notorious critics of liberal teaching in higher education worry about what goes on in graduate classrooms. As for academic freedom in research, tenure has barely summoned fortitude against some of the temptations to skew results to suit the needs of granting agencies.

And so the structure of tenure will remain, although much diminished, because it has become a privilege so customary that no competitive institution would dream of withholding it from a faculty member it truly wanted to appoint, or to hang on to when some rival school made a bid. It is now, in fact, one of the main tools for competition in a society that values winning as one of the most reliable gauges of excellence in its educational institutions as well as in its athletics.

Tenure in the 1990s

The tenure system has been under particularly heavy fire since the mid-1990s, when some higher education gurus, exasperated by the stubbornness of tenured faculty in refusing to pay attention to undergraduate teaching reforms, began to ally themselves with managerial gurus who advocated the abolition of the job security of tenure in order to ensure “nimble” responses to changing circumstances. They also believed that ambition would lapse in the modern workforce if employees were not goaded by fear of firing. If tenure was regarded as a hindrance to academic reformers, it was an insult to managerial orthodoxy.

By the mid-1990s, just-in-time, outsourced, and short-term contract employment had become common practices in industry. The industrial unions, which had demanded assurances of security and benefits for workers during the years that saw the rise of the American middle classes, were cast as the villains in a troubled world economy. There seemed to be a general agreement that entering the global marketplace entailed loosening traditional benefits for workers. Demands for contract provisions that covered medical and retirement benefits for employees were considered a form of union blackmail, and job security was viewed as one of the last vestiges of outdated employment systems. This was the era of mandatory term limits for elected officials, and even judges were put up for periodic electoral review to make sure that no one of them stayed on the bench for long without having to campaign to do so. Following suit, many educational systems initiated retirement deals to thin the ranks of tenured faculty—only to have to reappoint some of them when critical and experienced faculty members took buyouts.

The most important development in academic employment in the 1990s, however, was that the academic job market, which had seemed to have a spurt of recovery in the 1980s, hit rock bottom. Predictions that the faculty appointed in the booming 1960s would have to be replaced by a new generation in the 1990s proved to be true, but the assumption that this replacement would strengthen tenure was misplaced. Administrations, pressed by lack of resources, found new ways to give beginning faculty jobs without tenure as lecturers, instructors, adjuncts, parttimers— or, in some institutions, “professors of practice.” A whole nomenclature was invented to mask the fact that more and more of the new faculty being appointed were not on the tenure track.

And so many PhDs who had labored long to obtain the training necessary to enter the professoriate found only the most precarious toeholds for themselves there. They were angry that the tenure system seemed part of the reason they could not find positions. Meanwhile, tenured faculty seemed only mildly upset by the situation—participating in the tenure system as if nothing had changed, and hoping that their own embarrassingly jobless doctoral students would give up and go to law school. Many in the new ranks of the contingent faculty came to believe that it would be better to destroy the whole system and seek at-will contracts administered by a faculty union than to defend the expectations of entrenched faculty.

Saving Tenure

Given this current state of things, the question for thoughtful academics, even ones who have retired as I have, is whether the tenure system is worth fighting for in its diminished state. If tenure is more a reward for status than a necessary condition for the establishment and maintenance of a community of committed, disciplined, and reliably disinterested scholars and teachers, why go against our deepest social ideals and continue to defend it? I have my doubts about speaking for tenure these days because I know that if present trends continue, the academic tenure system will only help increase stratification of American higher education, privileging some academics and barring many others from full participation. Some critics may say that traditional tenure already fits that description, and so we ought to give it up. But I still respond that it does not have to, and in the past it has not done so.

Tenure was initiated about a hundred years ago to ensure that very capable individuals who enter the professoriate would find there an incentive for lifetimes of thoughtful service in the pursuit of knowledge—and in all areas of study, not just the applied and profitmaking ones. As conceived by the American Association of University Professors, tenure was designed to democratize our colleges and universities by letting each institution attract faculty who could be expected to do their work as members of an ongoing, self-governing, and autonomous community. Tenure would be quintessentially American because its safeguards would extend to all schools—large or small, famous or obscure, urban or rural. Salaries might vary, the glow of prestige might light up one professor and not another, but all would be equal in their possession of the protected freedom to think and teach as best they knew how. And their fitness to attain that guarantee would be judged by peers rather than some form of officialdom outside higher education. It is the future of this kind of tenure that remains in doubt, even while an attenuated and divisive form of it will undoubtedly continue.

The best recent discussion of whether to fight the decline in tenure, to substitute unionization for it (despite its unavailability to many fac ulty), or to settle for granting adjunct faculty a better deal can be found in an interview and discussion of The Last Professors, a new book by Ohio State University English professor Frank Donoghue, on Inside Higher Ed (www.insidehighered.com/news/ 2008/06/11/lastprofs). One online respondent suggested that the demise of tenure is like global warming. We old-time tenured faculty had been warned about its melting away, but we have not acted. The question is whether we have reached the point of no return.

As a retired tenured faculty member who has tried to defend the system as well as I could, I must join the Al Gore hopefuls and suggest that there is still time to bring our academic world back into a livable climate. But that time is passing, and the powerful, tenured members of the professoriate must lead the effort to set tenure right again. They must take a fearless and searching inventory of their disciplines—acknowledging the numbers of classes taught by adjuncts as a problem, taking on more of that teaching themselves, badgering administrations to allow tenurable replacements for tenured retirees, refusing compliance with new schemes to normalize nontenure- track appointments. They must brave accusations that they do not understand basic economic or managerial theory, asserting their own commonsense understanding of continuity, commitment, and equity as the surest bases for excellent teaching and research. There will be no future for traditional tenure if those who have it continue to ignore the fact that the time to save it is now.

Mary Burgan is former general secretary of the AAUP and emeritus professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington. Burgan’s book on higher education, What Ever Happened to the Faculty? is now available in paperback. Her e-mail address is mary.burgan@verizon.net.

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