Scholarship Is Changing, and So Must Tenure Review

To gain the freedom to innovate, we must get tenure; yet to get tenure, we must be conformists.

By Sylvia Hurtado and Jessica Sharkness

The future strength of the tenure system—and the survival of tenure itself—largely depends on the continuing support of faculty and the capacity of faculty to develop review processes that recognize emerging forms of scholarship. Assessments of the quality of scholarship through internal and external reviews, however, do not always reward new kinds of scholarship; in many cases, traditional tenure review processes discourage innovation  and serve to reinforce existing disciplinary paradigms. This problem is not new. In his 1990 book Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, Ernest Boyer, then president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recognized the issue and attempted to move the academic community beyond traditional ways of thinking about the evaluation of scholarship. He argued that scholarly evaluations should reward not only “discovery” but also work that crosses the boundaries between scholarship, teaching, and service. Today, innovation in faculty work and attempts to cross disciplinary boundaries are still not adequately recognized and rewarded. Renewed efforts are required to introduce flexibility into review processes deeply embedded in disciplinary structures.

Data from the 2004–05 faculty survey administered by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles—which include responses from 40,670 faculty members at 421 institutions—can provide insight into some of the challenges facing the institution of tenure. Although the data do not directly address whether innovations in faculty work are considered favorably or unfavorably in various kinds of scholarly review processes, the data do cover how faculty view tenure as an institution as well as the extent of faculty involvement in the kinds of innovative scholarship that may prove challenging for tenure review processes. In particular, survey data reveal that not all faculty fully support tenure, and that a substantial number of faculty are involved in research that spans multiple disciplines.

Faculty Support for Tenure

The Higher Education Research Institute’s 2004–05 faculty survey contained two items that assessed faculty support for the institution of tenure. The first asked how strongly faculty agreed or disagreed with the statement, “Tenure is an outmoded concept,” and the second asked how strongly they agreed that “Tenure is essential to attract the best minds to academe.”

The survey revealed that about one-third of faculty (34 percent) believe tenure to be outmoded; this proportion has remained about the same since 1989. Perhaps more importantly, 61 percent believe tenure to be essential to attract the best minds to academe. This finding suggests that almost two-thirds of the faculty views tenure as a valuable institution while the other third does not, but those figures may be misleading. A little more than half (52 percent) of the faculty shows uniform support for tenure, while a quarter does not; the remaining quarter provides mixed reviews of tenure (see figure).

Not surprisingly, the survey found that attitudes on tenure vary among tenured and nontenured faculty. Approximately 66 percent of tenured faculty believe that tenure is not outmoded and is essential to attract the best minds to academe, compared to 50 percent of faculty probationary for tenure and 29 percent of faculty not on the tenure track. More than one in ten tenured faculty (15 percent), however, do not support tenure, finding it to be outmoded and not essential to attract the best minds to academe (27 percent of probationary faculty and 44 percent of non-tenure-track faculty feel the same way).

Interdisciplinary Work

Some faculty might have concerns about the institution of tenure because they believe that the tenure review and promotion process does not fairly evaluate innovative faculty work. Although the university should be an ideal environment for work across disciplines, properly valuing and rewarding such work has been a perennial problem. Higher education scholar Lisa Lattuca explored this problem in her 2001 book Creating Interdisciplinarity and found that much of the resistance to interdisciplinary work lies in the insularity of particular disciplines, the lack of an institutional climate of interdisciplinarity, and the structure of the rewards system. “Disciplinary structures,” Lattuca writes, “can impede interdisciplinary scholarship, and faculty are sometimes dissuaded from pursuing interdisciplinary work by fears of unfavorable reviews from colleagues.” Her interviews uncovered “a pervasive fear among faculty who do interdisciplinary work . . . that colleagues will neither appreciate nor reward it”; thus, “engagement in interdisciplinarity can be especially intimidating for junior faculty who depend on the support of departmental colleagues for their promotion and tenure.” The 2004–05 faculty survey found that, nationally, the vast majority (83 percent) of faculty do at least some kind of academic work spanning multiple disciplines, and almost one-third (32 percent) do such work to a “great extent.” Faculty working in fields within engineering, the social sciences, and the humanities are the most likely to engage in interdisciplinary work, although faculty in the natural sciences (particularly the physical and biological sciences) also frequently report doing disciplinespanning work.

In terms of the tenure and promotion process, many of the faculty members who are involved in work spanning multiple disciplines worry that their scholarship will be undervalued. For example, faculty doing a great deal of interdisciplinary work are the most likely to feel that they must work harder than their colleagues to be perceived as legitimate scholars and are least likely to believe that their personal values are congruent with dominant institutional values (see table). Taken together, these results indicate that faculty pursuing multidisciplinary scholarship sense that their work is “outside of the paradigmatic box.” Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the survey found that faculty who do multidisciplinary work are the most likely to feel that research and publishing demands as well as the tenure review and promotion process are sources of stress for them. On the other hand, they are also more likely than other scholars to feel that they have many opportunities to develop new ideas in their research.

Even tenured interdisciplinary scholars are more concerned about the review processes than tenured scholars who do not engage in work that spans disciplines, though junior faculty conducting interdisciplinary work feel by far the most vulnerable. This finding meshes with research on the relationship between interdisciplinarity, faculty interests, and tenure. As Diana Rhoten of the Social Science Research Council and sociologist Andrew Parker note, in the sciences young scholars tend to “gravitate toward the rich scientific opportunities at disciplinary boundaries,” but “the tension between the scientific promise of the interdisciplinary path and the academic prospect of the tenure track” means that they may risk their future careers in doing so.

Complicating the picture is the fact that faculty members who do a great deal of interdisciplinary work are also more likely to engage in other activities that can prove difficult to evaluate in the tenure process. For example, interdisciplinary scholars are far more likely to focus their research on women, gender issues, racial and ethnic minorities, and international or global issues in their research. They are also more likely to teach in those areas and to teach courses involving service learning in a community. Furthermore, scholars doing interdisciplinary work are more likely than those who work within a single discipline to use their scholarship for public benefit—for example, by addressing community needs or publishing op-ed pieces. Many of these activities fit within Boyer’s expanded notions of scholarship but have not yet been incorporated into standard notions of academic work.

Outside the Box

Despite the risks, many faculty who work outside of the paradigmatic box still support tenure. We must become flexible enough to fairly evaluate and reward their scholarly activities. Such fairness will require that we select reviewers who can properly evaluate not only interdisciplinary work but also other scholarship that poses challenges to traditional review processes, such as mixed-method research; action research, which is done in collaboration with a community; use of online publication venues; and work that blends aspects of teaching, research, and service.

Peer-review processes in journals allow an author to respond to critiques that are sent back to reviewers, providing an opportunity to educate reviewers about the work, but most tenure reviews do not permit this dialogue to take place. While tenure allows established scholars to navigate uncharted waters and cross disciplinary boundaries, young scholars still feel that they pay a price for working on the edge of their disciplines. Faculty must obtain tenure in order to gain the freedom to pursue innovative research, yet ironically, the process of acquiring tenure may constrain talented scholars to normative modes of scholarship and pursuits within established paradigms. If the essential value of tenure lies in providing a secure environment for the development of new knowledge and innovation, then our review processes must adapt to changes in scholarship.

Sylvia Hurtado is professor and director of the Higher Education Research Institute, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has written on diversity, teaching and learning, and student outcomes in higher education.

Jessica Sharkness is a doctoral student in the Higher Education and Organizational Change program at UCLA as well as a research analyst at the Higher Education Research Institute.

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