Tenure, Academic Freedom, and the Career I Once Loved

We’re being underfunded out of existence.

By Annette Kolodny

In the fall of 2007, just months after my retirement, I was asked to contribute a personal retrospective piece to a planned collection of essays by senior feminist literary scholars. Almost without thinking, I found myself writing the following:

Much though I have loved both teaching and scholarship [and even some aspects of administration], if I were twenty-one again I am no longer certain that I would apply to graduate school in order to pursue a career as a college professor in the humanities. Under the pressure of the ultra-conservative right and the related pressure of chronic underfunding— especially in the public universities—the humanities no longer seem to me an inviting haven for audacious intellectual inquiry or a place to build a reasonable career. I am seeing too many budding young scholars frustrated by the lack of tenure-track positions, forced to carry heavy course loads as adjuncts, or pushed into a quasi-nomadic existence as they repeatedly move from job to job. There is little that is satisfying in this kind of teaching, there is never time for one’s own research and writing, and there are certainly no meaningful financial rewards, let alone job security. Under such conditions, the love of one’s field or discipline is hard to sustain.

Writing the sentences above unnerved me. They seemed almost a repudiation of what I had once struggled so hard to attain.

In 1975, following a denial of promotion and tenure by the English department of the University of New Hampshire, I filed one of the first Title VII lawsuits, charging UNH with sex discrimination and anti-Semitism. My purpose then was not only to secure the promotion and tenure that I knew I had rightfully earned but also, perhaps just as important, to preserve an ideal of academe as a meritocracy where serious inquiry survived unfettered and protected, no matter how daring or controversial. Through that process I came to understand that, without tenure, I could never be sure of having the protected space I needed in order to pursue feminist teaching and research projects that, at the time, were still unfamiliar to or even looked upon with suspicion by many of my colleagues. Happily, I eventually prevailed in a precedent-making out-of-court settlement, and my career survived.

With this personal history behind me, when I was appointed as dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona in 1988, one of my first goals was to initiate a comprehensive faculty review of the college’s promotion and tenure documents. I wanted to ensure that they provided a level playing field for women and people of color while also fairly evaluating new or potentially controversial areas of research and scholarship. After three years of difficult rethinking and rewriting, the faculty voted to approve truly innovative new criteria and procedures that have become models for other institutions around the country. These activities coincided with a period when senior academic administrators everywhere were trying to forestall the dismantling of the very concept of tenure.

The problem was particularly acute at publicly funded institutions, where the threat came most often from conservative state legislators who complained that tenure was protecting inept teachers or overpaid professors who did not teach at all. The litany of complaints was basically the same in almost every state: tenure was an outmoded lifetime sinecure that protected deadwood and prevented institutions from firing nonperforming faculty members. Without fail, the solution proffered was to eliminate tenure altogether so that incompetent professors could be dismissed and lazy professors be forced to teach more (or be fired).

Despite the ubiquity of these assaults on tenure, most campuses—like my own—were finally able to circumvent the call to abolish tenure by addressing what was perceived as its main systemic shortcoming. At the University of Arizona, as at other institutions, regularly scheduled post-tenure reviews were instituted in departments where they did not exist, and such reviews were made more rigorous where they were already on the books. Teaching-improvement programs were developed for faculty members whose classroom performance was found deficient. High-quality teaching in all the faculty ranks was thereby ensured, schools told the public, because repeatedly poor teaching evaluations clearly justified initiating a dismissal procedure “for cause.” Now, however, both tenure and academic freedom are in crisis again—albeit for very different reasons.

Unwritten Compact

There used to be an unwritten compact between public colleges and universities and the state and federal governments. In exchange for various kinds of relatively generous financial support from both state and federal sources, public institutions kept tuition low (or charged no tuition at all) and thereby provided unprecedented levels of access to higher education for increasing numbers of students. As part of this compact, the federal government looked to public institutions as its most reliable and cost-effective research arm, funding various projects through a host of government agencies.

Undergirding this compact was the joint 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure of the American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Colleges (now the Association of American Colleges and Universities). Under the principles enunciated in that statement, public institutions could effectively compete with the private sector to attract the best and the brightest for faculty positions. In other words, many very talented people accepted the lower salary scales of academe in exchange for the security of tenure and the freedom to pursue long-term, complex research or artistic projects. But the compact has unraveled, and the undergirding is eroding.

Three intertwined and mutually reinforcing circumstances explain today’s dismal situation. First, as a nation, we have lost any shared and clearly articulated sense of the goals and purposes of higher education. Second, the rationale and workings of tenure are poorly understood and, outside of academe, no one can agree on what the term “academic freedom” really means. Third, over the last twenty-five years, as the costs of a college education continued to escalate, the groups most eager to enter our colleges and universities have been increasingly priced out of the market. At the same time, our public college and university systems have been chronically underfunded.

Most undergraduates at public institutions (and most students’ parents) will give you one clear and very practical definition of the role and purpose of higher education: a college degree represents the minimum prerequisite for attaining at least a middle-class lifestyle. The purpose of higher education, according to this view, is to help prepare students to succeed in today’s uncertain economy.

More privileged members of our society, as well as most of us who enter the teaching professions, still enjoy the luxury of believing that the purpose of higher education is to teach students how to examine ideas critically and put into question inherited beliefs, conventional pieties, and accepted wisdom. Yet that ideal of a liberal arts education is being called into question by current economic pressures. And that fact inevitably places readers of Academe in a quandary. For if, as we so often assert, academic freedom and tenure are the irreducible bedrocks upon which our modern colleges and universities stand, then why do we, as a nation, no longer share common understandings of the role and purpose of the higher education that academic freedom and tenure are supposed to enable? How can we make claims for academic freedom and tenure as safeguards when we cannot all agree on the goal or purpose of the education they are supposed to safeguard?

A Little Survey

I have spent the last six months conducting a very unscientific little survey, asking all sorts of people whether they have heard the term “tenure” or the phrase “academic freedom,” and, if so, whether they know what they mean. I heard relatively well-informed responses from graduate students and from individuals employed by educational institutions of all types. But by and large, undergraduates, their parents, and those not engaged in the teaching professions had no idea what tenure meant or how it was awarded. They did not relate it to faculty ranks and promotions. A few parents, however, told me they thought tenure meant lifetime employment for faculty, no matter what. And some folks in the grocery store, echoing that misperception, told me tenure conferred on professors an extra measure of unfair privilege when the unemployment lines in Tucson are daily getting longer. No one associated tenure with academic freedom.

In fact, most people with whom I spoke had only the dimmest recognition of the phrase “academic freedom,” but people told me what they wanted it to mean. Over and over, prospective college students and those already in college said academic freedom should mean the freedom to be able to afford a college education, and, once in college, the freedom to study any academic subject they want to study. Parents complained bitterly about the costs of a college education and said academic freedom should mean the freedom for every academically qualified young person to obtain a college education, and maybe even a free (or at least low-cost) education for students from limited financial circumstances. By contrast, for those for whom a college education was not a personal or family concern, academic freedom suggested that, as long as they qualified for admission, all American high school students enjoyed the freedom to obtain a college education and study whatever they wanted. And many were sure that young people in other countries do not enjoy such freedoms. These last respondents seemed blissfully unaware that, in many European countries, a college education (and often graduate and professional school, as well) are free to the qualified, while the brightest and most talented children of the poor in the United States have far less of a chance of achieving a college degree than the low-achieving children of the wealthy.

The general public, I fear, has no idea what tenure and academic freedom mean or how they might be related. And too many people still mistakenly believe that, where higher education is concerned, America remains the land of level playing fields and equal opportunity for all.

Another conclusion can be drawn from my survey: lots of people want a college education, either for themselves or for their children, but they find that dream increasingly difficult to obtain. Their comments were often laced with anger and frustration that college had become so expensive. As a result, children from poor, lower-income, and even middle income families—those most desperate to get into college as a way of escaping the threat of poverty—have no reasonable way to pay for college except to work part time (sometimes full time) or take on heavy debts. To make matters worse, a Republican Congress saw to it that federally guaranteed student loans were handed over to for-profit private lending institutions that can raise interest rates on those loans again and again.

Increasingly, these economic realities have an impact on student enrollment patterns. Rather than study what might really be of interest to them, many students feel the need to major in fields in which they have a reasonable expectation of lucrative employment following graduation. The student who once might have studied classics or philosophy opts instead for abusiness major, and the student who once might have majored in literature chooses instead to take a degree in pharmacy.

Changing student enrollment patterns have a direct impact on how public colleges and universities allocate funding. In times of financial stress, schools tend to “downsize” departments or programs where enrollments are slipping or combine them with other programs and departments (regardless of whether the resulting amalgamated entity makes intellectual or pedagogical sense). At worst, entire programs and departments are eliminated altogether.

While none of this downsizing constitutes an intentional assault on either tenure or academic freedom, in fact both are undermined. Inevitably, some fields and disciplines will be available only in the privileged precincts of wealthier institutions. We thereby narrow our students’ abilities even to be aware of the vast range of human knowledge. So much for those who told me that academic freedom means the freedom to study whatever you want.

No less important, a school that declares “financial exigency” as the rationale for closing down academic programs or departments is legally empowered to terminate the services of even tenured faculty. Declaration of financial exigency can provide a pretext for eliminating programs or departments in controversial subject areas and, at the same time, eliminating in those same programs and departments faculty members whose research or publications may have attracted unwanted publicity. But even if programs and departments are not eliminated, when enrollments begin to slacken, many colleges and universities respond by hiring non-tenure-track faculty. From the point of view of the university administration, the hiring of adjuncts, part-timers, and term lecturers provides maximum flexibility for the continuing downsizing of faculty cohorts in fields with low or unstable student enrollment. Beyond the fact that overreliance on non-tenure-track faculty can adversely affect the quality of teaching and advising in any department, and beyond the fact that many fine teachers and scholars are exploited by these circumstances, the use of nontenure- track faculty also has an impact on the preservation of tenure and the future of academic freedom.

Budget-conscious administrators too easily become habituated to the lower salary and benefits costs associated with departments and programs staffed largely by nontenure- track faculty. Inevitably, even if sometimes grudgingly, tenuretrack faculty members in such departments take on additional student advising and departmental governance duties. Students may grumble that certain courses are not always offered or that insufficient faculty members are available for advising. But even with low morale, the department staggers on, hoping for better times ahead.

Unfortunately, though, the longer any department appears to meet student demand and to function at least adequately without a majority of its faculty on the tenure track, the more likely it is to communicate (however unintentionally) that, even if not ideal, the situation is workable and can continue. Over time, situations once considered unacceptable and temporary become institutionalized. And if Department X can get along with less than half its faculty in the tenure ranks, some legislator is sure to demand, then why can’t others? In this way, gradually, the pressure to reduce the tenured ranks—rather than simply abolish tenure altogether—accelerates, not for ideological reasons but for budgetary ones.

The downsizing of the tenure eligible ranks has direct consequences for academic freedom. Faculty members without tenure will hardly risk pursuing cuttingedge or potentially controversial research and publication (if they even have time for research), and they will avoid raising controversial or contentious subjects with their students. Tenure was designed, in large part, to protect academic freedom in research and teaching. When fewer and fewer faculty members on any campus enjoy the protections of tenure, then academic freedom on that campus is necessarily also imperiled.

Suggestions

Given the financial burden they are taking on, parents and students are not interested in debates over tenure or academic freedom lest these distract them from the immediate goal of preparing to earn a living. Overburdened parents are particularly vulnerable to right-wing charges that proselytizing left-wing professors have invaded the campus and are leading their sons and daughters astray by introducing inappropriate political material into the curriculum. Overburdened undergraduates— students working twenty to forty hours each week to pay the bills and still taking out student loans— greet their required general education liberal arts courses as impediments to getting on with the practical major for which they signed up. They have no inclination to confront ideas or subjects that might unsettle their worldview. And with rare exceptions, they have no incentive to concern themselves with the esoteric issues of academic freedom or to distinguish between their teachers who are tenured and those who are not.

I have five suggestions for how we might begin to address these problems. First, we need to do a better job of educating our governing boards, as well as our state legislators and the general public, about the meaning and importance of protecting both tenure and academic freedom. Nothing less than the nation’s entire research infrastructure is at stake. Second, we need to find more accessible ways of talking about the core values of higher education that make clear that preparation for earning a living and stretching one’s imagination are not incompatible. Indeed, they can be mutually beneficial. Third, we need to be clear that the financial impact of the trillion-plus dollar debt imposed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be with us for generations. We now have to abandon the idea that public institutions will be adequately funded by state and federal governments in any foreseeable future, and therefore we need to court private support from devoted alumni and local business interests, make these supporters our advocates to the state legislature, and enlist them in capital campaigns. Fourth, we need to introduce the concepts of tenure and academic freedom into our classrooms as part of our subject matter. We need to explain the meanings of the concepts and point out to our students the topics that would be banned or nonexistent without academic freedom protections, or the famous research projects that would never have been completed had the professor not had tenure. And fifth, we all need to start unionizing, not just the adjuncts and graduate teaching assistants. Especially for faculty in fields that do not attract substantial external funding, collective bargaining may be the only means to securing tenure and academic freedom protections as well as reasonable teaching loads and adequate salary levels.

Unless we preserve both tenure and academic freedom in teaching and research, why would a life in academe any longer be attractive? Surely those considering such a life will not be drawn by the money or (except in some few departments) the luxurious office, the well equipped lab space, or the state-ofthe- art classrooms. To be sure, most of us love teaching. But the exhilaration one experiences in the classroom may not be enough to keep future generations of PhDs on campus if other factors—like tenure protections, support for academic freedom, secure employment, and reasonable salaries and teaching loads—are not also in place. Today, one-third of all K–12 teachers leave the profession in their first three years. By five years, half of them have left. Will this be our future, too? Or will higher education simply no longer attract the best and the brightest to its faculty ranks? I am no longer certain it would attract me.

Annette Kolodny retired from the University of Arizona on June 30, 2007, having served as dean of the College of Humanities from 1988 through 1993 and, subsequently, as College of Humanities Professor of American Literature and Culture. Kolodny detailed her personal experiences as dean as well as the means of effecting positive change on campus in her 1998 book, Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty-first Century.

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