Across the Great Divide

Tenure benefits those who have it and also those who don't

By Cary Nelson

Is tenure dead? The question is less a provocation than a cliché. Certainly several groups and numerous individuals have been busy for years trying to kill it off. The Pew Foundation has long been seeking alternatives—any alternatives short of extraplanetary exile for tenured faculty. Richard Chait and Cathy Trower of the Harvard University Graduate School of Education have been dancing an anti-tenure two-step for any paying audience for more than a decade. Meanwhile, the anti-tenure mice have been nibbling away at tenure for thirty years simply by hiring faculty off the tenure track, either full time or part time.

From one perspective—that of nationwide trends and averages—the battle for tenure is already lost. Between 1975 and 2005, the percentage of American faculty either tenured or eligible for tenure was gradually cut nearly in half, from 56.8 percent to 31.9 percent. The actual number of such positions has not declined, but the majority of hiring has been off the tenure track.

Yet on numerous elite or liberal arts campuses the picture continues to look entirely different. At many of our best-known institutions, tenure is alive and more than well: it remains the primary model for faculty hiring. And here and there across the country, institutions have rethought their addiction to foraging for fast-food faculty and instead have been replacing expendable parttimers with permanent employees.

Two Worlds

In one world, where the tenure system remains strong, academic departments benefit from a stable, dedicated workforce composed of tenured and tenure-track faculty. I know my colleagues’ published work. I know the subjects of their current research. I am familiar with their course syllabi. I have built (or avoided) personal relationships with them over time. When I advise students about forming faculty committees, enrolling in courses, or planning a curriculum, I know how to balance faculty strengths and weaknesses. When we appoint new faculty, we vet them exhaustively and come to know their intellectual commitments months before they arrive. Even in moments of intense departmental conflict, in-depthknowledge of the players puts both advocacy and aggression in context. We are a community—with all of the attendant stresses and rewards—not a traveler’s hub. And our students are part of that community; in time they master its resources and risks. They too need not travel blind.

The other world, the world dominated by the absence of tenure, is nothing like this community. In the world without tenure, substantially a place of part-time employment, transient “colleagues” cross paths unnoticed, like ships blind to each other’s passage beneath the noonday sun. Yet even that blunt metaphor is inadequate, since it entails potential daytime visibility. Some departments concentrate part-timers in evening courses. Since those faculty members feed on the curriculum only at night, they are sometimes nervously referred to as “vampires.” Perhaps that is a useful provocation. If it triggers a moment of recognition, tenured faculty may realize they are our vampires. We called them up and assigned them to our darkness. They are us, the faculty.

At institutions relying on contingent teachers, the appearance of new faculty or the disappearance of continuing faculty is often unmarked. No sense of community obtains. The college is literally not a meeting place, a space of interaction, for its faculty, many of whom may retreat to the parking lot immediately after class to travel to another teaching job. A department in an institution staffed with contingent facultyis often essentially a structure filled with nameless bodies. The campus is recognizable only through its buildings and its students. In institutions without tenure, academic freedom and shared governance are often nonexistent.

A department of tenured faculty may succumb to posturing and bombast, but even that is preferable to the world without tenure and academic freedom, where the climate is too often ruled by fear. If you believe part-time faculty have academic freedom, you should talk to them and learn how some design their courses to avoid controversy and the potential loss of their jobs. Yet the heads of institutions relying on such vulnerable faculty still hypocritically claim their students are being taught through the example of intellectual courage. Not that tenured faculty are necessarily eloquent or outspoken: as legal scholar Matthew Finkin and psychologist Emanuel Donchin succinctly pointed out in a March 30, 2007, article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, tenure is not a guarantee that everyone will be courageous but a method for protecting the few who are.

The protection that the combined force of tenure and shared governance gives significantly diminishes the necessity for constant, disabling wariness and for intellectual choices shaped by estimates of personal and political vulnerability. Remarkably, many contingent faculty members remain fiercely dedicated and give excellent service despite the contradictory pressures to be forthright and cautious.

In its most comprehensive, institution-wide forms, the alienated world without tenure is consolidated across an economic and cultural divide. The world with tenure and the world without it are increasingly serving different populations. Tenure is becoming concentrated in elite institutions, where it serves elite students and offers faculty elite identities. In the world without tenure— increasingly the home of poor and working-class students, disenfranchised minorities, and alienated faculty—untenured teaching too easily becomes a second-class education.

The two other major institutional consequences of tenure’s absence— diminished or nonexistent academic freedom and diminished or nonexistent faculty governance—exacerbate the problem. But of course these two matters are codependent: curtailment of one enhances curtailment of the other. The AAUP has long known that job security underwrites academic freedom both individually and institutionally. Without a clear majority of faculty members possessing job security, a climate of fear may prevail. Faculty members at an Ohio institution without tenure told me their president warned them in 2007 that speaking to the press was grounds for immediate dismissal; a national higher education reporter confirmed those reports. And in 2004, the AAUP censured the administration of Philander Smith College for dismissing a professor who violated a similar injunction against contact with the media (censure was removed in 2008 after a new president rescinded the policy). Without strong shared governance provisions, the faculty loses control over the primary areas of its responsibility—the appointment of faculty and the curriculum.

More deeply, faculty lose control over their own fate, and they typically lose the right to peer review and proper grievance procedures. The world without tenure is a world of administrative fiat—first over all elements of shared governance, then over academic freedom as it applies to faculty speech in public and in the classroom. Although the world of faculty contingency has seen numerous serious curtailments of faculty speech in recent years, the bedrock denial of faculty agency is in shared governance. Stripping a faculty of procedural safeguards enables assaults on individual freedoms as occasions arise. To survive at all, faculty then must suppress their fear enough to function, but the fear is with them nonetheless.

Erosion of Rights

At present, the worlds with and without tenure seem sharply divided. Yet in some critical respects, they are becoming steadily more similar. The most critical cultural overlap is in administrative impatience with the element of faculty authority in shared governance. In too many elite institutions, faculty have carelessly allowed thorough faculty oversight over programmatic development, budget allocation, and educational mission to wither. Administrators have filled the vacuum and are increasingly frank in their contempt for the delays inherent in collegial process. We have learned too often that, when the bedrock of shared governance crumbles, erosion ofacademic freedom soon follows.

One sees evidence of this deterioration at many institutions with tenure. Pressure to revise faculty dismissal proceedings may rise. Ad hoc committees appointed by administrators are being used more frequently in place of elected committees to facilitate both program termination and program creation, often outside normal faculty senate review procedures. Financial exigency—as in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and in Ohio at Antioch College—is being employed to disenfranchise faculty members and set aside handbook guarantees. Faculty are suddenly finding that academic freedom no longer applies to e-mail and university Web sites. At many institutions, a general commitment to across-the-board improvement of department quality is being replaced by a pecking order based on each department’s capacity to raise external money, again without the faculty senate’s consent. Sometimes, as at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, administrators find reasons to limit the faculty senate’s ability to define its own membership and thus who participates in shared governance. And, increasingly, some institutions, among them my own, are becoming reluctant to fund unprofitable humanities and social science research, something many tenured faculty never imagined would happen.

I am not predicting that tenure will disappear from the world that presently has it. I am, however, arguing that the erosion of shared governance is a strong national trend that cuts across both worlds. As shared governance declines and managerial administration rises, tenure and academic freedom will mean less than they have for nearly half a century. The two worlds of tenure are more interdependent than they may appear. The world without tenure is a living laboratory for higher education as a whole, and the results of experiments conducted there will not bring good news to any of us.

Will institutions without tenure and academic freedom completely destroy tenure and academic freedom at those institutions that have them? Not likely. Will the world with tenure and academic freedom be gradually corroded and transformed by the world without them? Almost certainly. The slow but nearly inexorable spread of contingency from the first to the second group of schools—a spread fundamentally facilitated by passive faculty at some of our best institutions— gives fairly reliable evidence of how trends at one kind of institution can influence others.

The Role of Tenure

My dichotomous model now needs further qualification. As we all know, at many institutions the two worlds coexist, with vulnerable and protected faculty often sharing the same building but remaining invisible to one another. Surely academic freedom carries less weight where a minority of those teaching have tenure or are on the tenure track. Most of the faculty at such institutions typically have little role in shared governance and no job security. Is the meaning of tenure itself changing at such institutions? Ask yourself how many schools now credit vacated faculty lines to administrators for reassignment, when only a generation ago tenured faculty in a given department routinely had power to decide the fate of vacated lines.

Evaluating this problem would be easier if we had comprehensive institution-by-institution data on trends in faculty hiring, not simply national averages. It would also help if we knew what percentage of courses are actually taught by tenured faculty at each institution. Accurate information on the role graduate student employees play in instruction is particularly elusive, but even in its absence we can begin to ask certain critical political and philosophical questions. One conclusion we can draw is that the meaning of tenure is not only individual but also institutional. Far too many faculty members think the only thing that matters is whether they themselves possess job security. But they have less of it than they think if it does not include structural support for due process, peer review, and shared governance. Tenure is something faculties possess collectively, and its collective character varies.

Tenure is also something we possess nationally. It is sustained by the remarkable consistency of the seven-year probationary period laid out in the joint 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure formulated by the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges (now the Association of American Colleges and Universities), which today has more than two hundred organizational signatories. Despite substantial national variation, a rough normative consensus about tenure procedures prevails. That consensus, however undermined now, reinforces related expectations about academic freedom. Without those expectations, arbitrary dismissal would be far more common and restrictions on faculty speech universal.

To some degree, the survival of tenure and its reinforcement of academic freedom in many elite private universities, flagship public institutions, and liberal arts colleges constrain practices at schools heavily reliant on contingent labor. Tenure at the institutions that have it helps anchor faculty freedoms at other schools. Without the anchor provided by institutions enjoying tenure, the educational system as a whole would falter. The professoriate cannot survive in its present form without a significant number of “anchor institutions” with tenure. Though the cultural and professional power the standard of tenure wields is both diminished and threatened, tenure remains a critical component of faculty status and is crucial to the AAUP’s effectiveness nationwide, even at institutions without a single tenured professor. Yet by allowing the creation of a huge class of contingent faculty without job security, we have contributed to widespread resentment against tenure in the national faculty workforce. The alternatives to tenure, however, are all deeply flawed. They have value in relationship to tenure—as partial security for those who lack tenure— but not as independent, stand-alone replacements for the tenure system as a whole. Renewable contracts, for example, are not a problem for those quietly doing their teaching and research, but clearly put faculty critics of institutional mission and administrative decision making at risk.

New Standards

In November 2006, the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure approved a historic extension of job security and due-process rights to part-time faculty. Regulation 13 in our Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure was the product of extensive ethical, political, and professional negotiations. The standards it puts forward, growing out of decades of contingent faculty activism in the California Faculty Association, the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, and elsewhere, were negotiated in relation to the standards for tenure set forth in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Put crudely, part-time faculty were granted far more job security than most of them possessed beforehand, but notably less than comes with traditional tenure. If tenure did not exist—and was not still widely enforced for roughly a third of faculty nationally—the AAUP would have little hope of winning assent to granting a series of real but lesser rights to part-time faculty. On the other hand, the country could certainly reach a tipping point where too few tenured faculty remain nationally to anchor job security and academic freedom for anyone else. That possibility now presents real reason for concern.

The process the AAUP went through is not unlike what union negotiators go through in seeking a degree of job security for contingent faculty: their rights are negotiated in relation to the better working conditions tenured and tenure-track faculty enjoy, either at the same institution or elsewhere. Strong union support can make a tremendous difference for contingent faculty. The contracts negotiated in Vancouver, Canada, and by the California Faculty Association make that apparent. Yet the result of doing away with tenure would likely be a pervasive backsliding to at-will employment. Even multiyear contracts would be more difficult to put in place under those conditions. In other words, we have a system that has become far too exploitive of far too many people, but it will not be improved or reformed if we abandon its best guarantees. While many part-timers will not believe me, let me put this clearly: you would be worse off if tenure did not exist.

What would happen if faculty unions were negotiating employment security in the absence of tenure? Obviously, right-to-work states would be largely cut loose from any consistent policies. And the unions would be subject to the give and take, the gains and losses, of job-security negotiations in other industries. You could then look to the auto industry for a model of the academy’s future. Negotiated buyouts for faculty eligible for retirement would be supplemented by God only knows what sort of managerial inventions for jettisoning faculty. There would be no set of guiding principles for faculty employment with any realistic purchase on higher education practice. Tenure can be guaranteed by a legally enforceable union contract, but it cannot be literally invented by one.

The other lesson faculty members must relearn—a term I use because many once knew this—is that we are not powerless, despite how powerful the national trends undermining tenure may be. The collective meaning of tenure can be reshaped and altered only collectively—either by faculty passivity or faculty action. Perhaps more than anything else, faculty members need to rethink their identities so that they include a component of collective agency. No matter how strong any given faculty senate may be, every campus also needs an effective AAUP chapter, an organized, prinicipled faculty voice prepared to speak truth to power. Faculty cooperation with administrators needs to be balanced by frank public discourse and, when necessary, by organized resistance. Only in that way can tenure’s central role in defending academic freedom be preserved.

Cary Nelson is president of the AAUP. A book about his career, Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University, is forthcoming from the State University of New York Press.

Comment on this article.

Comments:

I was dumbfounded by Cary Nelson’s statement in the opening paragraph of his article in the September-October issue of Academe that “…Cathy Trower of the Harvard University Graduate School of Education [has] been dancing an anti-tenure two-step for any paying audience for more than a decade.”  This cavalier and crude dismissal of a person who has been working for more than a decade to find a way to make tenure work for women, minorities, and a new generation of teacher/scholars is completely off the mark.  To add insult to injury, Paula Krebs quoted this absurd depiction of Dr. Trower in her editorial preface to the issue.  

To set the record straight for those who don’t know, Cathy Trower is Director of the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE), which is gathering the data we need to help us improve the environment in which we recruit, retain, and develop junior tenure-track faculty, and to disseminate this information so that we can make the academy a more appealing place for new faculty to work. 

Perhaps Cary Nelson and Paula Krebs find Dr. Trower threatening because the results of her work challenge the traditional notion that the seven-year up-or-out rule that was created by white male professors many decades ago is the only true credo of our profession.  (See her article in the same issue of Academe, “Amending Higher Education’s Constitution”)  Trower recognizes that this old doctrine doesn’t work well sometimes and can actually prevent persons from being tenured who are worthy of tenure – specifically, women and minorities.  Trower is not anti-tenure; she is so pro-tenure that she is working to improve the environment in which tenure must be earned so that it can be granted to people who don’t fit the mold created for a different time.

K.F.

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