Amending Higher Education’s Constitution

The constitution reflects the views and privileges of the people who wrote it.

By Cathy A. Trower

In 1787, the founding fathers drafted a constitution for the United States of America. The result has been widely acknowledged as an extraordinary achievement and a durable model for democratic societies. By some standards, the U.S. Constitution was a work of genius; by others, it was a codification of entitlement. By any definition, it was a product of the times. While the document was cloaked in the language of “we the people,” only white men attended the convention.

As for the unalienable rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” set forth in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, women could not vote or hold property, and African Americans were property. Married women could not hold property in every state until 1900, and women gained the right to vote only in 1920. African Americans were recognized as people, and not chattel, with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. While the Fifteenth Amendment, adopted in 1870, prohibited the states and the federal government from using race, color, or previous status as a slave to disqualify a citizen from voting, full voting protections were not guaranteed until a century later with passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Legislation passed by the federal government in 1963 made it illegal to pay men and women different wage rates for equal work on jobs that require equal skill, effort, and responsibility and are performed under similar working conditions.

If a critical mass of women and African Americans had been at the table, the Constitution would surely have been a different document. And had the content been different, the course of history would have been, too. At a minimum, both groups would have had earlier and greater representation as elected officials at all levels of government. The United States would surely have had by now a woman or African American president or vice president. And both groups would have had earlier and greater access to education, capital, and real property.

Beginning in 1934, representatives of the American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Colleges (now the Association of American Colleges and Universities) met and drafted the definitive statement on academic freedom and tenure. Few women, and as far as I can tell, no people of color, participated in the deliberations. Like the U.S. Constitution, the 1940 Statement on Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure  was a commendable, if deficient, product of the power elite and the contemporary context. As the drafters of the AAUP’s 2001 Statement of Principles on Family Responsibilities and Academic Work admitted, the male model was presumed to be universal when the tenure system was created; it was assumed that untenured faculty “were not the sole, primary, or even coequal caretakers of newborn or newly adopted children.” It is difficult to imagine that, had a significant contingent of women been present, a “do-or-die” probationary period coinciding with the most likely years for childbirth would have been approved.

While the U.S. Constitution applies to all Americans, tenure does not. Those who have it decide who else gets it. Thus, the problem is less a matter of the content of the AAUP statements than it is of the enormous protection that tenure gives to incumbents. The tenured have all the power, and not just about tenure decisions. They can resist any changes the university wishes to make, including those concerning diversity and the rules that apply to incoming faculty. They are the ultimate gatekeepers, who no longer have to retire at age sixty-five. The status and protection that tenure ensures, historically conferred by and to white males who also made the rules for white males, are proving to be problematic. The troubles resulting from tenure policies are not insurmountable; the problem lies in their execution.

A Changing Academy

At least two things need to happen before we can address these troubles. First, we must recognize the changing nature of knowledge production and dissemination so that the work of new scholars is rewarded. Second, we must examine the ways that traditional tenure policies undervalue and discount the contributions of women and minorities, who are being held to an outdated standard. The tenured cannot continue to be blissfully unaware of the biases, subconscious or otherwise, that have allowed them continually to reproduce themselves. To frame the knowledge production argument, I draw upon the work of two scholars. The sociologist Bruno Latour suggested in a 1998 Science magazine article that we have moved from a culture of science to a culture of research in the last century and a half. Perhaps it is time the academy caught up with this transition. Latour writes,

Science is certainty; research is uncertainty. Science is supposed to be cold, straight, detached; research is warm, involving, risky. Science puts an end to the vagaries of human disputes; research creates controversies. Science produces objectivity by escaping as much as possible from the shackles of ideology, passions, and emotions; research feeds on all of those to render objects of inquiry familiar. Research does not always and only result in articles in refereed journals. Sometimes the path research takes leads to a dead end, sometimes to a new route, sometimes to an entirely new thought. Today’s scholars conduct research, not only science. We should reward research, not only science.

Michael Gibbons, former secretary general of the Association of Commonwealth Universities, argued in a 1998 report prepared for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization that if universities are to engage productively with distributive knowledge systems and continue to play a role as problem solvers and producers of knowledge, they will need to restructure their approaches to research and teaching. Knowledge production and dissemination are no longer self-contained activities; researchers estimate that over 90 percent of the knowledge produced globally is not generated where its use is required. Knowledge production is less an isolated, individualized activity than a creative, team adventure. Instead of doing strictly disciplinary work, we are now multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary; we identify problems and then ask for solutions that often require crossing disciplinary lines. Research is now more often shaped by the interaction between researchers and end users than by research scientists. Not only peers, but also users, must judge quality. We must ask ourselves, “What is the economic and social impact of our work?” not merely, “In which academic journal might this appear?” As the production and dissemination of knowledge have changed, so have some of those who choose to pursue careers in research and teaching.

Policy Reforms

Based on twelve years I have spent on research, including literature reviews, interviews, focus groups, and surveys, I want to offer some possible policy reforms new scholars might like to see.

Research. New faculty have many concerns about research, including what counts as research, how it is done, how it is evaluated, and the equity of support for it. In light of the changes in knowledge production, collaborative, interdisciplinary, and applied research should count for tenure. End users should have a say in the evaluation of research. Research about important social questions, race, and gender issues should count. Institutions should ensure that all junior faculty members are equally supported in their research efforts.

Teaching and service. The fact that women and faculty of color have greater teaching and service loads than white men is well documented. Cultural taxation on faculty of color is common because (1) many campuses have few faculty of color, (2) junior faculty of color feel they cannot say “no” to advising minority students and serving on multiple committees, and (3) some faculty of color actually entered the professoriate so that they might serve in these ways. We need to monitor teaching and service loads for equity during the probationary period, and if inequity exists, we must examine whether it is by “choice” or otherwise. In either case, excellence in teaching and service should count more than it currently does for tenure and promotion.

Bias in the tenure process and peer review. Newly appointed tenure-track faculty members expect openness, equity, and fairness in the workplace. But what do they find in the academy? Secrecy and confidentiality. The new scholar asks herself, “Can’t secrecy also possibly mask bias, whim, cronyism, and other extraneous factors?” New scholars believe that openness ensures equity and a focus on the candidate’s performance and that it imposes accountability on the evaluators. Thus, we might expect that a tenure candidate’s dossier, as well as the portfolios of peers, be open to inspection by tenure candidates. We might expect that measures be taken to remove gender and race information when reviewing written work so that it may be judged solely on its own merits.

Exclusion. Women and faculty of color find themselves excluded from social networks in graduate school and the “old-boy” formal and informal networks in the academic workplace. They are less likely to get postdoctoral fellowships, be asked to join funded research teams, or be mentored. Isolation is a key factor cited by women and faculty of color who are either unsuccessful in their bids for tenure or drop out along the way. A solution might be to set up formal networking and mentoring systems in graduate school and beyond to ensure greater equity. Mentoring teams for all junior faculty members should be offered, although not mandatory, as some junior colleagues prefer to “go it alone.” Importantly, mentoring should be evaluated.

Work-life balance. Part of “having it all” for the current generation of young scholars means having balance between work and home life. Members of Generation X (roughly, those born between 1963 and 1980) do not want to be like their workaholic parents; they demand a flexible enough environment to find balance. They are willing to work at home, but also sometimes need to bring home into work. Some institutions have made stop-the-tenure-clock provisions automatic (opt out, not opt in) because so many faculty do not take advantage of these provisions for fear of being deemed less than serious as scholars.

An amended academic constitution might include policies for modified duties; half-time tenure tracks; creative restructuring of the probationary period so that duties can be fulfilled sequentially (allowing time for focus on research followed by focus on teaching or vice versa); flexible tenure tracks with a five- to ten-year window (making tenure based less on time and more on output, production, and service); stop-the-clock provisions for elder care or illness; multiple paths to tenure; job-sharing provisions; policies allowing reentry onto the tenure track after time off; policies for reduced workload during certain periods; and provisions for on-campus daycare. The key is to provide flexible policies, ensure their transparency and consistent application, and measure their usage and efficacy.

If we do not amend the academic constitution, if we fail to examine the execution of our tenure and promotion policies, if we do not pay attention to the values of new scholars, if we refuse to see how a system designed long ago no longer works well, the academy will not continue to attract the best and brightest women and men of all races and ethnicities. We will not only fail ourselves; we will fail society.

Cathy A. Trower is research director at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education’s Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, a national initiative focusing on creating great workplaces for early-career faculty. Her e-mail address is cathy_trower@harvard.edu.

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