Tenure Wild Cards

Changes to tenure might come from the for-profits, the unions, or the general public. But come they will.

By Robert Zemsky

The circumstances of tenure have changed and will likely continue to change, perhaps even dramatically. The proportion of university and college faculty members with full academic qualifications—which usually means those with earned doctorates—who either have tenure or are serving a probationary period for tenure has been declining steadily over the last three decades. In many large research universities, the number of academically qualified faculty not on the tenure track now exceeds the number of academically qualified faculty on the tenure track. Postdoctoral fellows, research faculty, and clinical and instructional faculty are distributed throughout these institutions, providing much of the labor force that allows the institutions to compete for major research grants and to mount instructional programs in which tenured faculty primarily teach graduate students. Nothing on the horizon suggests these trends will either abate or be reversed.

Some institutions, again principally research universities, will continue to explore ways to stretch out the tenure clock—and in the case of women, in particular, ways to pause it to accommodate child bearing and child rearing. New family-friendly policies may also allow couples who share a single academic appointment, most likely in the same department, to earn tenure jointly. My guess, however, is that such efforts will be mostly under the radar, given that higher education has more contentious issues on which to focus. For the foreseeable future, the consuming issues are likely to be what I have come to call the “four horsemen of higher education reform”: access, affordability, accountability, and quality.

The push for post-tenure review has slowed, but not gone away, as attention has shifted to these other four issues. With most of the rest of the nation’s labor force occupying contingent jobs—thus facing more frequent career as well as job changes as the economy adjusts to the demands of global markets—legislatures and boards of trustees will continue asking why professors should be so privileged as to enjoy lifetime tenure without at least periodic performance reviews. So what is the future of tenure? The easy answer is that there will be more of the same: a decrease in the proportion of academically trained personnel who either enjoy or are eligible for tenure, adjustments to the tenure clock to accommodate the growing prevalence of two-career academic families, and continued fussing about how to keep older faculty, in particular, productive and accountable. But tenure itself will remain a central feature of the academic landscape.

Before we become too sanguine about tenure’s future and put our faith in the academy’s habit of seldom changing its tenure practices, let me suggest two wild cards that could portend real,probably irreversible, changes.

For-Profit Institutions

The first wild card involves the spread of for-profit higher education and its very different way of employing instructional staff. Here the model is the University of Phoenix, a business that has proved remarkably resilient despite the disdain of traditional academics. The University of Phoenix and its principal competitors or imitators have academic employees rather than faculty. The University of Phoenix is literally the owner of the courses taught by its faculty, making it the final arbiter of both what and how faculty teach. Members of the academic staffs of the University of Phoenix and similar institutions are contingent workers in the best and most restrictive sense of that term. They are well rewarded, but only as long as the content and style of their teaching is valued in the marketplace. The University of Phoenix is not interested in supporting either subjects or individuals whose efforts do not tap an ongoing revenue stream.

The University of Phoenix labor model will probably continue to spread—first through the growth of for-profit entities and eventually by extending to nonprofit institutions, particularly those serving adult and part-time students. Already most of these institutions—principally community colleges, less selective liberal arts colleges, and state comprehensive universities—employ large numbers of adjunct faculty, many of whom work simultaneously for more than one institution. Today these adjuncts are the academy’s gypsies—poorly paid, ordinarily without benefits, often without offices, and almost always without standing in the institutions they serve. The University of Phoenix treats its contingent workforce much better than do most institutions that employ large numbers of adjunct faculty. If a contingent- labor model like that of the University of Phoenix spread to these institutions, the working conditions of adjuncts would actually improve in the sense that these employees would likely be treated as contingent professionals rather than academic gypsies. But that improvement would require the institutions that employ them to abandon the distinction between “regular” and “adjunct” faculty and instead to treat all faculty members as part of a contingent academic labor force, as the University of Phoenix does.

Were this institutional model to prove successful, two conditions could speed its spread. If the number of institutional mergers and acquisitions increased markedly, such “takeovers” and “makeovers” would provide opportunities for redefining the conditions of employment, particularly where one of the two institutions being conjoined was already employing its teaching staff in nontraditional categories. Initially, most such efforts would likely involve one or more institutions training health-care professionals. In time, however, the contingent model might prove attractive to any institution that saw its future in serving an ever-changing educational market.

The growth of the contingent labor market would also be spurred if one or more of the unions that currently bargain on behalf of faculty were to take an interest in developing alternative employment contracts. I am aware that many will view such a development as simply not possible—the raison d’être of unions is to ensure job security as well as better working conditions and higher pay for employees. But in the face of the economic changes that have put a premium on short-term benefits and substantially higher wages as a substitute for job security, unions are beginning to change. Their challenge in a labor market that favors contingent work is to get the best deal possible for their members. Faculty unions will not lead the parade toward an alternative model of academic employment, but if unionized contingent workforce contracts succeed in other parts of the economy, eventually faculty unions will adopt—and adapt—similar strategies and tactics for the colleges and universities they have successfully organized.

Public Opinion

The other wild card capable of altering tenure’s future is the ever-present possibility of a public outcry on the part of those who have never liked tenure. “Why,” they will ask, “should the academy be exempt from the discipline of the labor market?” Were there to be a perfect storm—a perception of out of-control costs, a sense of students not being served, and a steady stream of arrogant pronouncements by faculty spokespersons about how the academy is different from other institutions and hence exempt from public scrutiny—a state legislature could abolish tenure in a fit of spite. However undesirable or, from the academy’s point of view, irrational such a political coup de grâce would be, it is not beyond the realm of possibility.

Most of us inside the academy tend to forget that those outsiders who know us best are sometimes the most likely to rail against tenure. In its 1999 report Great Expectations, the public opinion research organization Public Agenda noted that tenure was an issue that quietly simmered rather than boiled. Fewer than 20 percent of those surveyed said they would eliminate tenure. On the other hand, one in four respondents with an advanced degree chose the elimination of tenure as the single most important way to improve colleges and universities— suggesting once again that the more familiar respondents are with colleges and universities, the stronger their perception that faculty should not be exempt from the pressures of job security and accountability roiling other professional classes. And, lest we forget, elected officials increasingly are being drawn from this pool of college graduates with at least a master’s degree.

Widening Gap

Were a public attack on tenure to succeed in eroding its protections, the gap between public colleges and universities and the nation’s elite private universities—those with excess applicant pools, large endowments, and substantial research portfolios— would widen substantially. The wealth and prestige of these private institutions all but guarantee them the ability to recruit and retain the faculty they want. Faculty at these institutions are better paid and spend less time teaching in general and teaching undergraduates in particular. The tenure standards and procedures at these institutions are the nation’s most rigorous, while their reward systems are the most successful in discouraging faculty who want to “retire in place.” As Henry Rosovsky, who twice served as Harvard University’s dean of arts and sciences, has pointed out, faculty at these institutions are frequently absent, but they have nonetheless proved remarkably successful at preserving their independence and autonomy as well as the perquisites that have traditionally accompanied a tenured billet at a major research university. Not any time soon will these institutions be tempted to try operating without a substantial core of permanent—that is, full-time, fully tenured—professors.

Yet even in these most lofty of institutions, the proportion of tenured or tenure-eligible faculty with terminal doctorates or their equivalents has been declining and will likely continue to decline as the pressure of everchanging research agendas places a premium on flexibility. That decline will be gradual, probably imperceptible, and, given the battles that could erupt in public higher education over tenure and transitions to a more contingent workforce, of little interest to anyone except the tenure purists. Put simply, the big battles will be elsewhere.

Conclusions

In sum, the future of tenure in the United States will reflect the mix of institutions providing undergraduate, graduate, and professional education across the country. The number of tenure slots at the nation’s smaller liberal arts colleges will likely contract as some close, some merge with or are acquired by more sustainable entities, and some begin experimenting with contractual arrangements that more closely mirror what is happening in the larger economy. These changes will be regarded as necessary because of liberal arts colleges’ dwindling share of the market, the need to expand into post-baccalaureate professional education, and the need to appoint adjuncts to accomplish this latter task.

Meanwhile, institutions like the University of Phoenix, which see in their faculty a contingent workforce to be employed using short-term contracts that allow the enterprise to expand and contract as market demand shifts, are likely to continue to grow in number. Consolidations— both mergers and acquisitions—will provide further opportunities to change academic working conditions while lessening the importance of tenure.

At private research universities, conditions will change more slowly. While tenure will remain a vested academic privilege, the proportion of tenured academic personnel will decline as these universities organize their research enterprise using ever larger research teams presided over by tenured faculty members but increasingly made up of academic professionals who remain off the tenure track for all or most of their careers.

The most dramatic as well as the most disruptive changes will likely occur in public institutions in states where it proves politically expedient to legislate the elimination of tenure. The opening shot in this battle will likely be in a small, politically conservative state or one with an established tradition of legislating by ballot initiative. The rhetoric will be angry, with each side claiming truth, justice, and virtue for itself. The losers in such confrontations will be the state’s public colleges and universities regardless of who wins the political contest. Ultimately, all of higher education will lose as faculty everywhere else, fearing that they are next to be challenged, resist all proposals that seemingly change the nature and privileges of the academy.

Robert Zemsky is professor and chair of the Learning Alliance for Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

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