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From the Editor: The Future of Tenure
By Paula M. Krebs
Tenure ain’t what it used to be.
The percentage of teaching done by non-tenure-track faculty has skyrocketed, and tenure is now a privilege held by the minority of higher education faculty members instead of a right and responsibility that accompanies a postsecondary teaching position. This is not where we want to be. For the back-to-school issue of Academe this year, we have asked a number of folks, from a number of different positions, to speculate about the future of tenure in U.S. higher education. Some have addressed what they see as flaws in the tenure system. Some make suggestions for changes that would make tenure more central to colleges and universities. Each author, and each reader of Academe, has a stake in the idea of tenure and its role in ensuring academic freedom, the freedom of inquiry unfettered by an administration’s political or economic positions.
That is not to say that all of this issue’s authors are equally committed to the survival of tenure as we know it. Anne D. Neal, one of the founders of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, takes issue with the AAUP’s position on post-tenure review and calls for trustees to take the lead in ensuring faculty “accountability.” Cathy A. Trower, cited by AAUP president Cary Nelson in his article in this issue as “dancing an antitenure two-step” for more than a decade, argues that the tenure system as it functions now restricts opportunities for young faculty members, especially women and faculty of color.
Some of the issue’s authors call for changes in tenure criteria (Mark Bauerlein, Sylvia Hurtado and Jessica Sharkness); some call for action, collective or individual, from the professoriate (Cary Nelson, Mary Burgan, Andrew Ross, Annette Kolodny); Robert Zemsky postulates the future of tenure that will grow out of the trends he observes in higher education now. I teach at a liberal arts college, perhaps the last bastion of tenure as it is meant to be. No vast cadres of underpaid adjuncts (though we have a few), no institutionalized second tier of faculty with permanent non-tenure-track jobs. Even so, I find that some of my newer colleagues do not share my commitment to tenure for all teaching faculty, what Andrew Ross calls in his article his “AAUP fundamentalism.” These faculty members went through graduate schools that relied on contingent labor of many sorts, and they didn’t see such labor practices as threatening to the tenure of their dissertation committee members. Why should those practices threaten their own tenure?
Perhaps the articles in this issue will help us to answer colleagues who pose such questions. Perhaps the issue will prompt some of us to pay more attention to the threats to tenure at our own institutions and beyond. And perhaps paying more attention will lead some of us to change some policies. After all, we don’t want tenure to be like the weather—with everybody talking about it, but nobody doing anything about it.
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