Should tenure for college professors be abolished?

[anniezz]

I don't see tenure as the problem, it's what is valued as important for tenure that's the problem.

I wish I had tenure. Without it, employees of a certain age (like me) are feeling less and less secure in their jobs.

[englishjw]

I believe there was a time when tenure was extremely valuable in protecting professors and teachers who pushed boundries. Today it seems more of a tool to protect mediocre (or worse) instructors. The old "educational contract" of low wages + great benefits + short hours + tenure should be changed to eliminate tenure, make benefits equal to those available to other workers but increase salaries to reward performance. These are the real world variables that the rest of us work within.

[NewHope33]

I'm going with xiggi on this one ... it's not tenure that's the problem, it's the education administrators that have created an environment in which even fabulous teachers get labelled as lazy and uncaring because "they have tenure."

Stated another way, if with a wave of your hand you eliminated tenure, how would that change things? Too difficult a question? OK, how about this ... would you rather have college students taught by TAs or Professors?

PS, Just out of curiosity, what do you think college tuition would be if Anatomy was taught by Surgeons, Leadership by Fortune 100 CEOs, US Government by sitting Senators, etc?

[collegealum314]

Without tenure, the research stars who have the ability and desire to be good teachers will never prioritize it.

The argument against tenure of college professors seems to be a strange transmutation of the argument against tenure for elementary and high school teachers. It's not analagous.

I've seen both cases--research stars who are excellent teachers and ones who aren't and who don't care at all about teaching. I'm not sure if tenure fits into the equation there.

[englishjw]

This is a true story. One day we had a physics class at my undergraduate engineering school. The professor was a well known and respected researcher. He came into class and proclaimed that class would have to be canceled that day since there was no chalk for him to write on the board. For me, this is a personal example of a research oriented professor who taught only because he was forced to.

There is more to the story. An eager student raced from our class and promptly returned with a handful of chalk for the professor. I'm sure the student assumed he had impressed the professor immensely with his quick and decisive action. As the student walked away from the professor's desk, the professor threw the chalk at him.

[NewHope33]

^ Not defending that jerk's lamentable behavior at all ... but eliminating tenure addresses this situation how? Oh-h-h-h I get it ... the college would terminate that "well known and respected researcher." Fantasy my friend.

[SLACFac]

englishjw, while your individual experience is regrettable, it ought not to be used as the basis for policy-making decisions unless we can uncover evidence that it is part of a larger trend that needs to be addressed. Abolishing tenure based on anecdotes would be as short-sighted as restricting access to students who want to rush a fraternity or sorority, or participate on a varsity sports team, due to the fact that just about every professor in the world has at least one horror story about a pledge or athlete completely disrespecting the educational mission of the institution.

[xiggi]

While the plural of anecdote is not data, it might be helpful to reconsider the value of the collective power of the social media to collate this type of anecdotes. Obviously, the pitfalls of sites such as "ratemyprofs" is easy to ascertain. But here is a thought:

What would preclude schools to host websites that give precise information on the teaching performance of each teacher for the past five years, including number of classes taught, research led, research funding, sabbatical, use of TAs, and ... grades. Allow for students to comment on a forum attached to each professor, but have their identity checked.

And, of course, make this site unrestricted for viewers, but restricted to members of the school for posting.

All in all, students, and especially prospective students, have little to no RELEVANT information about the school they attend or plan to attend. Students are impressed by the pedigree of big names (Nobel etc) but have no idea if they will ever see the teacher on campus, let alone attend one of his class or lecture. For all we know, the famous person might be spending all his time in DC or writing column for the NYTimes! Everything that is negative is buried under layers of secrecy, and only comes out when scandals are inevitable. People have to make decisions based on hearsay and reputational indexes that are rarely void of manipulations and gamesmanship.

Could schools offer additional transparency? Not only could they, but they should make it a priority. Will they? Based on history, that is a pipedream, as the academic model is based on a need-to-know basis and hushed discussion in ivory towers.

The good news is that, just as the communist leaders and recent dictators could not keep their citizens from global news, the new world built on social media will force them to improve. Anecdotes are usually forgotten quickly, but this changes when they are collated over longer period of time.

[motherbear332]

The experiment has been done.

Florida Gulf Coast University gives faculty members multi-year contracts rather than tenure. I don't know that much about the university, but given that it doesn't even have a forum on CC, it doesn't look like it has turned into a shining light leading the way to a tenureless future.

Some European universities that are more established and prestigous also have multi-year contracts instead of tenure. At one that I am very familiar with, renewal is the default, and non-renewal tends to be the result of getting on the wrong side of a more powerful person rather than poor teaching or research performance.

[SLACFac]

xiggi, I respect your passion for undergraduate education, agree that prospective students and parents are not generally given the type of information that will help them make the best decision, and agree that certain important sectors of academic culture do downplay teaching undergraduates.

I guess the question would be, how do you interpret these measures? Knowing that I teach ___ classes a semester and have an average of ___ students in those classes doesn't really tell you anything about the quality of my teaching. I strongly believe that good teaching in the humanistic fields (once you get beyond the most basic introductory classes that, for better or worse, have to help students address the content gaps that most of them have because of their high school preparation) depends on the creation of trust, connection and conversation among all seminar participants. The ability to create that sort of seminar environment is extremely difficult to measure, but I think that it is one of the strongest indicators of a quality teacher in disciplines like mine.

(Note: I'm not saying that other disciplines don't value these skills, or that seminars are somehow done "best" by those in the humanistic disciplines. I don't know if/how seminars are used in other disciplines, which is why I'm not commenting on them.)

It is also impossible to consistently create that sort of environment in large classes (my experience is it is doable, if not a bit unwieldy in the 17-20 range, a bit tricky in the 21-25 range and very hard to do in a group of more than 25). You can accomplish many important things in a large class--you can still teach a lot of content, and, if you are dedicated (or have assistance), you can still give students assignments that will help them work on their writing skills. However, you cannot educate students on an entire way of reading, thinking and talking about material with other people that, to me, is an important part of humanistic education.

Actually, in my experience--which should not be taken as definitive, but I put it out here to see what others think--teaching students in the intense writing/discussion seminar environment takes more mental and emotional energy, and often more time, than teaching a larger class.

I would ask questions about the constraints on education in the humanities if professors were being asked to consistently teach more than 3 seminar courses a semester with more than 25 students per seminar (I would read statistics for introductory courses differently). Even an excellent professor would find it very, very hard to reach his/her optimum teaching performance under those circumstances. In other disciplines, you would probably interpret those stats differently. Furthermore, other people might not define good teaching in the way that I'm defining it (I obviously like my definition, or else I'd develop a new one, but I can't claim that it is authoritative), and they would also look at the stats differently.

I think it's a great idea to ask institutions to provide certain types of statistics, but I also think that, without conversations about what good education is, even the availability of those statistics might not help people make better choices.

[Hanna]

I don't think anyone has argued that abolishing tenure would turn universities into shining lights. The only question that FGCU could answer is whether the institution and its students are doing better than comparators at small, recently established public institutions -- U of West Florida is probably the closest thing to a control group there. How was its faculty development and student achievement 20 years after its founding?

A more interesting experiment, with a better control, would simply be to compare publication rates and topics of many individuals before and after they earned tenure. Do professors tackle more controversial issues after getting tenure? Are they more likely to challenge orthodoxy in their fields when they have tenure? Is there a flowering of creativity? Do their courses/grading become more challenging when they don't fear low student reviews? If so, that's a great argument for tenure. If not, then all the theory on this thread about tenure's positive effects isn't borne out in the real world.

I'm sure someone has measured this somewhere, at least on a small scale.

[xiggi]

I guess the question would be, how do you interpret these measures? Knowing that I teach ___ classes a semester and have an average of ___ students in those classes doesn't really tell you anything about the quality of my teaching.

I would ask questions about the constraints on education in the humanities if professors were being asked to consistently teach more than 3 seminar courses a semester with more than 25 students per seminar (I would read statistics for introductory courses differently).

I agree that the analysis of the finer points might not be that easy. However, it would be pretty easy to compare the load you describe as THREE courses per SEMESTER to the overall load at your school and ascertain how that compares with other teachers. In addition, I think that the relevance of comparing a typical load at a residential LAC to what happens at research universities that rely on the lecture+section model has never been greater.

I happen to agree that teaching three courses per semester is stretching the demands placed on teachers who believe in the elements you cited. On the other hand, I'd like to know more about the teachers who are combining sabbaticals and low loads to average a very small numbers of hours per year, including 1.5 rules for large lectures.

[ucbalumnus]

Originally Posted by xiggi

The 20% of faculty members (that is, 840 out of the 4200 faculty within our sample) with the highest teaching loads carry 57% of the total number of student credit hours taught at the University’s (or 55% of the total teaching load if we control for the part-time status of some faculty).

Of course, counting by student credit hours means that those who happen to teach stuff like freshman general chemistry or economics (with hundreds of students per class) will be counted as "more productive" than those who happen to teach stuff like senior or graduate level courses in the same subjects.

While a 500 student introductory general chemistry course is a greater teaching load (even when the faculty member has assistance of TAs as is typical in such large courses) than a 25 student advanced chemistry course, it is not the same teaching load as 20 sections of 25 student chemistry courses.

Using the "student credit hours taught" measure, it may turn out that LACs which emphasize small faculty-led classes at all undergraduate levels are seen as "least efficient" because each faculty member can only teach a small number of students per semester or year. But is the "efficient" large classroom with hundreds of students really what everyone wants (and is it even possible as students reach the more specialized advanced level courses)?

[QuantMech]

To add to the comment by ucbalumnus: My university will not cancel a class for Ph.D. students provided that there are at least 5 students enrolled. Classes with 10 students or so are common at that level. At the undergrad level, the enrollment needed to guarantee that a class will be offered is 15--but in practice, classes that are essential to a degree program may be offered with as few as 3 students.

Also, most universities that have 500-student general chemistry classes wish they had enough students in advanced chemistry courses to make up 20 sections of 25 students! They are more likely to have enough students in advanced chemistry to make a single 25-person section.

[sakky]

PS, Just out of curiosity, what do you think college tuition would be if Anatomy was taught by Surgeons, Leadership by Fortune 100 CEOs, US Government by sitting Senators, etc?

I'm actually not sure that this reinforces your point. I believe that your implication is that tuition would be significantly higher.. but then, so would the payoffs of such a practical and - far more importantly - well networked education. Imagine an undergraduate education where you really could develop social contacts with Fortune 100 CEO's and sitting Senators. That's an educational experience that would arguably be worth millions. The vast majority of people spend their entire lives without ever once having the opportunity to talk to a Fortune 100 CEO or a sitting Senator.