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<p>Or sometimes not. I can think of quite a few tenured professors at top-tier universities who are, frankly, neither doing much research nor much teaching. Instead, they seem to spend most of their time on their own personal endeavors, such as their own side consulting businesses. </p>
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<p>I’m not entirely sure about that. Frankly, it’s hard for me to see what harm the abolition of tenure would generate. Note that such abolition wouldn’t mean that all of the senior faculty would lose their jobs. Those who continue to be productive would be allowed to remain and would therefore enjoy ‘effective tenure’. We would simply remove the lifetime guarantee that the tenure system provides. </p>
<p>The best argument in favor of tenure - and where I might agree that harm might be engendered if abolished - is that it allows faculty to tackle politically unpopular research topics without fear of repercussions, and for that reason tenure probably did provide social value in the past. But, honestly, how many tenured faculty actually do that nowadays? Tenure may therefore merely be an anachronism. </p>
<p>We should also keep in mind that the tenure system does not actually create overall job security, but rather redistributes job security. The tenure system provides lifetime job security for the senior faculty, but only at the expense of tremendous job insecurity among the junior faculty. Every year, boatloads of assistant or untenured associate professors are ‘fired’ every year because they failed their tenure reviews, despite their work usually being good enough to allow them to remain at the university at the assistant or associate level if that choice had been available. To replace the fired professor, the university then has to hire another junior faculty member, often times newly minted from a PhD program or post-doc, who would then surely have fewer research credentials or teaching experience. </p>
<p>Ultimately, who seems to be hurt the most are the students. In all of my years of schooling, the least experienced teachers I ever had were college professors. All throughout K-12, I can’t recall a single teacher who didn’t have at least 2 years of prior teaching experience. {Granted, K-12 schools obviously do hire new teachers, but I didn’t encounter any, and their ranks are obviously dwarfed by the sheer number of experienced teachers.} But I’ve been taught by numerous college junior faculty who had less than 2 years of prior teaching experience, and in some cases, no prior experience whatsoever. The constant cycling of junior faculty due to the tenure process serves to ensure that many faculty members will have minimal teaching experience. With only rare exceptions, it is usually a painful experience to take a class taught by somebody who has never taught before. </p>
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<p>Let’s just say that I understand the system all too well.</p>