Should tenure for college professors be abolished?

GMTplus7 · June 10, 2012, 10:04pm

from a Wall Street Journal article:
[Vote:</a> Should tenure for college professors be abolished? - Ideas Market - WSJ](<a href=“http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2012/05/30/vote-should-tenure-for-college-professors-be-abolished/]Vote:”>http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2012/05/30/vote-should-tenure-for-college-professors-be-abolished/)

Critics of tenure for college professors say it is ruining the education of millions of students. In pursuit of tenure, they say, professors have become experts at churning out research of questionable value while neglecting their teaching duties. On top of that, critics say, tenure has become the tool of a stifling orthodoxy in academia, rewarding only those whose views on curriculums, administration and finances are in line with the status quo.

Proponents of tenure say its the only way to preserve the quality of higher education in this country. It sets the bar high for professors, supporters say, ensuring that only the very best are retained. And, they say, it gives professors the freedom to pursue the groundbreaking research that advances knowledge in so many fields, and the security to challenge administrators and students to do their best.

What do you think?

annasdad · June 10, 2012, 10:09pm

It sets the bar high for research, which has little or nothing to do with teaching performance.

soccerguy315 · June 10, 2012, 10:37pm

I would be interested in what percentage of professors teach undergraduates AND do groundbreaking research that advances knowledge in a field.

I bet the number is not very high at all.

Many professors write their papers and get them published in these academic journals that nobody (almost literally nobody) reads. Their research has no (again, almost literally no) impact on society.

Who would you rather learn about foreign policy from: someone that sat in their office and wrote 15 articles, or someone who worked in the field for 20 years?

My opinion might be slightly different for the hard sciences, but again I bet most of the people adding to the knowledge base are not teaching undergrads.

MaineLonghorn · June 10, 2012, 10:44pm

My dad still teaches undergrads, and he’s done a lot of engineering research. He has been inducted into the National Academy of Engineering and the Russian Academy of Engineering, so I think he’s contributed something worthwhile.

The reason he is still working full-time is that he enjoys teaching. The research is secondary for him.

MD_Mom_1 · June 10, 2012, 10:47pm

At my little college, the math teachers studied whether students who regularly did homework got better grades. DUH.

But at big name schools, my guess is that there is plenty of research that my husband would categorize as a BGO: blinding glimpse of the obvious.

Tenure does allow people to speak a bit more freely. I am on contract and I do not attend faculty meetings and voice my opinion.

SLACFac · June 10, 2012, 11:05pm

Here are a few reasons why I think that tenure is a good thing:

Compensation/pool of candidates issues–I am willing to be paid far, far less than people who hold other types of advanced degrees because my job holds out the promise of tenure. I could see a situation where the “haves” (i.e., schools with large endowments) could raise salaries and still bring in talent, but what about the “have nots?” I have to believe that the security of tenure allows institutions that are hampered by their location and other factors to bring in talented people who would not work there otherwise.

<ol>
<li>Tenure creates a sense of ownership that I believe is necessary for a successful institution–You have all probably read about “the adjunct problem.” This is a complicated issue that is all too often reduced to the claim that adjuncts are somehow inferior classroom teachers. This is generally not the case–many, if not most, adjunct professors are dedicated to their students. However, these adjuncts don’t usually have a strong interest in the long-term development of the institutions that they contract with, which is completely justifiable, since the institutions have given them no reason to have a long-term interest. I am not claiming that the abolition of tenure will lead to all faculty being employed on an adjunct model, but I think that the abolition of tenure would erode faculty interest in the long-term future of their institutions, and I think that would create problems. Curriculum, hiring decisions, advising methods, specific class offerings–all of these things have to be considered in both the short-term and the long-term view. If faculty become more mobile, I would wonder about the future of faculty governance. </li>
<li>Permits faculty to maintain standards/Academic freedom issues–This is sort of the standard reason: tenure protections allow professors to engage in innovative research AND to maintain standards in their classrooms. Given trends in higher education, I would be very afraid of professors at some institutions constantly being held hostage to student evaluations and other highly imperfect methods of evaluating teaching if the protections of tenure did not exist (it’s bad enough that many pre-tenure professors feel this pressure). </li>
</ol>

I think that the richest institutions could survive just fine in a world without tenure, but that tenure allows a lot of institutions that may not have all the advantages of the richest schools, but are doing wonderful work, to attract talented people and get those talented people invested in the mission of the institution. That type of investment bears all sorts of dividends for students.

psych_2 · June 11, 2012, 2:27am

Great post, SLACFac.

I’ll add that I’m constantly amazed that most(?) CCer’s seem to think that research that isn’t immediately “ground-breaking” is portentous, useless crap. Research is a process of synthesis, not “one and done.” Research should build on previous research in meaningful ways, and the journals I’ve published in have “novelty” or "potential for impact’ as a top criterion and actually do reject on that basis. However, you aren’t going to go from, say, developing a potentially useful compound into turning it into a safe and effective drug overnight. And one researcher sure as heck isn’t going to do every step in that process. Furthermore, that compound may look promising, may hold up well in testing, but may not hold up in every way we need it to, so it gets scrapped. That happens a lot. So, should we just stop trying? Or develop psychic abilities that will allow us to only do studies that we 100% know will work?

To use an example from my field, let’s talk about bullying. We find out that bullying occurs in X% of students and is correlated with A, B, and C. Does that by itself change anything? No, but we start to know what the problem looks like. Does that mean we never study to prevalence of bullying again, because we already did it? Surely, our one study was universal and never changing, right? So then, we look at evidence-based interventions for A, B, and C (reviewing literature is so useless). We develop them. We test them. Some fail. Some work. Yay, let’s implement them. But wait, we did more research–turns they only work in Finland, not in the U.S. Should we look at how bullying differs between the two countries? Maybe look at a number of samples and correlates? What good would that do–won’t solve a problem, right? But with this “useless” research, we revise them and implement them in one American school. They work! We implement them inn 20 other schools–but they only work in five. Clearly, all 20 studies were useless research–5 because they confirmed what we “already knew” (duh!) and 15 because they were about an ineffective program (not solving any problems there!). And we could have just made them up to begin with–why try to understand the problem through research first? ;)

Dad_of_3 · June 11, 2012, 6:46am

Like most issues in the world, it’s all shades of gray, but in my opinion, primarily to benefit the profs and not anyone else. Tenure is basically a mechanism that someone can do what they want, ignoring what is needed out of them. There are certainly a few cases where what they want is more valuable to their customers, but in the majority of cases, it is not. Just imagine that in every other job in the world, people had the luxury of doing what was needed out of them for 10 hours a week, and spent the rest of the time doing what they wanted to without being accountable. There are certainly some individuals who will do things that are more valuable than they are doing now, but in the majority of cases, the system will just become inefficient.

So in one word, yes, but keep dreaming if you think it can be done.

GMTplus7 · June 11, 2012, 7:28am

I work for a technology firm that has a tremendous number of scientists doing research. We publish; we innovate; we think long term. And we do this without tenure.

annasdad · June 11, 2012, 7:43am

There are good reasons for the tenure system. It’s also a system that can be abused, and sometimes is. Like a lot of other things, it seems to me.

coase · June 11, 2012, 7:48am

SLACFac said it well. If you had a choice between two jobs, one of which had questionable job security, you would only accept the latter job if the pay were much higher. Tenure allows universities to pay less. A few years ago, two of my colleagues left to go to the private sector. They were earning three times their academic salary within a year (and the multiple is even higher now than if they had stayed in academia). It may be true that tenure just benefits the professor, all else equal, but not all else is equal.

At my institution, pay raises depend on research productivity, teaching evaluations and service to the department, college and university. If we ignore what is needed out of us we are hit in the pocketbook. I have even had a colleague forced into early retirement because of an erratic teaching perfomance.

While doing research I have to remain abreast of the current research in the field (literature reviews are an intergal part of research papers). This helps me keep my graduate courses up to date and sometimes directly helps my undergraduate classes as well. But even if my research did not produce anything directly relevant for my classes, it still keeps me intellectually engaged. In that very basic sense, research is complementary to teaching. Think of it like working out in a gym. The worst teachers we had were senior colleagues who were not doing research. That may be a problem with tenure, but not with the focus on research per se.

Student evaluations are highly imperfect. Better teachers get better evaluations on average, but there are many cases of effective teachers who are penalized for being demanding and others who are rewarded for being less demanding.

Every time I check Google Scholar I find lots of citations to work in my field so people are reading it. The public and private sector also show interest in the work.

ordinarylives · June 11, 2012, 8:46am

Tenure, which protects a professor when he or she presents controversial ideas, is very valuable. I work for a Catholic university. Do I want to be afraid that if I select a text that goes against church teachings or discuss something controversial that it’ll get back to the local bishop, who’ll call the college president, and my head will roll like John the Baptist’s? Tenure is awarded according to standards set by the institutuion itself. Some may want a bucketload of research. Others may focus more on teaching or service to the institution. The issue isn’t so much tenure, which is desperately needed to protect academic freedom, but how schools go a out deciding what is worthy of tenure. And that can really only be addressed on a school by school basis.

SLACFac · June 11, 2012, 11:07am

Dadof3, I stand by my previous point: tenure helps institutions that aren’t sitting on incredibly large endowments and/or are located in “less desirable” locations attract talent and that benefits students.

Actually, for the vast majority of professors, this isn’t necessarily the case. In fact, the workload for professors goes up once they receive tenure, because they are then expected to take up significant service responsibilities (participating in major curriculum initiatives, chairing departments, etc.) that pre-tenure faculty do not (or should not) have. In other words, tenured faculty, in most cases, lose some of their autonomy when they receive tenure (the world of top-flight research professors operates differently, but that is also not the world of most professors). In fact, at institutions where tenured faculty will be expected to take up additional service after tenure, willingness to do this sort of work and remain committed to the institution is one of the criteria for receiving tenure.

This is one of the reasons that, according to a recent summary of research published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, ([Why</a> Are Associate Professors Some of the Unhappiest People in Academe? - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Are-Associate-Professors/132071/]Why”>http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Are-Associate-Professors/132071/)) associate professors, or those professors who have been tenured and promoted from assistant professor but have not been promoted to full professor, are the least happy members of the faculty, on average. Associates do not have the perks of full professorship and are expected to maintain teaching quality and at least some semblance of research output while doing a lot more work.

The tenured folks at my institution work their rear ends off (sure, most of them scale back in the 2-3 years before retirement, but my God, they earned that right) to steward the institution, the students, and the young pre-tenure faculty, and they do so at the cost of their own individual research prestige. I have all the respect in the world for them.

I want to be clear: I’m not looking for sympathy here, as I know that the protection of tenure is precious in an economic climate like ours. However, I believe that the common stereotype of tenured life is not terribly accurate, and so I wanted to provide additional information.

spurster · June 11, 2012, 12:11pm

What evidence is there that the current system is not working? How is it “ruining the education of millions of students”? Are there any facts behind this story? Some statistics, please, rather than hot air (the current specialization of the WSJ).

ACCecil · June 11, 2012, 12:45pm

I have tenure at a Community College. When I first started teaching, 19 years ago, I thought tenure was a stupid idea. I was used to the system of, if you don’t do a good job, you will get fired, which is how most of the profit making world works.

I have a far different perspective now and it isn’t just to protect my turf although, obviously, it is good for me that I have tenure.

If it were abolished, as the article may have suggested, it would be another blow against quality education because without tenure professors do not hav eprotection again the students and administrators, as mentioned int he excerpt in the OP. That is critical. If you like grade inflation, abolish tenure. If you like professors asking students to think and do their best without having to worry about complainst, then protect tenure.

I do not research.

The value of research is a different issue.

Tenure is important.

I realize that tenure is abused by some professors. At my college, we are working on post-tenure review procedures. So, even though I have tenure, they wil still make sure I am teaching well or else I could get reassigned. It is the best of both worlds. That way, I am protected from students by tenure, but I certainly can’t use tenure to be lazy.

Just my $.02.

I must admit, I do find it funny that some people think tenure is bad because it makes professors lazy. That is true in some cases, I realize. But the vast majority of teachers, especially K-12, take their work seriously and while I do not profess to be hard working, hell, I freely admit, I did more work in one day in The Real World than I do all week in my job now, which is why I am posting right now, I will tell you that teachers aren’t the reason education isn’t what it should be in this country.

The teachers aren’t the problem.

Super busy, and overly entitled students are the problem.

Momzie · June 11, 2012, 12:57pm

Have any of you actually ever seen a tenure file prepared by a professor and submitted to the university’s tenure and promotion committee?

To say that “it only looks at research” is simply wrong. Ours includes about sixty different documents that need to be included, and it includes a breakdown of our teaching evaluation scores by course, by semester, to be charted as to show trends, etc. There is a minimum score which is required and it’s not particularly low.

Our files also require that we include things like letters from community organizations where we might have spoken, research that we have done in concert with the community and which benefits the community, clippings from when we might have written an article or been mentioned in our local paper.

And then, yes, we are also expected to hit certain standards in terms of research. I can tell you from experience that the old, moldy professors who long ago stopped doing research also stopped keeping up with the literature that you’d want them to be familiar with in order to teach your child. Presumably, you’d want the biology professor who taught your child to also be doing research in genetics so that they would be familiar with the latest trends in genetics, including the stuff that hasn’t been published yet but which they heard about at the academic conference. (Our university only pays for us to go to academic conferences where we’re presenting. So a professor who doesn’t research will be less up on the latest information, techniques, etc.)

And good luck to the guy who would rather be taught by the foreign policy practitioner than by the foreign policy professor. Chances are what you will get is a mid-level bureaucrat who spent most of his time working on a very narrow area – say, for example, how gas prices are set in the Middle East. When you ask him a question about 9/11, the rise of China, etc. he won’t have enough historical knowledge or knowledge of a different area to be able to teach you about that, nor will he have been reading the journals where those areas are discussed. You, too, will end up with lots of “practical knowledge” about gas prices – which, incidentally, will not help you pass the foreign service exam, where they’re looking for generalists. So, as Dr. Phil says, good luck with that.

Manorite · June 11, 2012, 1:33pm

Let’s dissect the reasoning here, and see if abolishing tenure is consistent with the rest of the argument.

Claim: In pursuit of tenure, professors are focusing only on churning out research.

Tenure is a good way to ensure you don’t lose your job.

To make sure they don’t lose their jobs, professors are focusing only on churning out research.

Research is desirable for universities, and thus those who churn out research are more likely to receive tenure, and thus less likely to lose their jobs.

Once tenure is achieved, one’s job is secured.

If tenure is eliminated, one can never be sure of job security.

If one is never sure of job security, then one must constantly act to keep one’s job secure.

If one is never sure of job security, one will constantly focus on churning out research, as the premise has established that this is the main concern of the research universities in question.

Conclusion: If tenure is not abolished, professors will focus on churning out research until they receive tenure. If tenure is abolished, professors will focus on churning out research for their entire careers.

–

I don’t believe the above argument because I disagree with the premise, that professors only churn out research in pursuit of tenure. Every tenured professor I have had has been a great teacher that certainly deserved tenure. I haven’t had a non-tenured professor that was unconcerned with teaching, despite whatever research they may have been focusing on.

Of course, there are some tenured and non-tenured professors who neglected teaching for research, but I suspect that many of them would still do so without tenure, as there are plenty of other motivations, such as genuine disinterest in teaching, sense of personal prestige from publishing significantly, and a desire to advance the field.

mathmom · June 11, 2012, 2:24pm

Dh teaches at a med school so his teaching duties are somewhat limited, but keep in mind that teaching students in your lab is every bit as much teaching as what you do in the classroom.

His school actually puts you through both asst and full professorships before tenure. When you finally get tenure you really deserve. Even so they are working on ways to deal with unproductive faculty members.

IMO, at least in medical research, the real crime is how impossible it has gotten to be to get grants. Nowadays your grant can be rated in the top 10% and still not get funded. It’s made research even more critical than it used to be in the whole equation.

xiggi · June 11, 2012, 2:33pm

You are absolutely correct. Teachers are not the primary reason why our education system, especially the primary and secondary one, is in such abysmal state. One could say that the biggest victims of the system are the teachers and the … students. But, here’s a problem. The culprits are also easy to spot, and they are the people who control our education system, and have been allowed to do so mostly with the support of teachers who were promised perks, including tenure and organized sinecures.

Is the life of a young teacher as swell as it used to be? Obviously not, because the system has been developed by the elders in a time our society was able to afford it, or not that interested to challenge it. Now that we surpassed the financial limits of the system and cannot afford to pay teachers for part-time (if any) teaching duties in tertiary education, and about 180 days of presence per year in the lower sector, the “complaining” by regular people becomes more vocal.

So, yes, teachers are not the reason why the system is so bad, but they also exhibit few intentions to abandon a system that offers the protection and perks that are simply unavailable in the private sector. Changes for the better will require abandoning tenure, non-year long teaching duties, and more than anything else depoliticizing unions and CBA.

But as Churchill once said, Americans can always be counted upon to do the right thing - after all other possibilities have been exhausted. This surely applies to our education system.

katliamom · June 11, 2012, 2:33pm

My bet is that the very same people who complain that TAs do a lot of undergraduate teaching also complain about tenure.

You want your kiddo to be taught by a real professor? You should back tenure. Otherwise quit your kvetching and accept that you’ll be paying tens of thousands of dollars per year to educate your kid by only slightly older kids without PhDs.

Should tenure for college professors be abolished?

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