Why should universities guarantee jobs to a bunch of elitists who study esoteric subjects and brainwash students with left-wing politics? This critique of tenure in higher education is as old as tenure itself, and it’s gaining ground. In recent years, governing boards and legislators in several states have attempted to ban tenure or curtail its power — sometimes succeeding, as in Wisconsin. In the American labor market, where employers have unusually wide latitude to hire and fire at will, it’s not hard for politicians to channel popular resentment toward a small class of workers with relatively strong protections.
That class is getting even smaller. The proportion of American faculty members on the tenure track has been falling since the 1970s, and today just a third of college professors have tenure or are on track to receive it. Every year more and more teachers join the ranks of contingent faculty, surviving contract to contract with little hope that these debates will ever apply to them.
Over the years, tenure’s defenders have offered up noble pleas for the system. It does not grant a teacher a job for life but simply protection from arbitrary firing and retribution; it safeguards academic freedom; it decreases turnover and creates a more stable learning environment for students; it’s more cost-effective than critics suggest, especially when compared with how much universities spend on new administrative positions and lavish student facilities.
All these arguments are basically right. But they will never persuade tenure skeptics outside the university. That’s because the fight over tenure is not really about tenure. It’s a proxy for a larger debate about the meaning of academic freedom and the priorities of higher education. These are intractable battles in the culture wars, but universities are not helpless to confront them — as long as they grapple with the real problems in the tenure system and academic culture.
David Helfand, an astronomer at Columbia University, began to notice these problems when he was in graduate school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He told me he “saw two classes of faculty: one class that was essentially untouchable, no matter productivity or behavior — and this was 50 years ago, so their behavior was not up to modern standards — and another class that was walking on eggshells.” When he arrived at Columbia as a junior professor in the late 1970s, he said, his colleagues told him to focus on research and “minimize my effort in teaching, because it would be detrimental to my future.” Tenure review at Columbia — and at many other universities — continues to focus heavily on a candidate’s scholarly publications.
By the time Dr. Helfand came up for review, he had made up his mind that he did not want the thing he was supposed to organize his life around achieving. When Columbia tried to give it to him anyway, he fought. The administration finally agreed to put him on five-year contracts. A few years ago, he took a leave of absence to serve as president of a new school in British Columbia called Quest University, which offers faculty members multiyear contracts instead of tenure, with a review process focused on rewarding teaching and a wider range of scholarly endeavors rather than the usual expectation of specialized books and articles.
Dr. Helfand went back to Columbia and served on a committee trying to revise the tenure review process to attach appropriate weight to teaching. “We wrote a report that would have changed things, had anyone paid attention,” he said. “It has always been my position that excellent undergraduate education and excellent research are not fundamentally incompatible, but I must say, after 44 years of trying to change things, I’m beginning to wonder if they are.”
It wasn’t always this way. The American academics who first lobbied for tenure a century ago did not see it as a prize that scholars should win after publishing enough articles in sufficiently prestigious journals or landing book deals with the right university presses. The American Association of University Professors drafted its first statement on tenure in 1915 and refined it in 1940, in response to the academic labor market and political pressures on faculty members suspected of “subversive” left-leaning teaching.
The idea was to protect the academic freedom of all instructors who proved themselves competent teachers for a reasonable trial period, regardless of research output. The association declared that “tenure is a means to certain ends; specifically: (1) freedom of teaching and research and of extramural activities, and (2) a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability,” since salaries in academia could never compete with those of the private sector.
Harvard introduced the practice of prioritizing research in the criteria for up-or-out promotion and tenure in the late 1930s, under the presidency of James Conant — although faculty members at the time cautioned against his narrow emphasis on research. Other elite schools adopted the practice in the higher education boom years after World War II, according to the research of Richard Teichgraeber, a historian at Tulane University. At most universities, the publish-or-perish rule did not take hold until the late 1960s. “This is how a lot of stuff happens in this country. Ideas and practices spread from the Ivies to the prestigious public universities, then to the midlevel schools offering master’s programs, to the middling bachelor’s institutions,” Hans-Joerg Tiede, the director of research for the American Association of University Professors, told me.
Ever since then, the pressure to publish quickly has driven faculty members down ever narrower lanes of inquiry, searching for some hidden byway no one has taken before in order to claim an original (if, to nonspecialists, trivial) contribution. In graduate school, aspiring professors often hear: Don’t be overly broad in your dissertation; you’ll have to get it done and published, because hiring committees care far more about that than how prepared you are to teach a wide range of subjects. Academic freedom no longer includes freedom to be a generalist.
No wonder most of us are hyperspecialized and write for tiny audiences of fellow experts. No wonder most Americans don’t really understand how professors spend their time and think higher education is “heading in the wrong direction,” according to a 2018 Pew survey. “There have been these trends over time. If you think about how departments form and then specializations within departments, pretty soon you’re a specialist in an increasingly narrow area,” Gilda Barabino, the president of Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Mass., told me. “We have to broaden that out. The disciplinary lines are blurring anyway.”
Olin College was founded in 1997 as an experiment in a different approach to institutional priorities. Funded by a large endowment from the Olin Foundation, the college has no tenure system or conventional departments. Faculty members are hired on multiyear contracts, with a review process that emphasizes student development (not just teaching), continual revision of courses and a broader view of what kind of external impact matters — including inventions and patents, collaborating with other institutions and public-facing scholarship such as popular writing and museum exhibitions. “We should be willing to have variable models of what success looks like and reward systems that make sense. Those things aren’t particular to Olin — they could happen anywhere,” Dr. Barabino said.
Giving up tenure may be well and good for engineers who are likely to land in industry jobs if they lose their teaching positions or for scientists who rely mostly on federal grants to fund their salaries and lab costs. And while there are certainly exceptions, professors in physics and chemistry are less likely than humanists or social scientists to venture into controversial political territory and find their academic freedom under attack.
Nonscientists are far more dependent on tenure protections — and the hyperspecialization of tenure culture is hurting us most. This is partly because of a double standard: People outside academia are happy to accept specialization in a physicist or a chemical engineer without expecting to immediately understand her jargon and research goals. But when a historian or a philosopher studies an obscure topic, it’s a sign of elitism and irrelevance.
Those of us teaching and researching outside the hard sciences need to find a way to stand by the value of our expertise while recognizing that perhaps our scholarship and teaching are more parochial than they should be. Specialization “leads the individual, if he follows it unreservedly, into bypaths still further off from the highway where men, struggling together, develop strength,” John Dewey, the philosopher and education reformer, wrote in 1902. “The insidious conviction that certain matters of fundamental import to humanity are none of my concern because outside my Fach” — subject — “is likely to work more harm to genuine freedom of academic work than any fancied dread of interference from a moneyed benefactor.”
Universities should use tenure review as a mechanism to encourage professors to connect their research interests to bigger questions and to create broader, more interdisciplinary courses — to take new risks. This is not a call to abandon disciplinary rigor or cater to student consumer whims. It’s a call to remember the reason most professors got into their fields in the first place: We believe our discipline is not a rabbit hole but a world of ideas, discoveries and methods that can help students understand human existence in new ways.
If faculty-led tenure culture bears some of the blame for the stultified atmosphere on many campuses, administrators should admit their responsibility, too. For all the fashionable talk about innovation in higher education, most administrators are deeply risk-averse in a way that undermines one of the central purposes of the modern university: to provide a space for energetic debate.
When conservatives complain about the lack of intellectually diverse debate on campus, they have a point. But the primary cause is not the predominance of tenured radicals in faculty positions. The problem is administrators’ terror of any controversy, any negative media attention, any headline that could irritate a donor.
Sometimes a member of the campus community seriously violates that campus’s norms, and that violation deserves a swift response. However, the governing impulse of university leaders is a pathological (and essentially nonpartisan) fear of any threat to their institutions’ reputations: an anxiety that drives them to launch rushed investigations, monitor social media, place professors who provoke student criticism on mandatory leave, require student groups hosting politically charged rallies to pay a “security fee” — and smother the potential for open disagreement.
Adam Steinbaugh, a lawyer at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (better known as FIRE), told me that his organization gets calls about attacks on academic freedom from both the left and the right. The unifying theme is that “administrations are conflict-averse. It doesn’t really matter who is bringing up the complaints. They are eager to protect the reputation of the institution, protect the budget and avoid conflict,” he said. “There is a certain tension with the fact that the First Amendment and the principle of free speech are supposed to embrace conflict. The notion of a marketplace of ideas is imperfect, but people do have different opinions, and that means there is going to be conflict.”
While administrators’ anxiety over their institutions’ reputations is an old theme, the rise of social media has led them to “overestimate how angry people are based on that feedback,” Mr. Steinbaugh said. “Twenty years ago, if someone was aggrieved about a Marxist professor on campus, the university might get a number of letters. But now the university says, ‘We’re getting a whole bunch of tweets and emails, so we should do something about it.’”
There is more ideological diversity on most campuses than casual observers realize, but it remains hidden because students, professors and other staff members have internalized this fear of conflict and retaliation. If university leaders would hang back more often from the temptation to act, to issue a public statement every time someone on campus got outraged at someone else, that would go a long way to protecting the academic freedom of everyone, tenured or not.
In the midst of the multiple crises facing American higher education, tweaking tenure review and campus public relations may sound like small beer. Such changes will not immediately reverse the adjunctification of the faculty or restore public trust in academia. But if the alternative is cynicism and inaction, we might as well try small steps that challenge academia’s culture of extreme risk aversion. Universities have the power to call the tenure system back to its original purpose: to permit teachers to explore big ideas, take risks in the classroom — and show our students just how adventurous the life of the mind can be.
Molly Worthen is the author, most recently, of the audio course “Charismatic Leaders Who Remade America” and an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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