There’s a not-very-interesting discussion of tenure at the NYT. Mark Taylor (religion, Columbia) makes this odd point against it:
To those who say that the abolition of tenure will make faculty reluctant to be demanding with students or express controversial views, I respond that in almost 40 years of teaching, I have not known a single person who has been more willing to speak out after tenure than before. In fact, nothing represses the free expression of ideas more than the long and usually fruitless quest for tenure.
That’s difficult for me to believe. (I note in passing the oddity of claiming that the job insecurity of the tenure track represses free expression but the job insecurity of a post-tenure employment system will not.) Here’s a short musing.
Consider institutional service first. In my anecdata, the faculty who are willing to call out administrators are all tenured. Sometimes this is annoying, sometimes it’s extremely beneficial, but it will be hard to convince me that an adjunct is just as likely as a full professor to tell the President or Provost that the admin is screwing things up. If faculty are going to play a large role in governance, they need job protection.
When it comes to research, the point is not so much “protect crazy ideas.” That makes it sound like its benefits are to give us more Ward Churchills: how appealing. Instead the rationale is to allow research avenues that might or might not pay off in either the short or long term. Let’s start with an example. A junior colleague sent me a draft of a paper recently. I suggested waiting on the project until after tenure. My thinking: it’s an ambitious but inchoate research program that doesn’t connect up in tidy ways with current literature, so it will be easy for a referee to reject. Spelling it out fully will require a book or several interrelated journal articles. If he puts his chips on this project, it’s quite possible that he won’t have enough things in print to get tenure, even if the work is good. But it’s an interesting idea! No way to know if it pans out in a big way or doesn’t. The only way to find out is to invest a few years in it, a risk that doesn’t make any sense without tenure. Short version: there’s a lot of value in giving researchers room to fail.
With teaching the case is even more obvious. Everyone in the bidness has seen what happens when instructors teach to the student evaluations. In some ways good, in many ways terrible. If you want innovative, creative, novel teaching (both in terms of content and pedagogy) you have to accept that there will be failed efforts. If you reduce the penalty for these failed efforts, you likewise allow space for innovation.
None of these are cases for tenure. (And I suspect I’m in the last generation or two to enjoy it, anyway.) But they’re better defenses of the broad idea than “protect our weirdos.” It’s disappointing to see such ineffective discussion of the idea from people who should know better.
18 comments
July 21, 2010 at 5:29 am
Cosma Shalizi
Also, this point by Jordan Ellenberg, about the same annoying piece in the Times, is pretty relevant for the sciences/math/engineering/etc.:
For reference, I know someone who left our graduate program ABD to go work in the vampire squid industry, and is making twice what I am. I wouldn’t trade places, but that’s because (relative) security and independence are worth a lot to me. If Taylor wants to take that away, well, let him pay the going rate.
(And just from an economic point of view, universities never have a lot of money, but they do last a very long time and can count on that. So using that as their comparative advantage in hiring seems pretty obvious.)
July 21, 2010 at 5:40 am
dana
Taylor also doesn’t realize that in this economy, someone coming up on their contract renewal, someone who’s been there for 20 years, is a lot more expensive than some energetic young thing just out of grad school. Probably be willing to do more than a 2/1 load, too.
July 21, 2010 at 6:09 am
NM
At this point someone should probably say something snarky about how Mark Taylor is chair of a religion department who found time to write Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities, a book that, I’m guessing, isn’t in his field of scholarly expertise. That person would also be sure he wrote it entirely on his own time, as someone on a seven-year renewable contract would surely do, for fear of being canned on acccount of misusing company resources.
More irony:
July 21, 2010 at 6:38 am
Kieran
On the long-term research/room to fail thing, there’s that bit in Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, where the Omnian priest visits Ephebe, where Philosophers are given free rein to think crazy shit up:
July 21, 2010 at 6:50 am
dana
Thou shalt not subject thy God to market forces!
What’s odd about Taylor’s proposal is that it seems to keep the worst part of the tenure process — going up for tenure to try to keep a job that you’re doing well — while eliminating the benefits. If he means it to be a serious review, what we’ll see is tons of short-term, sparkly projects meant to impress review boards or the next hiring committee.
I also think that one of the benefits of tenure is convincing academics to move to idyllic small campuses in the middle of nowhere. The places are nice enough to live in if you have job security, but not the kinds of places you can imagine settling if there’s a good chance that your contract won’t be renewed, because losing your job would mean relocating.
I do have to say, though, that with under a third of college instructors tenure stream, a seven-year contract sounds like anywhere from seven to fourteen times the job security most academics have now. That’s not a reason to get rid of tenure, but don’t expect a lot of sympathy from the adjuncts.
July 21, 2010 at 6:57 am
kid bitzer
the problem, cosma, is that the bargaining structure you are describing applies only to one slice of the academy, i.e. those who, if not offered tenure, will tell universities to piss off and go take a lucrative job elsewhere.
many of us in the humanities have no competitive offers from elsewhere. no vampire squids eager to embrace us. no wall street firms hoping to pervert our quant abilities.
if the universities offer us less, then we’ll take less. no one is offering any *more* than they are, certainly.
i think the future will look roughly like this: people who can get competitive offers from outside will use the universities as a home-office with nice letterhead, and support themselves on the basis of grants and graft. this is the harvard medical school model. tenure is superfluous, since your salary is based on what you bring in anyhow.
people who cannot get competitive offers from outside–to wit, the humanities–will dwindle to casual workers, employed for piece-work, at whatever wages they can get.
July 21, 2010 at 9:16 am
kid bitzer
(coming back to acknowledge that you yourself applied the right qualifications and restrictions in your original, sc. “sciences/math/engineering/etc.”).
July 21, 2010 at 9:23 am
Cosma Shalizi
many of us in the humanities have no competitive offers from elsewhere. no vampire squids eager to embrace us. no wall street firms hoping to pervert our quant abilities.
This is what comes of letting people get the idea that it’s OK to transact official business in the vulgar tongues. If corporate communications wouldn’t be taken seriously unless elegantly written in a classical language, the situation of the humanities would be far less dire.
(I am only half joking.)
July 21, 2010 at 9:38 am
Vance
no wall street firms hoping to pervert our quant abilities.
I’m afraid I read this as “quaint” on the first pass. The older senses of that word work well too….
July 21, 2010 at 11:07 am
Tim Lacy
I’m posting my comment to simply “like” Dana’s 6:50 am comment. This comes from someone moving—with his forbearing wife and two-year old—to a small IL town for a two-year, non-tenure small school job in higher education. – TL
July 21, 2010 at 1:00 pm
Davis X. Machina
quod Domina Cosima proponit, mihi gratissimum audire. Negotium gravius in linguis veteribus recte agendum est.
(Spes mea maxima semper est in schola quadam vocationale docere, sicut figularius aut faber.)
July 21, 2010 at 4:15 pm
califury
I’m not too impressed with Taylor. A discussion of tenure framed in dollars is basically stupid.
Faculty are expected to train themselves to an edge of specialization so fine that they are _not employable_ outside of a university. What do you do with the world’s expert in the grain boundaries of aluminum at blast level pressures when, at age 50, he isn’t the youngest knife in the drawer–and paid too much?
In a “you’re fired if we don’t like your progress” system, professors will have to specialize in sucking money from the government or a private patron.
Sounds like “Back to the Future,” with the way-back machine set to about 1700.
July 21, 2010 at 5:27 pm
kid bitzer
quaeritur utrum cosma domina sit an dominus.
(mihi dubitum est, quia bradipodidae epicoenae sunt.)
July 21, 2010 at 5:55 pm
califury
I love the WEB.
Davis X. Machina’s comment translates immediately as:
“and Lady Cosima display , me gratissimum be heard. Employment pregnant upon language veteribus recte agendum est.Spes( my maxima always is upon school dining table vocationale to instruct , as figularius either skilled )”
And Kid Bitzer’s reply is clearly,
“to seek whether cosma lady he is or dominus.mihi( to doubt is , because bradipodidae epicoenae are )
Thus it is proven that speakers of dead languages can be replaced by automated translation services and their tenure should be revoked!
July 21, 2010 at 6:34 pm
Cosma Shalizi
Dominus.
July 22, 2010 at 4:04 am
kid bitzer
cosma–yeah, kinda thought so.
califury–the trouble is, machine translation of latin really is dead simple. you seem to have found an incompetent one, but it’s not hard to do. and then latinists are screwed, if all they can do is translate (or compose) latin.
July 22, 2010 at 4:53 am
Dave
So, who’s an epicene sloth?
July 22, 2010 at 5:09 am
kid bitzer
there is a question whether cosma is a woman or a man.
(it’s unclear to me, since there are sloths of both genders).
i probably misused some words and got the syntax wrong, but that’s because i couldn’t find a very good machine translator, either.