Author: Tenure is hurting students, universities
BY SARAH BUTRYMOWICZ
THE HECHINGER REPORT
NEW YORK -- There’s a debate going on in higher education over tenure — the traditional practice of granting lifelong job security to professors after seven or so years of work.
Naomi Schaefer Riley, a former Wall Street Journal editor and writer, has written a book on the subject, entitled The Faculty Lounges and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For. In it, she explores the consequences of tenure, concluding: “Even in areas of study where one might not expect it, tenure is preventing institutions from living up to their highest potential. It is stifling the most innovative professors and preventing students from getting the education they deserve.”
Here is more of what Riley had to say.
Q. You spend a fair amount of time in the book on this tension between tenure and academic freedom, which as you point out isn’t really defined anywhere but it is what people turn to in defense of tenure. Is there a way to still protect this notion of academic freedom, whatever it may be, if tenure is eliminated?
I think the question you have to answer first is, does tenure do a good job of protecting academic freedom? And I don’t think it does. I think very few university professors really feel like they can speak out their true beliefs on a variety of subjects. Part of that, of course, is that many people in the university don’t have tenure, but many people are in the process of trying to get tenure, which is a seven-year process … it just trains you to keep your mouth shut.
For the people in the university who really do need academic freedom — that is, they need to be able to say controversial things as part of their job, which I think is a smaller and smaller portion of the academy — having multi-year renewable contracts … would allow people to feel like most of us do, which is that we come in every day expecting to do our job and we come in every day expecting to keep our job. It’s not that most people, even in this economy, walk around in fear of losing their job all day. And that’s how academics imagine the university would be if they didn’t have tenure.
Rest of the interview: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/06/05/2251327/author-tenure-is-hurting-students.html#ixzz1OUYiM0yL
Who has a faculty lounge? Not us. They give us tenure instead.
ReplyDeleteEeeeeez a pun. Not a good one, but what do you expect?
ReplyDeleteWe actually do have a lounge of sorts. It isn't big or anything. It contains the mailboxes, a coffeemaker, a fridge, a couple of chairs, and the departmental copy of the Crampicle of Higher Ed. None of my colleagues, to my knowledge, ever uses it except to pick up mail. But the staff keep their lunches in the fridge, so it isn't a total waste of space. But close enough.
Hmm... Can tenure be transferred? Because, perhaps F&T can give me his/her tenure if he/she doesn't want it.
ReplyDeleteTenure doesn't hurt students. Letting 75% of the teaching in the US be done by underpaid, overworked adjuncts, however, hurts students a lot. And everybody else.
ReplyDeleteI would say "fine, go to the union model then" except that the same people that hate tenure also hate unions and are doing their quite successful best to destroy them too. Nothing must impede the transfer of wealth to the privileged classes, or slow the creation and maintenance of a massive underclass that can then be blamed for their bad luck in being poor.
The older I get the more Marxist.
Anonymous! Sweetheart! I missed you so much!
ReplyDeleteIt's just not the same here without anon's repetitive, content-free comments, is it? I know I can't think straight without 'em.
ReplyDeleteOh EMH, I want my tenure, and you should have it too. That was a joke. The rhetorical term is understatement.
I haven't read the book, but just working from the interview, it seems to me that there are a lot of things she gets right, but a few crucial ones she gets wrong. For instance, here's a segment from the interview about evaluating teaching:
ReplyDelete"Q. You also spend a little bit of time on the idea that we’re not really evaluating professors in a productive way — students might not know which professors (are most effective) until years after the fact, and other professors might not know how to evaluate their peers. Are there any promising evaluation systems that you’ve seen?
A. You have to think about getting as much feedback as possible from different kinds of elements. I think student evaluations are part of that process, but they’re not the whole process. Having a colleague sit in on your class is important, and having administrators sit in on your class is important. A lot of professors would really balk at the notion that the college president should be in their class, but there’s a lot to be said for that. For senior people who have had some experience in the classroom, they can figure out whether you’re doing a good job engaging with your students and teaching them some serious material."
Even *with* a tenure system, fewer and fewer administrators have spent any substantial time in the classroom. The idea that "administrators" (and college presidents?!?) = "senior people who have had some experience in the classroom" is way out of date, and in fact was far more common when a much greater percentage of the faculty was tenured or tenure-eligible (though I'm not sure how much connection there is between those two facts).
Nor does she seem to realize that full-time contingents (which is what she'd like to see all faculty become) are subject to many of the same pressures as part-time contingents/adjuncts. While we all still need tenure to protect academic freedom (events in Wisconsin and Virginia are enough to serve as reminders of that), we also need a substantial number of faculty who can tell administrators that the cheapest way to do something just isn't going to work. I agree with her that the tenure system in most places currently rewards research, but that's not a reason to assume that it can't reward, and protect, good teaching, instead or as well.
P.S. Apropos of our somewhat similar recent discussion, I heard a Dean, in a welcome speech to a conference I attended over the weekend, quantify his university's progress in building a research reputation in terms of "research dollars brought in." It was especially odd because the room was full of humanists, few of whom (except maybe a few with digital projects) bring in research dollars at all, but most of whom are quite productive.
I can think of fewer and fewer senior administrators who could give me meaningful feedback on my teaching, because most of them have no classroom experience. Senior admin where I work seem to be hired based mostly on their ability to 1) procure PhDs in "educational leadership" and 2) attend endless meetings with each other.
ReplyDelete