Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Borrowed Early Thirsty: Tenure for Sale?

Bardiac has posted a scary story about a questionnaire asking what pay faculty would accept in exchange for giving up tenure, followed by some very good questions:

How much is tenure worth?
Would you give it up [if you have/had it] for 25% more salary?  200% more?
I've got some thoughts on the questions (so this may serve partly as a reminder to myself to come back and set them down), but for the moment I'm busy providing feedback to students (i.e. doing my NTT job), so I thought I'd throw it out here.  

21 comments:

  1. My answer is that I already have done that. Industry salaries in my field are double or triple my current salary.

    Although I enjoy teaching, the real draw of the job is job security and academic freedom.. both of which require tenure.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Interesting! So if you choose a small amount, the interpretation is "take away tenure, they won't mind much." If you indicate a large amount, the conclusion is that we know we're overpaid deadwood and don't want to give up our cushy sinecures.

    And the source of this will surprise no one. The story continues at Inside Higher Ed:

    On Tuesday, the secretary of the faculty at the Madison campus emailed professors to say that the survey was funded by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a think tank that describes itself as nonpartisan but which has promoted conservative ideas and has ties to Governor Scott Walker.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's effective trolling, yes: even objecting to the question can be interpreted as a losing move.
      The only bright spot here, ironically, is that the IRB may actually have to hold the pollster responsible for the misbehavior. Though that, also, will be recast as a liberal witch-hunt against open inquiry, etc.

      Delete
    2. I think that if I said I would give up tenure for double or triple my salary, I am doing the opposite of implying that I know I'm overpaid. I think I am implying that in "the real world", people don't put up with such bullshit without getting something in return.

      But I would not give up tenure for even triple my salary. If tripling my salary were my primary goal, I would get a different job that pays me that much and let my spot in the academy go to someone who would do right by it. The good of the academy requires faculty governance, and that requires tenure.

      I will not sit up and bark like a good dog for the administration simply to get more treats.

      Delete
    3. The only thing more powerful than a professoriate with tenure might be an independently-wealthy professoriate. So if they paid us like football coaches and we lived like full professors, we might be able to enforce something resembling faculty governance. But it ain't gonna happen. So the next best thing would be a return to a world where tenure, and faculty governance, had some real meaning. Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to happen, either.

      Delete
  3. I've thought of this now and then, mostly in the context of remembering a couple of talks I heard during grad school which speculated on what a system with no tenure would look like. The premise was always the same as the one in the survey: you'd have to pay people considerably more to make up for losing the benefits (especially longterm job security) of tenure. Of course, the non-tenure-track system that now governs the working lives of the majority iof college instructors works in precisely the opposite way: lower job security and lower pay generally track together, rather than in the inverse ratio the economists and other prognosticators are still apparently assuming, 20+ years later.

    My second thought is that such predictions, polls, etc., and most conversations about "threats to tenure," end up being distractions from the biggest, and apparently least-noticed, threat to tenure: the growth of the contingent class. While tenure (or at least any form of tenure that resembles what most of us associate with the word) may be deliberately killed off in a few places, including Wisconsin, it will probably disappear nationwide more as the result of gradual wasting away (fewer TT faculty proportionately, leading to less power for the remaining TT faculty, leading to even fewer TT faculty, and so on). I'm beginning to think that shouting "tenure" to a room full of professors is the equivalent of shouting "squirrel" to a pack of dogs: it produces chaos and sometimes conflict, while nobody actually gets fed very well.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That said, based on my own experience and fears as a career full-time contingent (and past part-time contingent/adjunct), I'd say that such a calculation, if one is going to make it at all, needs to take into account the following factors:

      --First, you need to start by determining a decent professional wage for the area in which the professor will be living and working. The salary should be enough to buy housing of the sort in which other professionals in the area live (or, if early in the career, to rent short-term housing and save up a downpayment) within a maximum 30-minute commute radius from campus, provide for hirself and perhaps a child (including child/afterschool care or replacement for the wages of a spouse who focuses mostly on caregiving), pay off student debt, save for retirement and the child's college, etc., etc. There would also need to be regular COL and merit increases. Since many TT salaries already fail to meet this criterion, you'd need to start by adjusting the salary upward.

      --You'd then need to include an additional amount to allow savings to cover several periods of potential extended unemployment during the professor's career. Since academic job searches often take several years, that's a substantial chunk of change. Make sure to add conference travel and relocation expenses, and coverage for a period of unemployment for an uprooted spouse (or, alternatively, the cost of maintaining two households for the members of a commuter marriage) as well. Alternatively, schools could set up a layoff insurance fund of some sort to cover all of the above, and include full payment of the premiums in the benefits package. That might be a pretty good idea, since, especially if the university self-insured, there would be an incentive against capricious layoffs, or layoffs to allow for the hiring of younger, cheaper, workers, and an incentive to help existing workers change and grow with the needs of the workplace.

      --Finally, the additional salary to allow for savings or the insurance fund would have to allow for the particular vulnerability of contingent faculty in the 50-70+ age range. Professors are never high earners, but those are still the highest-earning years, and they're also the years during which it becomes increasingly difficult to find an equivalent job, in terms of both salary and responsibility, if one loses an existing one. One of the major benefits of tenure, especially now that mandatory retirement at 70 is a thing of the past, is the ability to keep working as long as one is able and needs the money (and since Ph.D.s tend to start their working lives late, and reproduce late, many of us do). (Relatively) high-earning late-career professors (those the critics of tenure like to classify as "deadwood," though actual examples of nonproductive older proffies seem to be harder to find than you'd expect) are favorite targets of the budget-cutters (not to mention the millenials desperate for jobs, and their parents). Prudent new hires to a no-tenure system (including those millenials) would realize that we're all going to be vulnerable to the "deadwood" charge some day, and demand a starting salary large enough to save toward the possibility of losing 15-25 lucrative years at the ends of their careers.

      By the time you add all of the above up, I'm guessing that you're much closer to 200-300% ore more of current salaries than 125%.

      Delete
    2. Applause! What an excellent, well thought out response! You have brought up issues that I had not even considered.

      Delete
    3. And now I'm blushing. Thanks. I should say that my model of how this could possibly work comes in part from observing how a few friends with Ph.D.s have made satisfying careers outside the academy. Living well below one's income while earning well, thus allowing one to be choosy when the need to find a new job arises, is definitely key. It's a viable model -- Ph.D.s are usually pretty good at amusing themselves for a while, sans formal job -- but it's not a cheap one for the employers.

      Delete
  4. I say 8000% and dancing girls during faculty meetings.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Unquestioned so far is this: What is tenure worth to students?

    Since becoming tenured, I have increasingly been able to provide them with what they need, rather than what they - or customer-service-fixated adminicritters - think they want.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Damn straight.

      Perhaps paradoxically, when I was able not to care whether I'd be skewered on my "customer feedback surveys", my negative comments actually decreased.

      Delete
    2. Goes in the "our working conditions are students' learning conditions" file, yes.

      Delete
  6. For tenure to have any meaning, one can't be talking about taking it away (or buying it back, or whatever) for anything other than gross misconduct. When people talk about ending tenure, what they are really saying is:

    "You remember when we told you that you were free to conduct your scholarly career in the way that you felt was most useful? Because you had established yourself as a scholar, who's knowledge and judgement were at a level that the best way to advance the field was simply to allow you to explore the issues that you felt would be most productive? You remember that? Ya, turns out we were lying. Psych! Now get with the program."

    ReplyDelete
  7. I'm not sure how I'd put a monetary value on it, because it would fundamentally change the nature of my relationship with my institution. I love my job and I love my colleagues, but it's not in a part of the country where I would ever have chosen to live if I had a free choice, and the salary is way at the low end of associate-professor range, even for the humanities. The reason why I stay, and the reason why they can count on me to stay, is because this particular institution offered me a TT job and, subsequently, tenure -- which is a non-transferable perk. If tenure suddenly ceased to exist, either at my university or in general, you can bet I'd be shopping around for alternative offers. I don't know how much extra money it would take me to move. Maybe none at all, if I got an offer from somewhere that did offer tenure, or from somewhere in a more desirable location. But I do know that my current institution probably couldn't afford to make me a counter-offer.

    In other words: get rid of tenure, and you push everyone out onto the job market, all the time. They might not know exactly what they're worth right now, but by God they're going to find out.

    ReplyDelete
  8. The survey was sent to all UW system faculty. I haven't answered it. I don't intend to do so, especially given what I've read about it here.

    (Also, hello everyone.)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sounds wise. And hello, BC! Good to see your helmeted visage. Hope you're holding up okay while wading through the BS that threatens to flood the UW system.

      Delete
  9. Speaking as a part-time contingent laborer, a full-time position at just one school would be worth a heck of a lot more than tenure.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.