Comments on: Tenure from a Wide Angle

By: James_West

James_West — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 22:05:16 +0000

I’m faculty at Vanderbilt, which is in the top five in research funding – and it doesn’t effectively have tenure any more. This has been true everywhere I’ve been: tenure means that they won’t take your title away, but they don’t have to continue to pay you.

On the other hand, at most research universities, they’re effectively only renting you space, anyway, and title is just dependent on how much money you’re bringing in. This is almost, but not quite, explicit. I pay myself, all of my people, and for all of my operations, as well as 54% indirects to the university. This is how it works at every university I’ve worked at.

By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 02:31:52 +0000

Tenure (as currently practiced in higher ed) is predicated on the model of the university instructor as a scholar-teacher (the exception seems to be some community colleges where tenure is entirely based on teaching and is vested after a fairly short probationary period), a model we were trained in and trained for. If we’re going to abandon it — and I agree that it seems to be decreasingly common, though I’m not yet convinced that it’s un-recoverable, plus I haven’t got it yet — then we’re going to need to entirely revisit the training and evaluation model of higher ed, with particular attention to finding ways to evaluate teachers that go beyond RMP/Customer Satisfaction Surveys.

By: dmerkow

dmerkow — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 05:45:46 +0000

I pretty much agree wholeheartedly and I think this points to why folks like Megan McCardle @ the Atlantic and others in the recent flareup have come out of the MBA world, which drinks deep of a hierarchical corporate structure that runs heavily counter to the management philosophy that the best universities seek to have (cooperative governance).

By: Brian Ogilvie

Brian Ogilvie — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 22:10:10 +0000

In general, I think you’re right about the benefits of tenure for governance. However, from my standpoint at a research university, I’m not so pessimistic about the intellectual benefits of tenure.

One crucial area where tenure protects academic freedom, at research intensive universities and selective liberal arts colleges, is in the case of subfields of scholarship that have become unfashionable. Think about intellectual history in the late 1970s and 1980s. If course enrollments and book sales had been used to determine whether intellectual historians’ contracts would be renewed, we would have lost a great deal. Tenure is inherently conservative on an institutional level, but from the standpoint of stewardship, that’s not a bad thing–quite the contrary. It ensures that trends, no matter what their merit, do not wholly prevail at those institutions where tenure still exists.