

Tenure: An idea whose time has gone. - tptacek
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/07/tenure-an-idea-whose-time-has-gone/60187/

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tptacek
Regarding liberal arts professors; here is an almost-perfect Patrick McKenzie
sentence, written this time by Megan McArdle:

 _Basically, these people are supporting an expensive hobby with a sideline
business certifying the ability of certain twenty-year olds to write in
complete sentences._

~~~
thefool
Also, while this is true on some level, on another, its not a bad thing for
society to support a few people whose sole purpose is to uphold a link to the
past (in any of it's incarnations).

Sure they may not provide a lot of utility in terms of increasing production,
but they do have a lot of perspective to offer to students.

~~~
rikthevik
I don't think the author of this article disputes that tenured experienced
professors contribute something to the system. They do. The problem is their
huge and disproportionate cost.

~~~
thefool
I actually think what the author is saying is that the huge and
disproportionate cost is what some of the best and brightest have to go
through in order to get a job in academia and that the purported advantages of
tenure come too late for those that could best make use of them.

I was responding to the author's dig at liberal arts fields above. That while
they may seem like expensive hobbies, they are expensive hobbies that are
important for society to have.

~~~
tptacek
Though perhaps not at the scale subsidized by academia today.

~~~
starkfist
My uncle is a chemist, and he wanted to see what sort of salary he would have
made if he was a tenured chemistry professor, instead of staying in industry.
It turns out a tenured chemistry professor at the University of Minnesota
makes $190,000. The top paid professors were economics and b-school profs, who
made $300K+. In contrast, the highest paid tenured humanities prof made about
$90K; most made around $60-$70K. Of course, the highest paid people at the
university were administrators ($400K) and sports coaches ($1M+).

We looked up Wisconsin and the pay scales were similar.

I believe every state has a database of state funded university professor
salaries, it's pretty eye opening.

~~~
hugh3
Is this surprising? Professors are paid within the academy depending on what
sort of salary they could demand outside. Since the demand for industrial
chemists is a lot higher than the demand for industrial philosophers, this
seems reasonable.

~~~
starkfist
Sort of surprising. Less so for the salaries of the philosophy profs, which
were around what I expected. More so for the big salaries of the other profs.

Someone who is a B-school prof isn't necessarily going to make $300K in
industry. I mean, this is the University of Minnesota B-school, teaching
classes like "Leadership." Not exactly the purview of captains of industry.
Likewise, industrial chemists do not typically make $190K. That's $50K more
than what my uncle makes as an industrial chemist. Also, these are all
taxpayer funded jobs. It seems like the salaries factor in to the new American
trend of public sector employees making MORE money than they would in private
industry.

~~~
tptacek
These numbers seem entirely consistent with the broader marketplace. A chemist
who is herself qualified to be a chemistry professor won't make $190k in
industry; $110k might be a better estimate. An executive might not make $300k;
the low $200's might be a better estimate for the CEO of a small (~100 people)
company. And, forgive me for what will sound like a snarky observation, but a
book store clerk is going to make $40k, not $90k. In all cases, there's a base
compensation set by supply & demand in the market, and an uplift on that base
set by supply & demand in academia.

------
hugh3
On the other hand, without the tenure carrot, how could you possibly persuade
a smart, successful individual in his thirties to pack up his life and move
to, say, Urbana-Champaign or College Park, TX? The biggest problem with the
academic job market is how spread out it is; while other professions usually
have a choice of dozens of employers in any metropolitan area, very few cities
have more than a couple of universities.

Tenure is a fantastic perk, and if it didn't exist, academic salaries would
have to be a helluva lot higher.

Now, tenure for _school_ teachers, that's crazy.

~~~
tptacek
My read of this article is that it's not the problem that some teachers get
this perk. Instead, it's the fact that the system that results from this culls
out huge amounts of talent,

(a) because few people will risk 15 years of their life on a career that is
more likely to unceremoniusly eject than to reward them,

and (b) because there will never be nearly enough openings for tenured
professors to make use of all the talent vying for those roles.

As always, it's not that the perk is bad, it's that it comes at cost
disproportionate to its value.

~~~
hugh3
Right. But I'm not sure how abolishing tenure would help with this. Sure, you
could throw professors out onto the street once they reach fifty and make 'em
find new jobs as Walmart greeters, but that's not a great solution.

What really needs to be addressed is the vast pyramiding of talent between the
PhD and the tenure-track level (I'm talking about sciences, not humanities,
which have other problems). The current system of postdocs sitting in a long-
term holding pattern until they either get picked for a permanent position or
give up doesn't actually reward talent, it mostly just rewards patience, being
independently wealthy, or having nothing better to do. A young scientist's
level of talent _should_ be apparent by the time you finish your PhD -- let
the universities snap 'em up for tenure-track positions then, instead of six
years later.

(Why yes, I am a fifth-year postdoc, thanks for asking.)

~~~
tptacek
By creating a more uniform, easily-accessible, and equitable marketplace for
academic talent, where access to scholarly positions didn't require a lifetime
committment.

Consider: I could conceivably become an MD at this point in my life, but stand
zero chance of becoming a professor of English. This seems warped.

------
dman
In science and math there are often times when developing a new contribution
takes several years. Research is inherently a risky and long process requiring
intellectual courage, adding economic worries to a researchers life will have
a chilling effect on the research. Industry does a great job at engineering
and exploring solutions around established theories. However most significant
scientific theories come from academia. In short without tenure I fear that
10-20 year timescale problems and pie in the sky ideas will go largely
unaddressed and unexplored.

------
jdhopeunique
The biggest problem I find is that universities avoid free market forces by
bundling everything together. Tenure is only one part of this.

Students pay tuition that is only dependent on the number of hours they take
regardless of what type of course. An industrial technology major has roughly
the same tuition as an english major. Students are also shielded from the
costs of the system by scholarships, loans, and parents money. They are thus
less motivated, less concerned about university waste, and burdening other
people with these costs or burdening their own future through debt.
Additionally their unmotivated, uninformed choices are putting them behind the
educational steering wheel of tax payers' and society's money. It's no
surprise that people complain about the lack of funding for science and
emphasis on college sports. Those are the choices students have made with OPM
(other people's money).

Similarly, faculty are paid for their experience and not subject area. An
exception at one university I know: the faculty in one department gamed the
system by rotating several people in and out of the department head position
so that they each could gain and keep a higher salary when they returned to
their non-department head position. Being paid the same leads to some
departments having overpaid professors who wish to protect their jobs from the
hordes of graduate students by raising as many artificial barriers as they
can(tenure, excessive grad student burdens, etc). Other departments may have
underpaid, overworked professors who are preparing students for relevant and
highly paid positions in the workforce, but who are nevertheless given the
same salary as the overpaid professors.

Students are not given the choice of paying less for courses that are taught
by an instructor vs by a professor. It would be nice if colleges offered
something like that following:

$600 for a course taught by a tenured professor

$300 an instructor

$150 by a teaching assistant

$50 self-taught with exams at a university or third party testing center

Such an unbundled tuition package would quickly expose the inefficiencies of
the university system.

Tenure works in a similar way by bundling the good and bad professors together
so that they must be accepted as a package deal, much like the way unions
work. I think most tenured professors are decent teachers and the truly bad
ones are exceptions, but the lack of flexibility to hire cheaper instructors
where there is a demand and the lack of choice for students is the real
problem. Even if a department had all really good tenured professors and no
instructors or non-tenured staff, the costs to students would be too
expensive.

Similar to the above bundling, state government jobs often require a Bachelors
degree...any major...for positions that should only require a HS diploma. This
is especially bad for non-teaching staff jobs at universities which require a
college degree(any major) for many jobs that only require a HS diploma...part
of the universities' way of promoting their own.

The whole system is designed to shield participants from free market forces by
bundling everything together and offering consumers and tax payers one bundled
choice.

The university system has not changed despite increased information
availability provided by the internet and online ordering of books. Most of
the actual learning is done outside the classroom and verified by in-class
tests. Surely a better system is available in this information age.

Full disclosure: I do tech support at a university. When I see the outrageous
salaries that some professors make, tenured or not, sometimes it is
infuriating. Especially when they don't understand the basics of using a
computer.

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jseliger
I'll repeat the same comment I made on McArdle's blog:

Dean Dad has a good discussion of this in today's post, The Tenure/Adjunct
Dialectic: [http://suburbdad.blogspot.com/2010/07/tenureadjunct-
dialecti...](http://suburbdad.blogspot.com/2010/07/tenureadjunct-
dialectic.html) :

    
    
        "The cost of tenure goes far beyond the salary of the tenured. It includes the opportunity cost of more productive uses that had to be skipped to pay for a decision made decades earlier in a different context. (We actually have people for whom staff jobs were created when their tenured speciality went away. That’s a direct cost of tenure.) It also includes the cost of the various bribes that have to be paid to the tenured to get them to step up to acknowledge institutional needs: course releases (a direct cause of adjunct hiring), preferential scheduling (whether it makes sense for students or not), and even cash stipends (which have to be paid for somehow).
    
        Whenever we allocate course reassignments for full-time faculty, we hire adjuncts to make up for it. Sabbaticals? Adjuncts. Grant work? Adjuncts. Someone has to teach the classes the tenured faculty won’t. (As one embittered adjunct put it in a department meeting, “I teach so you don’t have to!” Exactly.) Aristocrats need serfs, and the tenured need the adjuncts.
    
        It starts earlier than that. The ‘bait’ of tenure is part of what lures so many young idealists into graduate school, replenishing the reserve army of the adjuncts. That oversupply allows the adjunct trend to continue. The crushed dreams of a generation of underemployed academics are a cost of tenure." 
    
    

Nonetheless, I think tenure will remain as a lure for superstars in the
profession if nothing else: for schools that are competing to get the best
faculty, tenure will remain a strong draw.

In addition, I still haven't seen anyone address Lorne Carmichael's argument
in "Incentives in Academics: Why is There Tenure?":

    
    
        "Loosely, tenure is necessary because without it incumbents would never be willing to hire people who might turn out to be better than them-selves.
    
        The analysis is consistent with several other aspects of the academic environment. It provides a rationale for "tenure-track" appointments and says something about the standards that can be used for tenure decisions. The job security derived here is not absolute. Incumbents (454) can be released if they fail to meet exogenous standards of performance (i.e., engage in "gross moral turpitude") or if the separations are voluntary (contract "buy-outs" or early retirement). In times of financial crisis, when involuntary separations are inevitable, the model suggests that entire departments be eliminated. This is because the members of one department do not choose the new hires of another. The framework used for the analysis is quite general, so it also makes predictions about the form of other organizations in which members have input into overall decisions" (455). 
    
    
    

(Carmichael, Lorne H. "Incentives in Academics: Why is There Tenure?" The
Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 96, No. 3 (Jun., 1988), pp. 453-472)

Until you get past the hurdle of having only people within the discipline
being able to evaluate others within the discipline and those in a department
not wanting to hire themselves out of a job, I don't think you'll have a
sufficiently persuasive case to get rid of tenure altogether, whatever the
benefits.

~~~
dman
The quoted sections above show up with horizontal scrollbars for me. Does
anyone else have that ? Admittedly my settings are a bit funky - my firefox is
set to override site fonts with Computer Modern.

~~~
tptacek
Yes, it's a side-effect of how he pasted his comment in.

------
api
Nonsense.

The problem that tenure solves is that politics is the enemy of truth. In any
organization without some form of tenure, an individual is going to have to be
very political to stay employed, advance, etc. (When I say politics, I don't
mean left or right or democrats or republicans. I mean the process whereby
humans jockey for position in a social hierarchy.)

Tenure is an (imperfect) way to remove people from the political game, thus
enabling them to tell the truth and think honestly. It's not perfect or
complete, but it works better than nothing and it's simple.

Tell me another simple way to enable people to be honest or tell the truth.

Edit: there's another related reason, and it came to mind when I was thinking
about Paul Graham's latest startup essay about keeping your most important
idea in mind...

Political maneuvering is hard. Political maneuvering with honesty and
integrity is even harder, since lying and deception are often quick and easy
shortcuts in political games. (This is why so many salesmen lie so often.
Lying is the lazy solution.)

What you want academics to be thinking about is their field of inquiry, not
politics. But without tenure, politics will get in the way and distract people
from doing their real job. Not only that, but those that lie and cheat will
find themselves with more free time than those that try to play the political
game honestly. Are those the folks that you want as intellectual leaders?

~~~
tptacek
Did you read the article, or do you just have very strong opinions about
tenure? I'm not criticizing what you're saying so much as pointing out that
you haven't engaged with any of the points McArdle (or the Thomas H. Benton
articles, like "Graduate School In The Humanities: Just Don't Go", that she's
clearly drawing from) has made.

McArdle isn't arguing that people should be made more accountable to politics.
She's pointing out the hard-to-deny fact that tenure has warped the market for
scholastic talent. What part of that argument do you disagree with?

It's one thing to say that we should make it hard for professors to be fired
for saying unpopular things or taking research risks. It's another to say that
it's acceptable for a lifetime in academia to require a 15-year longshot
gamble that leaves you penniless and unhireable at the end. I think a
reasonable person could argue that the latter problem is has a greater
chilling effect than the former.

~~~
api
The article talks more about the humanities, but my reaction was based more on
thinking about the sciences. The sciences, I suppose, are a far different
ballgame... if you don't make it to a tenure track position or want to skip
the whole postdoc nightmare altogether, you can always get a good job in
industry. That's not necessarily true if you studied, say, medieval
literature.

But I think what I said still stands. I think that tenure represents an
example of a really expensive solution to a nasty problem. The nasty problem
is that politics makes it hard to be honest, think unpopular thoughts, speak
truth to power, investigate unpopular topics, etc. It's also a huge
distraction and time sink. Tenure is the only solution we've come up with to
this problem that's workable. It's an ugly and hugely expensive solution, but
nature favors ugly solutions over no solution.

In other words: it might be worth employing 10 space-filling past-their-prime
tenured professors and destroying the careers of 100 aspiring students who
don't make it to buy 5 free thinkers with the time and resources to ask tough
questions and protection from politics.

A very loose but economically similar analogy would be VC investment, where
it's worth funding 99 failures to get one Google.

~~~
starkfist
_The sciences, I suppose, are a far different ballgame... if you don't make it
to a tenure track position or want to skip the whole postdoc nightmare
altogether, you can always get a good job in industry_

Unless your science PhD is in Biology.

People overstate how easy it is for a science PhD to get a "good" job in
industry.

~~~
tptacek
I have a friend with a physics PhD who makes the same observation. The
supposed ease with which a postdoc can break into industry may be unique to
computer science.

~~~
api
That's a widespread problem, and I don't see how tenure affects it. The
problem there is that we're no longer trying to win a cold war with the USSR,
and there's no domestic demand for such things. People don't want to go to the
stars. They want to gossip on Twitter.

~~~
tptacek
I think the connection to tenure is obvious. Instead of a very select few
people getting a vast reward for engaging with the field, a less select few
people will get a less significant reward. More people will have the
opportunity to contribute, and, because the stakes will be lower, it will be
less risky for academia to hire and thus easier for people to switch between
industry and academia.

~~~
starkfist
The stakes are already as low as they can get. There is no shortage of
postdocs who will work for peanuts.

In relation to tenure, what you are proposing is already in place. When a
tenured prof dies, they don't replace him, they just hire 2-3 adjunct faculty.

With this in mind, the article is somewhat pointless; most universities have
been in the process of effectively eliminating tenure for at least a decade.
The ones that don't have billions of dollars worth of endowment money, so who
really cares what they do?

