

The End of Tenure? - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/books/review/Shea-t.html

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crcarlson
One traditional way of dealing with this issue is to have a mandatory
retirement age. Pre-tenure and usually pre-full professors usually do a good
job of hustling for money and growing the university. And after attaining full
titles the inertia of their work carries them for a while. Then some go on to
continue being research (money) making machines and others start to milk it.
Mandatory retirement makes room for more ambitious younger professors to bring
in more work.

Running a research lab at a university is a lot like running a startup. I
believe the professors should get to enjoy the fruits of being successful
early in their career later on after being tenured. Otherwise there would be
no incentive for these guys to make the personal sacrifices required to do
great work above and beyond what an 8-5er might do.

It seems like a half way decent financial model and an intelligent management
of investments should be able to continue to make a system like this
successful. The current focus on tenure as the problem is more of a reaction
to poor financial planning by the endowment managers IMO.

In sports the ultimate prevention against doping (if someone wanted to prevent
such a thing) would be to test frozen samples every year for say 20 years with
progressively more modern technology and threaten to retroactively remove
trophies or awards of those discovered to be clever cheaters. I wonder if
there is a similar analog for financial institution managers where one would
place their compensation in reserve and only dole it out based upon proper
risk management behavior (as well as returns) as proven out by future events.

~~~
_delirium
> Otherwise there would be no incentive for these guys to make the personal
> sacrifices required to do great work above and beyond what an 8-5er might
> do.

My guess is that universities would also find themselves having to replace
that incentive with monetary incentives, at least in areas where industry
options exist. Universities currently get away with paying below industry
rates partly because of the lure of research freedom: once you're tenured, you
get complete freedom to define your research agenda (well, universities still
have a lot of levers they can use to put pressure, but it's at least
_relatively_ large freedom). But if you're never going to get to that point,
and have to continually justify your research in light of current grant
opportunities, what's hot versus out of favor in various fields, how much your
output was this year, etc., you don't necessarily have more freedom than you'd
have at an industrial research lab. So I think universities would find it
harder to attract researchers unless they started paying salaries on par with
industry research positions, which may not make abolishing tenure a net money
saver.

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VengefulCynic
In the end, to my mind, the thing that pisses people off the most is the
consistency with which tuition increases outpace inflation.
(<http://www.finaid.org/savings/tuition-inflation.phtml>) After that, all
issues like out-of-control costs, expensive research centers and sports
facilities just raise the question, "Are these things paying for themselves or
are they just translating into costs that need to be passed onto students in
the form of tuition?"

Just look at the comparison to a 2-year college and do your own analysis.
[http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/the-
skyrocketin...](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/the-skyrocketing-
costs-of-attending-college/)

~~~
yequalsx
As you pointed out the great increase in tuition is mostly from private
colleges. In public schools the increase comes from declining state support.
When I went to school tuition paid 1/3 of the cost of my education. Today it
is common for tuition to only cover 1/2 of the cost of education. Tuition is
the way to make up the for the loss of state support.

Tenure is not why colleges cost so much. Most teachers are not tenured and
tenure is becoming less and less prevalent. The debate about tenure and its
merits has nothing to do with the cost of college.

EDIT: In the last paragraph I'm complaining about the article and not the post
I'm responding to.

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joeyo
I find it troubling that the article doesn't even mention a single time the
reason why professors have tenure in the first place: academic freedom. It's
difficult to have scholarly discourse on unpopular or unprofitable topics if
you have to fear for your job.

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protomyth
Maybe they should end it in High Schools first. Also, a lot of colleges use
the athletic program to pay for things. They are basically pro-sports with an
attached school.

~~~
w1ntermute
> Maybe they should end it in High Schools first.

That'll be very difficult to do because of the teachers' unions. Since they
have a lot of political clout and the government controls most high schools
(whereas private institutions are much more common at the tertiary level), it
would probably easier to start with colleges.

~~~
protomyth
Yeah, your right, it would be easier to start with colleges, but every time I
see a "broken college" article, I really wish they'd fix the input system
first.

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merraksh
One of the most important balances you are advised to learn as a tenure-track
and a tenured professor is that between research and teaching. The college
measures your performance, and hence decides if you get tenured, based, among
others, on how much research (publications) and on your teaching evaluations.

At least officially, for a tenure track professor (mine is a Math dept.) both
research and teaching are equally important, but while you can limit the time
spent on teaching (preparing notes, office hours etc.) research and service
take all the rest.

 _Spin off the med schools and research institutes, they say. University
presidents “should be musing about education, not angling for another center
on antiterrorist technologies.”_

Isn't the purpose of a scholar that of creating knowledge and disseminating
it? I don't think a professor that does only teaching can create knowledge, at
least not as much as the one that does both --- with the right balance,
obviously.

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Daishiman
A lot of university systems in other places of the world do not have tenure.
At least where I study, positions last two years and are renewed in contests
where candidates are evaluated on academic, educational, and professional
qualifications, and an "order of merit" is created, whereby the first in the
order gets the position. There's a mandatory retirement age at 65, after which
a few exceptional professors might still teach under special temporary
assignments.

It's not perfect in any way, but at least there's a set of fairly objective
criteria, and the candidates are judges by people outside of the institution
(usually esteemed professors from foreign universities), and it does put some
pressure into academics for keeping up with their research and teaching. The
downside is that some very senior professor's merits are already so great that
it's almost impossible that they lose in a contest, which is in a way similar
to tenure or great seniority in other public sectors.

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nanairo
Maybe it's different in the USA, but having studied in the UK I find the jab
at the olympic class sports facilities a bit populistic to say the least.

The University is a place with a LOT of young people, so already putting a
sport facility there is a good idea (the ones here are always very much used).
Second at least where I have been, they are open to local residents too, who
can therefore benefit from good facilities.

Finally I am a bit discouraged when one day I hear we need to do something to
incentive sports and lower obesity, and the next they shoot on the sports
facilities of unis. To me it seems a lot like sour grape: "I don't have it so
you shouldn't either".

Edit: Oh, forgot to point out that there is such strong competition between
unis, that good sports facility are a very easy and relatively cheap way of
getting students to apply, and hence to get money for the rest of the uni.

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oogoog
Tenure is weird, but its only a part of the reason university prices are so
high.

First, getting a great education in a luxurious environment from world famous
researchers is just going to be expensive. Unsurprisingly, not everyone is
going to be able to afford that. Most people will have to find another way.

Second, government subsidies and regulation must raise the cost of education
for the entire market -- private schools too. Ironically this hurts poor
people the most.

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julius_geezer
I wonder whether HN, the NY Times, the Economist, etc.haven't any unproductive
fascination with Higher Ed stories. I find it a much more interesting
fascination than (say) the NY Times's fascination with parochial NY (and
usually) Manhattan fads, but not necessarily of wider interest.

