

The case for getting rid of tenure. - Arun2009
http://www.slate.com/id/2263348/pagenum/all/

======
electronvolt
>Critics say that tenure hurts students by making professors lazy. Course
loads vary widely from school to school: At some public universities,
professors teach nine or 10 courses. At smaller schools, they teach as few as
one or two, totaling as few as 140 classroom hours a year. If you can't be
fired, what's to stop you from refusing to teach an extra course? "I honestly
don't know what a lot of academics do a lot of the time," says Taylor.

As a child of two senior academics who are fairly well known in their fields
at one of the best Universities in the USA, I do know what a lot of academics
do a lot of the time. Just because they are not teaching 10 courses does not
mean they are wasting their time or spending it at leisure: my parents often
work 10-12 hour days all year long, mainly working on their research (a course
that has already been developed and taught several times is not much extra
work for a professor, assuming they have TA help or the like; see note at the
bottom). Although it is certainly a flexible schedule, it is not an easy one:
if you intend to continue doing good work and are not slacking off after
tenure, there is no obvious point where you are 'done'. There are always new
problems to address, writing to polish, or another conference to attend.

Note on teaching: Although teaching a class for the first time is a huge
amount of work, as you need to come up with lectures/etc., teaching it -again-
with no changes requires much less time; maybe an hour or two of prep for an
hour of classroom time compared to 4+ hours:1 in class. Either way, teaching 9
or 10 -different- courses seems ludicrous if you care about undergraduate
teaching quality; even if you are actually teaching two courses 5 times, that
leaves no time for research.

>By the time you come up for tenure, you're 40. For men, the timeline is
inconvenient. But for women who want to have children, it's just about
unworkable.

This is certainly the case. I was born when my parents were in their late 30s,
and my younger sister in their mid 40s. Not only are you looking at challenges
in terms of stability, but also in terms of just physical location: academic
jobs are few and far between, so when one of you can get a job at Ivy League A
and the other at Flagship State School B, you take what you get, even if it
means that you will be three states away from your spouse. I was born as soon
as my parents were able to live in the same place.

Tenure has its disadvantages: in the case of schools which are simply
emulating the much better institutions that world class research does flow out
of, tenure seems (to me, at least) less important. It does have an impact on
undergraduate teaching quality; this is why I believe that teaching staff as
well as research staff are so important to the success of a university.
Teaching comes as a second responsibility after research to most professors,
particularly undergraduate teaching.

The system proposed by nagrom, with divisions between teaching,
administration, and research, makes some sense, and from what I've seen it's
already partly in place. Any professor who ends up doing administrative work
(chairing a department, running a graduate program, etc.) often receives a
teaching cut in order to facilitate that. However, the only way that I see to
balance the teaching and research is to have dedicated teaching staff who are
evaluated primarily on the merits of their teaching.

~~~
bmj
In my experience, at a small liberal arts college, there is little motivation
for research, so even if the professor is teaching four or five courses a
year, it is possible that they aren't doing much outside of the classroom
work. Thus, tenure is a ticket to an easy life of teaching the same material
year after year, with little value or motivation to publish.

I don't disagree with your point, however, and I had professors that did work
hard outside of the classroom on their research, and certainly, in the case of
larger universities, many do work long hours.

------
okmjuhb
I almost couldn't make it through without going crazy:

>Imagine you ran a restaurant. A very prestigious, exclusive restaurant. To
attract top talent, you guarantee all cooks and waiters job security for life.
Not only that, because you value honesty and candor, you allow them to say
anything they want about you and your cuisine, publicly and without fear of
retribution. The only catch is that all cooks or waiters would have to start
out as dishwashers or busboys, for at least 10 years, when none of these
protections would apply. It sounds absurd in the context of the food-service
industry—for both you and your staff.

Except that the reason this is crazy is that dishwashing and bussing tables
have little to do with cooking, and that the goal of a restaurant is to make
money. A much better example would be one in which the goal of a restaurant is
to produce new and exciting foods, and where all head chefs have to start out
as a station chef and prove themselves there, first. This system would
actually make a lot of sense then.

The article then goes on to blame tenured faculty salaries for increasing
costs of tuition; never mind that academic faculty salaries have either just
kept up with inflation or fallen behind it for the past 30 years, that in fact
administrative salaries have ballooned during that same period, and that the
fraction of tenured faculty has dropped substantially. Some of the numbers
they give are at first glance highly suspect (35 years of professorship
costing $12 million means, not adjusting for inflation or the opportunity cost
of money, that a professor costs a little more than 340 thousand dollars a
year over her lifespan - a number that seems hard to justify).

The argument about affecting teaching and interdisciplinary study is a red
herring - if we put too much weight on (e.g.) publishing as opposed to
teaching in deciding whom to give tenure, there's no reason we won't do so
when we're hiring for our renewable 7-year contracts or whatever alternative
system is implemented. The problem is academic priorities, not tenure. (Though
I'm not taking a stand on whether or not teaching is valued too much or too
little as it is, and likewise with interdisciplinary studies).

The arguments that tenure hurts intellectual freedom for those without it is
ok, but it also misses the point of tenure. Tenure makes it difficult for
political decisions to dictate research directions. Tenured medical ethicists
can write honestly about abortion without worrying that in 10 years the social
tides may have shifted and they suddenly have to defend their jobs because of
something a TV news pundit dug up on them. The article is somewhat correct in
that young researchers might be afraid of saying inflammatory things because
it could hurt their chances of getting tenure later, but there's no reason any
alternative system is necessarily better in this regard.

>Critics say that tenure hurts students by making professors lazy. Course
loads vary widely from school to school: At some public universities,
professors teach nine or 10 courses. At smaller schools, they teach as few as
one or two, totaling as few as 140 classroom hours a year. If you can't be
fired, what's to stop you from refusing to teach an extra course? "I honestly
don't know what a lot of academics do a lot of the time," says Taylor.

This is particularly infuriating. The article makes it seem as though Taylor
is an academic faculty member, so it baffles me that he doesn't know any
better. Teaching even one course is a pretty substantial amount of work. Doing
it while trying to get grants and do research requires a tremendous amount of
effort. The professor's I've known are, to a person, among the most dedicated
and hardworking people I've ever met.

>But the clincher for the anti-tenure argument may come from the very people
it is supposed to benefit: academics. Specifically, young academics. Consider
the career path of an aspiring full-time tenured professor: Four years of
college, six years getting a doctorate, four to six years as a post-doc, and
then six years on the tenure track. By the time you come up for tenure, you're
40. For men, the timeline is inconvenient. But for women who want to have
children, it's just about unworkable.

This is perhaps my favorite paragraph in the article, and it by itself might
be enough to justify some of the proposed fixes. The alternatives to the
current system, the "modifications to tenure", are all interesting ideas that
I'd like to see explored more fully. I wish that there were more to them than
a few throwaway sentences in the second-to-last paragraph of the article.

------
nagrom
On the other hand, you get a lot of people doing crazy amounts of work for
little pay in order to get tenure. If you abolished the tenure system, there
is no chance at all that the majority of current scientists would stay in the
field - the freedom that comes with tenure to pursue whatever interests you is
the only reason to stay and work the ridiculous hours required of post doc
researchers.

It's a beautiful idea that people would work for 1/3 the market rate because
the work is so interesting, but it doesn't hold water. If you work as a
researcher at Google, Microsoft or IBM, do you get paid 1/3 of a senior
developer position? Abolishing the tenure system would see _even more_ of the
current brain drain from academia to industry.

Changing the tenure system _is_ feasible. What really needs to be done is to
split professorship into three paths: project management and administration,
technical work and teaching. A professor should pick one main area, and one
minor area and stick with them. It won't happen because all the prestige is in
technical work and all the power is in administration. There would be few
professors choosing to teach, and few professors willing to admit that they
don't do any technical work. Everyone would claim to do technical work but
actually politic and scheme, and to change things you would need the
enthusiastic consent of exactly the guys that play the system the best.

By the way, in the point alluded to in the article that universities pay a lot
of money to professors: professorial salaries have not inflated all that much
in the past 30 years. Vice principals' salaries have, consultancy services
have and centralised administration has. To the best of my knowledge, the
inflated money has gone to purchase huge IT systems and employ a lot more
student support services and student monitoring, at least in my experience. To
point a finger at professorial salaries is misleading at best.

~~~
jdhopeunique
I don't think IT systems make up much of a university's budget. A quick google
search turned up the following:

<http://naturalscience.msu.edu/administration/budget.html>

[http://www.bgtplan.lsu.edu/TREND/finances/actual/genexpend.p...](http://www.bgtplan.lsu.edu/TREND/finances/actual/genexpend.pdf)

[http://budget.psu.edu/openbudget/AllFundView2001.asp?type=A&...](http://budget.psu.edu/openbudget/AllFundView2001.asp?type=A&FY=20082009&fundtype=99&admin=%27TUN%27&sortcode=A)

~~~
nagrom
The _inflation_ in spending is what I was addressing. That second link shows
that professorial salaries are one of the slower-increasing expenditures in a
university's budget very nicely :-)

~~~
jdhopeunique
Inflation in spending is very misleading. I'm reminded of certain statistics
that begin with "<x> minority is the fastest growing <demographic, religion,
political affiliation, etc> in the country" ...well of course. When you're the
minority, it's easy to be the fastest growing.

I relooked at that second link and the total instruction and research budget
are only growing slightly slower than the total budget over the entire time
period ie. a multiple of 2.17 vs 2.3

------
Locke1689
This is a stupid article. For one, tenure is on a huge decline among most
universities (and even more so in professional schools). The most laughable
thing though is believing that removing tenure will encourage teaching.
_What?_ My dad has a saying -- you're only as good as your last grant. My
school charges $50k per student per academic year, a decent portion of which
goes to fixed costs. You know what keeps the lights on? Not student tuition.
We recently sold IP rights for Lyrica to drug companies for $700 million. We
have ~8,000 students. You do the math.

I have said it before and I will say it again: _major research universities
are not about teaching students._ Harvard isn't making the big bucks for its
endowment through simple education.

Getting rid of tenure doesn't help any of that. If anything, it removes the
option the tenured professors have of focusing on teaching. That said, if
tenure disappears I don't really care. I would hope that it would cause
universities to decide to pay people other than the tenure track professors
decent wages but I really don't see any chance of that no matter what way this
goes.

------
rdtsc
One of my professors in college encouraged me to do a PhD, get on a tenure
track position in some college, and then wait for it ... slack for the rest of
my life.

Her words were something like: "then you could go to the gym, travel, take it
easy, do whatever you want -- they can't fire you."

As she was saying it, I realized she was also talking about herself and her
own career.

Good colleges have well known, hard working professors. Other colleges have
some good professors too, but also attract a lot of those who game the system
to get a tenure then just sit on their ass until the day they die while
getting payed (often the state's public funds).

Yes, sure there is pressure from the department head. There is positive re-
enforcement for those who seek grants and funding from the industry. Some can
get into administrative duties if they don't feel like research and they can
boss others around while getting a slightly higher salary. But many just get
holed up in their offices, doing shit. Some pretend to "research" crap so
outlandish and useless that they might as well not do anything as it is just a
waste of resources.

~~~
yequalsx
I have tenure. Part of the reason for the slack off after getting tenure is
fatigue from the process of getting it. I spent 7 years as a grad student
teaching classes for low wages and no benefits. Then many years as an adjunct
for low wages and no benefits. I was lucky enough to get a tenure track job.
Spent several more years doing a lot of extra work to prove how valuable I
was. I didn't get paid extra for this extra work.

Now I have tenure. I haven't had a pay raise in 2 years. It looks like we
won't get a raise for another 2 years. I make $56,600 a year. And now I take
it easy.

I don't see the system changing because without the possibility of tenure
there is no way in hell I would have gone this route. Unless pay was increased
to industry standards but that's not going to happen either. Society does not
want to pay for quality teachers.

EDIT: Take it easy for me means that I'm not going to serve on the curriculum
committee. I try hard to teach well. I don't do the committee work.

------
nkassis
If tenure was removed, that would probably result in Universities having to
pay more for professors no? I mean, part of the pay discrepancies between
industry and academia is usually attributed to job security and benefits.
Remove the job security and you need to compensate for that.

What I'm getting at is, 15 tenure professors left does not put those
universities in the black. Those low payed non-tenured professors will be
asking for more or leaving.

This article fails in my view. The quote about some guy not knowing what
academics does with there time is hilarious. I work for a University as a
programmer in a lab. I can tell you that they work pretty hard to obtain
grants and new deals for advancing their research.

I'm sure some slack off but that's like anything else. Theres a ton of dead
weights in corporations today. The corporate world is not the panacea the
media makes it out to be. Small companies are another story, they can't live
with dead weight.

------
forgotAgain
This seems to me to be just another attack on professional careers in this
country.

If I were to pick the most significant staffing trend impacting the quality of
college education it would not be the granting of tenure. Rather it is the use
of adjuncts to teach classes, the sole purpose of which is to reduce cost for
the university.

Why so many people are trying to stratify the society into a wealthy few and
near indigent masses I don't understand but the ideas given in the article
serve only that purpose.

~~~
jdhopeunique
A recession is the perfect time to take a hard look at budgets and trim what
is not needed. People _will_ question professional careers that are inflated
and that is just a natural economic process. The university system is already
heavily stratified with tenured professors in the upper class and grad
students and staff in the lower class.

I agree with your point about the use of adjuncts being a significant staffing
trend. It's also a necessary trend especially at non-research (or sub-par
research) universities. The combined roles of researcher and teacher at these
universities lead to mediocrity in both in my opinion with professors using
research as an excuse for slack teaching. Most students learn outside the
class anyway.

------
btilly
My father-in-law would have supported this whole-heartedly.

He got disillusioned with math after he got tenure. So he stopped doing
research. He went to the department head and said, "Since I'm not doing
research, why don't you just schedule me to teach more courses?" He was turned
down because the department head didn't want him to make the other professors
look bad. He made the offer repeatedly until he got tired of hearing the nos.

The end result? He puttered around for 15 years after that. His classes were
always well attended. Students who attended his section of the course always
did better on tests. But he never again got a promotion, and he was never
allowed to teach any more courses than anyone else.

I think that a system without tenure would have forced him to make choices
that made him happier. A system that actually rewarded teaching would have
both made him happier, and have served the students well.

------
GeoffWozniak
> "I honestly don't know what a lot of academics do a lot of the time," says
> Taylor.

Perhaps he should talk to few. From my experience, it involves writing grants.

------
alextp
The main thing broken about the US academic system is not tenure, I think.
It's grants, and the perpetual chasing of them, the effective cause of the
good teachers having no time to teach and hardly any time do to research (if
they restrain themselves to a healty working week).

------
balding_n_tired
Tenure is not unlike the jury system: an excellent political safeguard that
has grave administrative drawbacks.

