The case for getting rid of tenure.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> "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.

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).

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