It just doesn't get the same sort of attention. Mr. Breneman has never been through the tenure process, though he received it with his appointment at Virginia last year. Still, he says, when he was president of Kalamazoo College, he regularly defended tenure against attacks from trustees. In the 1980s he could argue that most businesses, the government, and the military offered the kind of job security that was tantamount to tenure. To have to argue that it's entirely because of academic freedom doesn't sell.
People view that as the crassest form of self-delusion.
As a participant in the American Association for Higher Education's project on tenure, Mr. Breneman has been given the assignment of writing a paper on how to sell the idea of alternatives to tenure to the next generation of professors. He may have an easy job. While his arguments are seen by some old-guard professors as attacks on the academy, they ring true with many younger ones who view tenure as elitist, a holdover from the days when the academy was viewed as an ivory tower. Chief among his complaints is that tenure squelches creativity. Young academics may steer clear of some of the hottest areas of research for six years, he says, until they secure tenure and have the freedom to pursue their real interests.