The main task of the university is candid and courageous thinking about important issues. The academic world must be different. Because of their freedom from reprisal, permanent, full-time tenured professors are in a far better position to hold students to high standards and to grade students without worrying about the potential effect on the professor's employment prospects. A corps of permanent, full-time tenured faculty is essential to maintain American leadership in research. Higher education research in the U.S. leads the world.
Research requires sustained periods of study and experimentation.
They spent noticeably less time in committee work, which, in part, is devoted to peer review of research, curriculum design and direction of graduate student education. Increased turnover of research faculty would disrupt graduate schools' instruction of graduate students and weaken research programs. Institutions with an inordinate number of transient, short-term faculty are diverted from their educational mission by the need to engage in constant searching for new instructors, imposing more work on the continuing faculty and the administrative staff and disrupting academic processes. Assuring quality in the appointment of new faculty circulating in a national labor market of more than 3,800 colleges and universities obviously becomes more difficult with greater turnover. All rights reserved.