Reflections on Tenure

During my four years of service as President of the AAUP, higher education has been under increasing critical scrutiny and these examinations of the academy have led to a variety of suggestions for change. Some of the suggested changes would alter such essential aspects of academic life as tenure and collegial governance. An analysis of these suggestions indicates that there may be other motives for making the suggested changes other than those that are obvious. They may reflect a desire to save money and to shift the delicate balanced partnership that has characterized higher education. When I assumed the presidency of the AAUP in June of 1994, I began to collect and file articles and reports appearing after that date which deal with significant issues of interest to higher education. No folder has grown more or has had more frequent entries than the one labelled "Tenure-Attacks On". The folder now contains not only news articles, but summaries of interviews I have participated in and responses to speeches I have given on the issue of tenure. As a biologist, my first impulse on encountering criticism is always to analyze the arguments given as objectively as possible and to try to apply logic in formulating appropriate responses that address the perceived problem. But meaningful responses to the attacks on tenure have turned out to be difficult, if not impossible to give, because the real issue turns out not to be tenure but what tenure protects, an academic world which has its own vital procedures and structures. Just when a reasoned response to one claim is framed, the focus shifts subtly and a new dimension of the attack is revealed. I have reached the conclusion that the fight against the critics of tenure can better be understood by those in sociology than in biology, and that the most meaningful responses we can frame have to be grounded in principle and in the longstanding traditions of the academy. First the attacks. What have been the claims? The earliest articles in my folder deal with "dead-wood". The assumption of many of these articles is that there is dead-wood in almost every department of every institution of higher education in the country. There is an unspoken understanding in my collection of articles that *Direct all correspondence to: James E. Perley, Department of Biology, Mateer Hall, College of Wooster, Wooster, OH 44691; e-mail: jperley@acs.wooster.edu. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.169 on Sat, 01 Oct 2016 06:14:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 724 SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES Volume 41, Number 4,1998 it is impossible to do anything about such non-functional faculty members and that the institutional structure protecting them is tenure. It is hard to be in favor of "deadwood," so the framing of the attack immediately puts the responder on the defensive. Of course, no faculty member would express a desire to keep those on a faculty who had lost interest in performing their duties with distinction. In looking at the faculty members I have known in both large public institutions and in small private ones over a thirty year career, however, I would have difficulty identifying many faculty members who needed to be removed from their positions for incompetence. A Provost from a large private university and a participant with me on a Pew panel charged with examining the future of higher education, confirmed my sense of the general quality of faculty work when he argued that we needed to institute faculty evaluation schemes, not because we would identify many faculty who needed help (he estimated that fewer than one per-cent of faculty would be identified in such screening as unproductive), but because such schemes were being demanded by the public who had lost confidence in the professoriate. On thinking about the claim that tenure protects "dead-wood," it soon became clear to me that the appropriate response, if there are such non-productive faculty members, would be help to restore them to the state of excellence they possessed at the time of tenuring, assuming that they had once demonstrated excellence or would not have been tenured in the first place. When I made the suggestion that opportunities such as sabbatical leaves might be made available to weak faculty members so they could become reinvigorated, the suggestion has been dismissed as too costly. When I offered the suggestion that funds be increased for faculty development, or that a special fund be established to support the research of faculty who have found it increasingly difficult to obtain grants given the cutbacks we have seen at the federal level, I was told that buildings had priority on campus, in part because donors could more easily be found for buildings than for academic functions. And there was no answer when I had suggested that dead-wood might exist because administrators often found it awkward and seemingly dangerous to charge faculty members with incompetence and to allow such a case to be made before a committee of faculty peers. When the argument about "dead-wood" is satisfied, the topic quickly shifts to the uncapping of mandatory retirement. The arguments here are best represented by comments made by the Chair of the Governor's Task Force on Educational Reform in Oklahoma. In responding to comments I made about tenure, he said that he could live with tenure if faculty members, at the time of hiring, agreed to a "twenty-yearsand-out" clause in their contracts. At no time in his comments did he discuss the quality of faculty work; he was solely concerned with cost and simply saw faculty members at the end of their careers as too expensive. Without evidence, he had come to the conclusion that the uncapping of mandatory retirement had caused great numbers of faculty members to stay on until they were carried out feet first, with yellowed sheets of stale lecture notes grasped in their hands. Even in an article appearing in The Chronicle of Higher Education this summer (August 8, 1997) dealing with the issue, the writer stated that not many faculty members were staying on after normal retirement age, but then proceeded to This content downloaded from 207.46.13.169 on Sat, 01 Oct 2016 06:14:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Reflections on Tenure 725 write an extended argument about the perils of such possibilities. Nowhere is there an apparent awareness of the reality that faculty members are not changing their retirement plans because of their new ability to stay in their positions for