While True Learn Dissident Friendly Tracking System

Tenure in the American university system is a lot of things, and they are not always easy to reconcile. It is a form of job protection, one that differs fundamentally from the protections offered by unionization. It is a safeguard for the freedom of academic inquiry — related to but not identical with a larger and peculiarly American commitment to free speech. (At public universities, tenure is part of the armor protecting faculty members for controversial political speech, even when that speech is unconnected to their teaching or research.) And it is a professional prize, a badge of authority, in the university's hyper-hierarchical symbolic economy.

It is also disappearing. In 1993-94, more than half, or 56.2 percent of faculty members at institutions with a tenure system had tenure. By 2018-19, that number had fallen to 45.1 percent. These declines are driven in part by declines in the percentage of full-time faculty across the university. In 1970-71, almost 80 percent of faculty members were full-time. By 2018-19, that number was under 55 percent.

To politicians, especially red-state politicians at a time when trust in universities among the public is very low, tenure is an easy target. "What other job in the U.S. has protections like that?" as State Sen. Rick Brattin, a Missouri Republican, put it. "If you looked around, you'd come up short." Meanwhile, an evaporating academic job market and rising adjunctification have severely diminished the ranks of tenure's potential stakeholders. As Ed Burmila asked last summer in these pages, "Are there enough academic workers with a stake in the tenure system left to defend it?"

With the help of Carolyn Dever, a professor of English and a former provost at Dartmouth College, and George Justice, a professor of English and former dean of the humanities at Arizona State University, we've gathered 12 scholars from across fields to address hard questions about the future of tenure. Besides these 12 new pieces, we've also included four previously published essays on tenure and its maladies. Our authors don't always agree with one another — but no discussion of the future of tenure can afford to ignore them.

Tenure, like Churchill's democracy, is the worst imaginable system, except for all the others. The best argument for its retention is still the one that lay behind its creation more than a century ago: insulation from political pressure. Then, and for many decades afterward, that pressure came from the right. Today it comes from both directions.

In the summer of 2020, after the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, colleges proclaimed solidarity with Black communities standing against racism. Presidents and provosts across the country, despite the impact of the pandemic on university finances, announced their recommitment to diversity and inclusion through faculty hiring initiatives. These efforts are not new. Many of the same colleges announced similar plans after the deaths of Trayvon Martin in 2012, Michael Brown in 2014, and Sandra Bland in 2015.

Throughout my years in grad school and while I was a junior faculty member, the advice I was given by colleagues time and time again was to wait to have children until after I got tenure. I ultimately took the advice — I got my Ph.D. at 27 and waited until I was 35 to have my daughter — but I know that most women in academe do not have that luxury.

Golden Cosmos for The Chronicle

The collapse of secure, well-paid positions and their replacement with precarious teaching positions is a crisis that needs to be solved. The answer is not more tenure, however. If we hope to succeed in making academic work viable, it can only be by joining a broader push for worker power and job security. Tenure does afford speech protections to a shrinking minority of academics, but why should such protections be exceptional? As long as some of us have something to defend that others never had in the first place, it will be difficult to build the kind of solidarity that leads to lasting and substantive change.

For junior professors, the pathway to tenure was already an arduous, anxiety-inducing one before the pandemic. There's the pressure to publish. There's the need to attend conferences in order to manufacture a professional identity. There's the importance of cultivating a scholarly network to support your research goals. It's a lot. Throw in life things (family, illness, divorce, caring for one's parents) and structural inequality (being a woman, person of color, queer, disabled, or all of the above), and the tenure process feels even more brutal. One year into a global pandemic, and tenure these days seems damn near impossible.

Our current crisis may well lead departments to act quickly to revise their tenure criteria — too quickly. Properly meeting the challenges ahead will require careful thought, planning, and time. Tenure at an R1 institution in an English department, such as my own, typically requires the publication of a monograph. Despite many calls to change tenure criteria over the years, top-ranked English departments have tenaciously stuck with the book.

Lars Leetaru for The Chronicle

After I received word of my promotion to full professor — a day after my 39th birthday — I decided to text my friends rather than post the news on Twitter. One of them asked how I was celebrating. I told her that I wasn't yet. Instead I was making a list of all the people who had tried to destroy my career.

"Wow, that's heavy," she said. It was.

But it was also cathartic. Writing the list helped me realize something. From the outside, being a mother probably seemed like the greatest challenge on my path to full professor (the most common reply to my text was some version of "I can't believe you did that with two kids!"). In fact, the biggest obstacle was actually race.

Today, discussions about tenure bring to mind that 1970s Miller Lite beer commercial: "Tastes Great. Less Filling." In 21st-century higher ed, tenure isn't that great — and it's filling us with false hopes. Tenure is tired.

A Radical Experiment

Tenure does not equal excellence.

Twenty-five years ago, I wrote an opinion piece for this publication that began as follows:

What do Queen Elizabeth, Fidel Castro, Clarence Thomas, and Pope John Paul have in common? Lifetime jobs, regardless of their current contributions or future plans, with no provision for performance reviews or mandatory retirement.

Just like tenured university professors.

Little has changed. Fidel has left us, but Clarence and the queen are still chugging along, and while there's a new pope, he's got the same deal. Tenured university professors still have that deal too — albeit far fewer of them.

Kristen Uroda for The Chronicle

On February 26, I was promoted to full professor. This was, of course, welcome news, especially after a year of many personal disappointments and global tragedies. But how to mark a promotion that says more about the gender and racial disparities of the academy than it does about any one person's accomplishments? As a historian of women and gender, I felt compelled to try to understand my own experiences in a broader context.

With Cornel West's recent request to be considered for tenure denied, the question academics should be asking themselves is not if they are tenurable, but if they even want to be. Last week, West shared that he may leave Harvard because of the denial of his tenure-consideration request, and the academic (and nonacademic) world reacted with outrage, critique, and confusion (many assumed West already had tenure). Regardless of what you think of West's politics and unsteady relationship with the academy, it's clear that his body of work and legacy are worth tenure at any institution. The widespread assumption that West already had tenure was revealing: We intuitively believe obviously tenurable individuals would have tenure, a conviction that's increasingly being challenged.

My institution, the Olin College of Engineering, does not have tenure. This decision was a boundary condition of the initial endowment grant that created the institution, and all faculty members who join do so with the understanding that tenure is not on offer. Here, I am not advocating for or against a tenure system. Instead, I want to explore some of what might be possible outside that system.

Joan Wong for The Chronicle

As the head of science policy at the National Institutes of Health, I spend a lot of time thinking about the role we play in driving the behavior of the institutions and scientists we fund. How can we incentivize positive changes? Sometimes that's about facilitating the growth of emerging science or urging resources away from futile outlets. But it is also about encouraging the type of responsible behavior that we believe advances science and health. Tenure, and the principle of academic freedom that underlies it, is an example of one such institutional-level behavioral driver.

It is time to change what work we value. When we do, our tenure process will have to change too. This is especially clear now that the call for "public humanities" has reached a crescendo. Universities and foundations have joined to prepare graduate students and faculty in history, literature, anthropology, philosophy, and criticism to take their knowledge beyond the academy. This effort is necessary to ground fields losing their sense of relevance — but it is only a partial one. Now, we need to fold public engagement back into our work as scholars. Public humanities must fundamentally transform our intellectual projects, our modes of inquiry, and our way of evaluating what counts as real scholarship.

If you're a faculty member at a public university in Iowa, you're under no illusion that tenure is guaranteed because, on a regular basis, an Iowa state representative proposes abolishing it. This year that proposal made it out of committee and was debated by the legislature before being voted down.

As I read through the bill, it occurred to me that faculty members and anti-tenure legislators do have something in common. Both believe in accountability. Where we differ is in our answers to the question, accountable to whom? Supporters of the bill believe universities should be accountable to them and their values, which vary significantly from state to state. In theory, most faculty members believe that artists, scholars, researchers, and higher education as a collective are accountable to ideas and the pursuit of knowledge. In practice, tenured professors often feel most accountable to their particular intellectual passions and their disciplines. Tenure is seen as a necessary protection because accountability to ideas can put intellectuals on a collision course with popular beliefs, familiar practices, and legislators.

Most university stakeholders are temporary. Students stay for a few years; trustees have limited terms. Administrators stick around for shorter and shorter periods as universities get harder and harder to run. Yet, universities last longer than almost any institutions in society. Whenever a crisis like Covid-19 comes along, catastrophic predictions about mass closures are never fully realized.

This institutional longevity is why tenure is so important. A permanent institution needs a permanent conscience. The tenured faculty provide that. Trustees want to leave their mark during their limited terms, and administrators are trying to survive or get to their next job. Only the tenured faculty have the ability to take the long view.

While True Learn Dissident Friendly Tracking System

Source: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-future-of-tenure

While True Learn Dissident Friendly Tracking System

A Radical Experiment

Tenure does not equal excellence.

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