Tenure Faces a Tenuous Future on Campuses

It hardly seems like a firing offense. But when Ed Schuh came out against federal farm supports at 90% of parity, the wolves were out.

The state’s farmers cried treason. Schuh was then head of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Agriculture and Applied Economics, and supports at that level would be a bonanza for agriculture.

“The governor went to visit the president of the university, demanding I be fired,” Schuh recalls. “The president looked at him and said, ‘I can’t fire Ed. He has tenure.’ End of discussion.”

And so it was. But it was far from the end of discussion of tenure itself.

The tenure system, that guarantee of a lifetime job with academic freedom, is facing its toughest challenge since its inception more than half a century ago. It is being questioned and revised in universities across the United States.

In many cases, universities feeling a financial pinch are trying to cut costs by hiring part-time professors.

Even some who argue vehemently that the system must be maintained acknowledge that it is imperfect. Despite growing sentiments for change, educators expect that it will survive, but not necessarily in its present form--or for as many people.

Tenure is not an ancient system. The American Assn. of University Professors developed it in 1940.

After a review process that lasts an average of six years, faculty members are granted job security.

According to the association, about 51% of full-time faculty members are tenured, and about 97% of four-year universities have tenure systems.

“I think tenure is very necessary . . . so that faculty can feel free to discuss ideas and not worry about any type of reprisal,” said Churchill Roberts, the tenured chairman of the Communication Arts Department at the University of West Florida at Pensacola.

Twenty years ago, Roberts offered students an opportunity to watch “Deep Throat,” act as members of a jury and write a position paper on whether they thought it was obscene. Massive publicity ensued.

“And so the chairman of the board of regents just decided unilaterally to send me a letter reprimanding me for that,” Roberts recalled. It appeared that the regents wanted to make an example of him, he added.

Roberts filed a grievance with the university’s Faculty Union and won, forcing the university to remove the letter of reprimand from his personnel file.

But there is a flip side to protecting faculty, noted Richard Chait, a professor of higher education at Harvard University.

The most powerful argument against tenure, he said, “is that it creates what’s often called a sinecure that places faculty beyond the reach of accountability, strategy and economy, and it provides too much insulation, too much protection, and that invites slothfulness and laziness.”

Under any sound tenure policy, faculty members can be dismissed for malfeasance, moral turpitude or incompetence, or if the university declares a financial crisis or eliminates an academic department.

“But there are some boards that would like to make it easier to dismiss faculty members,” said Ernst Benjamin, associate general secretary and director of research for the professors organization.

The reasons combine economics and pedagogy.

“One is a soft economy and a lot of downsizing and layoffs that focus people’s attention on employment security and invite people to wonder why faculty enjoy this privileged station,” said Harvard’s Chait.

Tenure also hampers schools when they try to change programs or use lower-cost labor, he said. And, finally, some academics feel that it just is not needed anymore.

The University of Minnesota Law School last year made a crucial change in favor of flexibility: Faculty members can be reasonably reassigned when programs are phased out. Professors who refuse to accept reassignment may be fired.

And two years ago, Bennington College in Vermont, facing a $1-million deficit, laid off 21 teachers with “presumptive tenure,” renewable five-year contracts. It replaced the system with individual contracts.

“There was a stagnation in the system,” said Mike Leary, a Bennington spokesman. “Presumptive tenure can tend to create a territorial atmosphere rather than an atmosphere where the faculty work together.”

Elsewhere, the change has been less drastic, but still striking.

Benjamin said the percentage of tenured faculty or faculty on tenure track is declining across the United States, as schools rely instead on part-time and nontenured professors.

“The principal reason is they cost less,” Benjamin said.

About 45% of all faculty today are part time, with few of them receiving benefits, Benjamin added. A full-time faculty member at a community college might cost $35,000 to $40,000 a year with benefits. Part-time faculty members teaching the same classes would cost about $15,000 a year.

Not surprisingly, the people at the lower end of the ladder--the ones who are less likely to get tenure--are the ones who are less enamored of it.

“Faculty of lower ranks, faculty of color, they’re more skeptical of tenure,” said Linda J. Sax, associate director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA.

She conducted a nationwide survey of 34,000 full-time faculty 26TENUREmembers and found that 38% considered tenure outmoded.

But 54% agreed that tenure attracts the best minds.

“For some institutions, tenure serves them exceedingly well,” said Harvard’s Chait. “The universities in the United States [that] are regarded as the very best in the world have deeply entrenched tenure systems.

“For those institutions that might be more financially strapped and require more flexibility that does not come from a large endowment, then tenure can be a constraint to change.”

More and more, schools are opting to change the system so that tenure is not the end of the road. They are adding “post-tenure review,” insisting that a tenured teacher continue to be evaluated.

A new study tracked at least 28 states in which public institutions have post-tenure review, are discussing it or are putting a plan together.

Christine M. Licata, associate dean for academic affairs at the Rochester Institute of Technology and coauthor of the study, said public schools are leading the movement.

Most schools are relying on the carrot, not the stick, she said. The idea is to enrich the careers of faculty and to help design plans for improvement for those who are not performing well.

In none of the programs she has studied do bad reviews lead to immediate firing. But at the University of Minnesota Law School (and at the university’s Morris campus), tenured professors whose work is poor can face a salary cut.

Still, that’s a far cry from losing their jobs, and tenure endures. Schuh, the Minnesota dean who survived apostasy on farm supports, would say that’s a good thing.

Schuh is 66 now and dean of the university’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. He has had other run-ins with politicians: when he opposed subsidies for alcohol as a fuel and when he endorsed the North American Free Trade Agreement. But he has never feared for his job.

“You have to have it to protect the integrity of the university,” Schuh said. “And when you protect the integrity of the university, you protect society. Society needs to be able to know that I’m not forced to lie as a scientist, as a scholar or as a researcher.”