As an ex-tenured professor, I can say tenure was a good thing-until the passing of anti-age discrimination laws that made it essentially a life time appointment. I am convinced that tenure when there isn't compulsory retirement at 65 has had some terrible consequences for the academy.

Why? Because the anti age discrimination laws combined with tenure has caused an impossible situation for new PHD's.

But I do still believe giving academics job security is a good thing, a necessary thing. SO what we need to do is replace tenure by say 25-30 year contracts or get a law passed that would again allow tenure to last only until somebody is 65.

Absent this, we will continue to have a horrible and practically hopeless situation for new PhD's - and it will only get worse.

(Of course, tenure in the 50's, 60's and 70's was effectively a 25 to 30 year contract since it ended when one turned 65.)

What amazes people on the outside is the short work week, the summers off, etc. that academics enjoy, while they criticize other professions' higher salaries. They need to get a clue about the world of work, especially some of the age 50+s.

Kevin:

I’m not sure how things work at OU, but at my large state university the vast majority of adjuncts do not teach – their adjunct appointments are courtesies for email, parking and library privileges, in return for mentioning this affiliation when they publish – or the few that do teach do so only as guest lecturers once or twice in a semester. If you count all of the people who have adjunct appointments in my department, they far outnumber the ‘regular’ faculty, and I suspect that the wild statistics you cite don’t count much further than that kind of figure. But if you count how many of our courses are taught by adjuncts, the answer is one per year, max, and that’s usually an advanced PhD student finishing up a dissertation, getting some teaching experience in their area of specialization.

I have yet to see statistics on adjunct teaching that get deeper than bogus extrapolation from raw numbers of adjunct appointments. It may be the case that 50% of faculty appointments are part-time in the U.S., but this tells me nothing at all about the percentage of actual teaching that is done by part-time faculty.

I am a retired former tenured professor from a large state university. My former dept had up to 40 or 50% adjuncts. The decision ti use adjuncts was clearly a cost issue not an attempt to bypass tenure. Universities are in financial trouble and it is lots cheaper to hire adjuncts at a fraction of the cost of a tenure-track faculty member. My feeling is that it is seen as a pure "business" decision, i.e. we need to cover x number of intro sections for x number of dollars.

As anyone who has lived in an academic environment can attest, "academic freedom" is a bit dubious. Professors can be threatened and pressured in numerous ways. Raises, benefits, grants, perks of one sort or another are used to keep people in line. Having tenure is no guaranty.

This is not a bad article (I'm not an academic), but as a defense of tenure, well, I didn't notice that one was made. Complaining about poor Ward Churchill being pushed out because politicians complained about him is absurd. Churchill was an incompetent fraud who never should have been hired. We should be more concerned about the plagiarists and charlatans who are still in place, rather than the one that was fired.

In the good old days, well, excuse me, in the good old days Lionel Trilling was famous for being the only Jew in the Columbia English Department. Were those the good old days? Were the Sixties and the Seventies the good old days, when you got an "A" for sleeping with your professor? Things are tough all over.

In response to Marty: My husband is a tenured professor at a fairly large public university. Forget the short weeks and summers off. Yes, he may be mowing the lawn on a Friday afternoon, but he is attending a conference on Saturday and Sunday. Not only does he three teach classes a semester, he also administers his program, advises students, certifies graduations, participates in faculty committees and other faculty related work. Summers are spent working on research and other contracts. He barely has time to take a small camping trip in the summer. People will criticize what they consider elite until they learn how hard people work.

The McCarthy era ushered in loyalty oaths -- required for all faculty. My father, then an instructor in electrical engineering at the University of Washington, was confronted with this -- and went into industry. The author is too accepting of practices of that era.

The professoriate is a racket. Part time work, excellent pay and benefits, cushy retirement, cool when it's hot, warm when it's cold. Anyone that snivels about that arrangement is not a serious person.

Short work week? Summers off? Not at a research university!

Nathan, who says it's part-time work? There is constant reading and preparation to stay up to the minute to make those class-room presentations worth while. Summers are not vacations; they are required to catch up. Putting professors to teaching 40 hours per week with a short vacation would be the same as having professors teaching what they taught in 1970; what would they know about today's world, today's knowledge, or today's research. Professors are paid for what they know -- not for the time they stand in front of a class. Are surgeons paid by the hour? Are ministers paid just for a 20 minute sermon? Most professors I know are harried from the stress of staying ahead.

For every professor who's busting his butt, another is coasting. Ambition is unequally distributed; more than a few PhDs are ambitious to attain tenure in a reasonably good situation. After that, it's an integrity issue. Moreover, ability is unequally distributed as well, and for every Bernard Bailyn - no, for every student of a student of Bernard Bailyn, doing interesting work at a research university - there are scores of grinds who got credentialed, perhaps even at the feet of the beloved Bud, have little more to say, but cannot imagine any other than the (putative, self-mythologizing) "life of the mind." And then...and then... This clearly isn't a one-size-fits-all conversation.

I feel like I have one hand behind my back whenever I defend my job and its hours, benefits and research requirements and yes, tenure, to people with no idea what these are or how hard academics really work. So let me say it to all those clockwatchers and administrators and politicians: we KNOW more than you, we are BETTER trained than you, we THINK more clearly than you, and with greater rigor, and we CONTRIBUTE more than you ever will in terms of knowledge and culture, in other words the things that have real value.

As my chair commented when I took my first tenure-track job, the joy of academia is that you can work any 80 hours of the week you want.

I've worked in the "working world"--a world where people talk of "bringing something home to work on" as if they ever didn't work, where they aren't grading papers at their kids' Saturday night recitals, where vacations don't mean "time away to finish your overdue manuscript."

Essentially, the professoriate needs better PR. It certainly has advantages--life of the mind and all that jazz--but it's not a profession for the lazy.

PO'd, are you certain you know more than we, that you think better than we, that you are more rigorous and more cultivated? Do you live inside our minds? Do you know what we read at night, and with whom we spend our time?

You are doubtless better trained at what you do than we are, but please don't assume that we are not trained and skilled to a high level or that we are unknowledgeable and illiterate.

Your prejudice and contempt are unfounded, and add nothing civilized to this debate.

One should also view tenure as a non-economic form of compensation. To become I professor I went to graduate school for six years to earn a doctorate. I started as an assistant professor for less than half the pay of friends who went to law school for three years. Now, after almost twenty years as a professor, I earn a fraction of friends who have been lawyers for the same amount of time. I knew that as a professor I would never make what a lawyer or MBA makes. But for me the lower pay was fine because I got a certain style of life and job security in return. If you eliminate tenure, one of the attractions of becoming a professor disappears. Without the prospect of tenure as an inducement, you would have to pay me a lot more to be a professor. Without the prospect of tenure, I would have gone to law school or business school and made a lot more money. If you think college is expensive now, imagine if you had to pay professors what lawyers and MBAs make!

You don't need tenure to maintain academic freedom. Just do whatever research you want - on your own freakin' time. Einstein wrote up his General Theory of Relativity while working as a postal clerk.

Get a job and do your own research, you bunch of crybabies.

Tenure requires a false belief: just because people don't suck before tenure, they're not going to suck after tenure.

No. Schools need a way to fire people who suck. Tenure obstructs. Get rid of it.

Jeff writes: "Just do whatever research you want - on your own freakin' time." But research is part of what we are hired to do. That is part of what it means to be a research university. If it is part of our jobs, why should we do it on our own time?

The author can't explain why some junior faculty might not support the idea of tenure. Perhaps they feel if nobody had tenure with the associated pay & benefits, there would be resources available to pay them a decent wage.

Keith wrote: "If it is part of our jobs, why should we do it on our own time?"

Honest. The issue isn't academic freedom and never has been. It's about money and leisure.

Ending tenure doesn't end academic freedom. You can research anything you want any time you want, without tenure.

But, you can't get PAID to research anything you want. Without tenure, you'd have to keep showing demonstrable progress in a research program. And maybe you won't be able to pick that program.

With freedom comes responsibility. Want to research whatever you want? Do it! And pay for it yourself. Want a paycheck? Do what your boss says, and do what you want on your own time.

Almost everyone works in a job like this.

Jeff - academic freedom is not supposed to mean you can spend your time researching whatever you want. In many disciplines, part of a professor's job is to bring in the grant money that will make research possible. The difficulty comes when the results of that research are not what the donors would like: academic freedom is meant to protect professors in these cases.

Tenure may or may not be a good way to do this. For the last eleven years, I've always had a one year renewable contract, and I've been happy with that. But the point of academic freedom is not to let me spend my time doing whatever I feel like, but to let me tell the truth without fear of reprisal.

I don't think of tenure as being driven primarily by academic freedom concerns. But I do find the attitude towards it of these 40% of junior faculty pretty interesting. Junior faculty are hired by senior faculty. If the latter did not have tenure their jobs would be threatened by the former and the incentive to appoint the best junior faculty would disappear. My suspicion is that these 40% are at the wrong end of the distribution.

During my 32 years as a full-time professor of physics in the California State University system my typical work week was 60 to 75 hours long, between class time, preparation, grading, committees, office hours, and research. During the summer break the hours were often 40 to 50 per week on research projects, often for no extra pay. And, trips to meetings, often on my own dime, to present research results or to upgrade teaching skills. So much for a cushy job with short hours....

Fine, get rid of tenure and you most surely will use the new freedom to cut people when they burn out. It works fine in other industries. But in how many of those other industries do people invest something like 12 years in training? And in how many is the training so singular that it is almost untransferrable. The question is, who in their right mind would risk that investment without a long term pay off?

The most important freedom is the freedom to fail lazy and incompetent and cheating students. Do employers really want those students to graduate with all As? If not, someone has to risk being an "unpopular" teacher and giving harsh grades. If you try this untenured, you lose your job because of "poor teaching."

Jeff writes:

"You don't need tenure to maintain academic freedom. Just do whatever research you want - on your own freakin' time. Einstein wrote up his General Theory of Relativity while working as a postal clerk."

Since Einstein was a patent office clerk when his *Special* Theory of Relativity was published, Jeff's contribution illustrates why pissed-off prof may not be that wrong.

@anonymous:
Excellent point. The corporate model means pleasing the customers. Many of the customers want good grades with little work. They will get it. And if you refuse to play along, they will find someone else to teach the class. The issue here goes way beyond tenure; it's about the disaster of modeling the university on the corporation.

Tenure is irrelevant because the vast majority of college teaching will be going online. Bricks-and-mortar colleges and professors will go the way of travel agents and stockbrokers. Students will learn at their own convenience, and not on a rigid and asinine agrarian schedule.

Bye-bye, guys---we simply don't need 90% of you anymore.

21st Century Professor
http://www.prism-magazine.org/jan07/feature_21st_century.cfm

An interesting article that for the most part I don't know how to judge, as I am not an academic. At least until I reached this sentence "But it’s especially difficult to defend the peculiar practice of tenure when the right is busy rallying its base by hammering elites and blasting the idea that intelligence is a prerequisite for entering public life." It's the kind of inaccurate, insulting, and unfair statement that confirms why many of them hold academics in contempt. A "Yep, them right-wingers just ain't smart enuff to appreciate us" sort of thing.

dan1138 writes: "Tenure is irrelevant because the vast majority of college teaching will be going online. Bricks-and-mortar colleges and professors will go the way of travel agents and stockbrokers. Students will learn at their own convenience, and not on a rigid and asinine agrarian schedule."

Doubtful...largely because for most colleague us also a social experience -- the transition to living away from parents and into adulthood; socializing and the search for future mates. Those sorts of things that students get from bricks and mortar colleagues will remain valued. I could never have gotten my college experience and everything I enjoyed about it online. There is a difference between college and travel agencies -- who looks back upon their last encounter with a travel agent with fondness?

Academic freedom means to me the freedom to take bigger risks, e.g., write grant proposals and conduct the best possible research, which may take a few years to come to fruition. The other points made already, that you can speak your mind more freely and be more demanding of your students, are important but secondary.

Unfortunately this appears to be a vicious cycle. Overloaded part time faculty have less time and resources to do research, the less contribution they make to society, the less value society sees in universities, the less resources the (public) universities gets for faculty. All of this is backed by bloated administrations and cash-strapped states.

Professors, stop taking grad students. I know the reasons why you need to, but make a stand. Given the deplorable state of the academic job market, they're not going to find gainful employment anyway. You have an almost moral responsibility to not sell these kids a fantasy of security and stability in their future careers.

Tenure is an expression of trust, and too many of those so entrusted have betrayed that trust too egregiously. If I were creating a new university I would use tenure--but I would add an escape clause which would make it quite easy to fire any professor who violated their trust. I don't mind professors who preach, but those who flunk people who disagree with their controversial beliefs are betrayers of both academic freedom and the trust of tenure. As I have experienced this first hand, in the late 80s, at two different colleges, I find it hard to sympathize with those who have already cleared the hurdle of tenure. However I think both university students and academic freedom in general are harmed by the use of part-time professors. Let the professoriate demonstrate they can be trusted again and things might change, but outside the academy cynicism rules, due in no small part to the brutal petty cruelties of some professors who believe themselves beyond all limits.

I've worked in industry, the private sector, as an adjunct, as a FT TT faculty, and a highish level college administrator.

Every university I've attended, taught at, or worked at has tenured faculty who work very hard and continue to make important contributions as researchers and teachers until they retire. There are also tenured faculty who do nothing, publish nothing, research nothing, whose lectures are rote, who don't keep office hours, who never look at their email or return a phone call, and who are completely inaccessible every day they are not on campus. There are also tenured faculty who are reasonably productive but use tenure as a shield for outrageously awful behavior. I see behaviors and attitudes in tenured faculty for which they'd be fired on the spot if they pulled this kind of crap in any other workplace and no one says a thing.

If the academy is serious about academic freedom, then it needs to develop ways to guarantee academic freedom to everyone who teaches -- TAs, grad students, visiting profs, adjuncts, pre-tenure FT faculty. The majority of post-secondary courses (both by credit hour and by course number) are taught by non-tenured faculty. The majority of the research, especially in the sciences, is done by non-tenured faculty and students. This isn't going to change. If the academy won't police itself, which it hasn't and I doubt it will, then accrediting bodies pushed by federal and state legislatures are justified in imposing standards on the academy.

What's evident through a lot of the comments here, as well as much of the anti-education policy being pushed through now, is that the American public has a deeply ingrained cynicism about any and all education. Why? Because education creates a questioning individual, and that goes against the need for a compliant workforce and a quietly grazing herd of consumers. So what is happening now? There is an attack on all teachers, all teaching, as the "cause" of our failing system. (Those grade-school teacher pensions! Tenure!)

I say, question that and get an education before you rush to answer..

I've worked in the academic world and the private sector. I'm a little sick of people telling me how hard they work in the "real world". Please. Golfing a couple of afternoons a week and calling it a sales meeting, 2 hour lunches, company paid cars, Rotary lunches for 3 hours to share "business ideas", sales conferences that are little more than booze fueled adultery escapades, bonuses regardless of performance, and hour and a half office chats bout your basketball pools. Give it a rest. Nobody works as hard as they pretend to.

seamus, where did you work? I'd like to get paid to play golf, so tell me where I can apply.

Barbara Piper: Ok,so we get the stats that support what everyone knows, namely, that the majority of college students are taught by contingent faculty, especially those in gen ed or introductory liberal arts courses which are supposed to ease students' transition into college and facilitate their future success. Alas, it is precisely this sort of teaching work that's being devalued in the academy because those doing it have crappy working conditions and little incentive to commit to it. Meanwhile, there are other faculty,comfortably full-time and tenured and they'd rather not think about the underlings. Some demand stats to show who's doing most of the "work." Ok, we get the stats. What then?

As many have pointed out, the casualization of academic work is an extension of the labor practices in corporationland where some are winners, some losers, especially students who seldom get full time attention paid to them, and aspiring teachers whose dream of joining and sustaining an academic community appears increasingly quixotic.

Ask yourself this: why don't we have an increasing percentage of part-time Presidents, Provosts, Deans, Sports coaches on college campuses? Why is even thinking about such working/hiring conditions as a possibility (to save money!) for this employment class absurd? Why is the adjunctification of the faculty so often seen, like the weather, as a force of nature and justified as such?

Finally, watch the documentary and read the book DECLINING BY DEGREES. Pity those idealists who still hope for a place in academe; curse their elder "parents" for participating in the diminution of available positions for the children they've taught. Is there any other profession that has allowed such a large portion of its practitioners to become temps? What's the percentage of part-time lawyers, doctors, dentists or other "professionals" who've spent lots of time and money, hard work, and accrued as much debt, as have college teachers, to get where they are and be faced with such crumbs as their only "reward?"

Nobody is forcing grad students into their chosen fields, so why blame the professors? The students could do something else if they wanted. They already know what the job stats are when they apply to grad school. It's hard to understand all the resentment about choices freely made.

I taught university for 19 years before finally securing tenure, 10 more and then retired early to write. You radiated insecurity," a colleague said. Who wouldn't, with some years, the whole tenured faculty voting on your reappointment...the turkey shoot. Fortunately I did my main work (on teaching thinking) under the radar. For moi, tenure's vital purpose is as a stainless-steel tool to Get One's Proper Work Done.

Guys, read the handwriting on the wall. In the future, research will be the province of relatively few, science/technology heavy universities. Teaching will be the province of the Internet, since the marginal cost of adding another student is zero. The idea that bricks-and-mortar colleges should play some sort of role in socializing young people and helping them find mates is absurd and laughable. Taxpayers should support that ? Yeah, and I'm the Tooth Fairy. It's simply OVER for the vast majority of colleges and faculty, just like it's over for newspapers and book publishers. Unless the information you possess is unique, economically valuable, and difficult to substitute, you are going to be decimated by the online world.

This is so depressing an issue. There is no doubt that higher ed. is now a ponzie scheme that is beginning to implode. But it was not by design and there is cabal to to blame. The US no longer values the sustained evaluation of ideas, and those trained at this, therefore, are in over supply. When I dropped out of Law School to get a PhD in the Humanities, it was a relatively well informed decision. News reports all showed that an aging professorate would begin retiring in the 90s, and PhDs would be in demand. there was no way to predict that St. legislatures would slash budgets, schools would impose hiring freezes, that the over supply of PhD meant that hiring committees could make ridiculous demands for publication and teaching (what was my SECOND book going to be and when would it come out while teaching a 3-4 load). Add to that the idea that college now is club that requires winning sports and health clubs, and catered dorms and all the plush necessary to compete for "customers" and is there any wonder that the reason to go to college (to learn how to evaluate ideas and information from experts) is lost on nearly everybody involved. Such is the rise and fall of civilizations.......

To nervous prof: I think the rise of "know nothing" political parties, fueled by misinformation and propaganda, is really behind these attacks on higher education, just like the recent attacks on unions in my State. And of course an educated, critically thinking public is not in their interests. Who would vote for them?

This review is wholly misleading by suggesting that tenure is primarily intended to benefit professors. It is (or was) intended to benefit society, by providing a healthy diversity of thought and opinion. It's also a complete anachronism in the Internet age, with a dizzying variety of opinions available today. We simply don't need a priestly class of elite mandarins to think great and provocative thoughts for us now. It's also silly to compare professors to judges. Only federal judges have lifetime tenure, and that's to insulate them from outside pressures since their rulings have a direct and profound impact on many aspects of daily life. In contrast, the vast majority of professors are totally ignored by society because they do nothing useful or important except to a tiny minority of peers.

A good example of why tenure still has a function is to look what is happening in Wisconsin. The Republican Party is trying to sift through a professors emails looking for ways to trash him because he wrote an op ed in a newspaper criticizing the governor and legislature for eliminating collective bargaining for state workers.

Clearly, this is an act of intimidation for expressing his views. He maintains that he makes a clear separation between his university .edu email and a personal account, but it is still an invasion of his free speech which hopefully tenure will protect. (see link below)
http://tinyurl.com/6dbk59s

I was graduated from one of the better Universities 50 years ago. I was very well taught by professors who were devoted and tenured. They were certainly more intelligent, better educated and even, I believe, wiser than most of the people I have dealt with subsequently. And one would certainly hope that this would be the case. I am grateful to them and to the institution that allowed them to teach me ... though I regret to say that while, when I occasionally return and find professors of equally high quality still on the faculty, the commitment to a liberal education as we understood it then has long gone. As one young man with good degrees told me several years ago "I don't have to know anything about Tallyrand or French history." I replied that a) if educated, he did need to know something about French history, and b) Tallyrand was not just French history -- had he never heard of the XYZ affair? Some of the problem is doubtless the presumption of college education for the majority of young people -- where they now learn (or not) what in Europe or Japan is learned in High School. But I do not assume that really relevant reforms in this matter will be made in this country any time soon. No significant group of either party (or any other major grouping) really seems to care. I tell my sons that if fortunate they may inherit a little money: this is not for fancy cars; it is for private school fees for their children, at schools to be chosen with great care and which, for starters, are (example of seriousness) expect at least three years of a foreign language, and offer Latin as one of them.

Read the actual blog of Prof. Cronon of Univ of Wisc-Madison if you want to see why tenure and academic freedom are still important. He is the person being targeted for his views about collective bargaining by public employees. This is the ultimate defense.
http://tinyurl.com/4hzc3jj

I'm a tenured professor, and I just don't understand the need to couple "free speech" with "job-for-life." There are certainly plenty of ways academic freedom could be preserved without making people un-fireable. There is so much deadwood at my institution, and so many young people sacrifice the best years of their young family lives to getting tenure, and then find themselves too burned out to continue being productive. Many excellent research programs haven't even begun to pay off at the tenure mark, and that stifles academic freedom too. Plus, without tenure, the journals wouldn't all be flooded with perfunctory second-rate scholarship put out there only to beef up a cv.
We need to protect academic freedom, and we need to give professor the incentive to invest themselves in their jobs. But we can do that without tenure as it exists now.

There are better defenses for tenure than Mattson's.

Here's one: you know how lots of college students graduate ignorant and thoughtless? Well, "faculty" with no job security--adjuncts and graduate students, for example--have been pressured into giving them high grades. Since states no longer fund colleges much, tuition-paying students, tuition-paying parents, and the revenue-generating athletics departments can easily exert force on instructors with little power.

It's much harder to pressure *tenured* faculty to give subpar students B's and A's.

Thank you Emil. Tenure does not have to mean a "job-for-life". A compromise solution could include renewable multi-year contracts that provide a good balance between job security and academic freedom, while providing the employer a similar freedom to terminate for poor performance. The sparring between academics and those working in "the real world" regarding who works harder is laughable... heros and slugs exist on both sides, it's just easier to get rid of the slugs outside of academia. True this up with a compromise that addresses both sides' concerns and we may find a winning solution. Also, academia is a business and should be concerned with the challenge coming from on-line educational options. Borders and Blockbuster spent a lot of time defending their brick and mortar world when they should have been looking to improve their businesses by embracing the Internet...had they done so they might still be on top.

When I was a student (in Canadian universities), there were low-performing professors around, protected by tenure. However, as a now retired professor, I can say that in my years as a tenured professor, department chair, and senior administrator, I attest to the hard-working and productive faculty members at my institution. Frankly, our system of performance evaluation does not allow for hangers-on and time wasters.

Tenure is for preserving dead wood and should be ended. I worked at a university where the tenured faculty were more incompetent than my freshman classes. It was the junior faculty that was carrying the weight of cutting edge research, field projects, and grants. What a perverted system.

Most of the "pro-tenure" comments seem to be addressed to freedom of speech, but I don't see anything addressed to freedom of inquiry. I work in a business school outside of the US, which has regrettably (like many business schools worldwide) sought to adopt the very cut and dried US business school tenure and publish or perish standards. Without tenure, I would not be able to explore my interest to research and publish alternative, and hopefully innovative, ideas. Often, these would have to be in alternative outlets such as books and niche journals (and not the top tier US journals that most US styled business schools are forcing their junior faculty into, causing a massive crowding effect). Where is any of this thought, that higher education outside of the humanities' book tradition has become as homogenized as milk, and that tenure is one of our last refuges against that? Thank you so much, Frederick Taylor, Henry Ford, and Wharton.

All of the comments to the effect of "research is what we're paid to do and tenure helps prevent reprisals if the results are bad" and/or "but we spent 12 years getting this education" don't hold any weight when you consider that similarly educated people at research labs typically have the same research obligations, minus tenure and teaching.

By everyone's logic, nothing is keeping us from being fired and we should all be in fear. But in the real world of research, typically (good) managers realize that without us they won't have a paycheck either. The sky doesn't fall in if your results are unexpected, most donors are also smart enough to know this.