Faculty tenure

A system in need of repair

By Alisa Farenzena
From the May 2005 Print Edition

Does there exist a profession in which employees can demonstrate gross incompetence or even refuse to perform their job duties altogether and still receive pay, not facing any risk of being fired? There certainly does: It’s called teaching.

Instructors at universities need only to remain on their best behavior until their departments grant them tenure. After that, professors never again have to worry about being fired unless they have committed some egregious crime: “An appointment with security of employment shall not be terminated except for good cause after a hearing before the appropriate committee of the Academic Senate,” according to the University of California Academic Personnel Manual.

This sort of protection is unheard of in other lines of work. After receiving tenure, a professor may perform poorly without fear of any recourse. Would we accept this from an accountant or an engineer? The professor can even decide not to bother teaching — and still be paid. This type of behavior would be outrageous for any other employee; a firefighter cannot simply look at the burning building and say, “Well, I don’t feel like fighting fires today,” and get away with it. Why, then, should we be forced to accept such a bizarre system in education?

Abolishing tenure would greatly increase accountability for professors. If they faced the same possibility of being fired that employees in other fields face, they would be much more likely to consistently perform their duties to the best of their abilities. If we switched from the tenure system to this more free-market model, students would get the best education, no longer at the mercy of lazy professors who were able to jump through all of the proper hoops only to gain job security.

Before receiving tenure, instructors not only exhibit a level of performance that they need not maintain afterwards, but also face incentives to demonstrate accepted political views that may not be their own. Proponents of tenure say that it protects academic freedom, but what it really does is use the prospect of freedom to bribe new instructors to conform to the prevailing ideology. It forces those new instructors who hold views that are conservative, or even extremely liberal, to hide their true opinions and act as if they buy into the standard leftist mindset of academia. If they don’t conform both inside the classroom and out, they face the threat of never receiving their tenure.

If those in the pro-tenure camp truly cared about the basic right to free speech, they would consider measures like conservative activist David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights, which would protect all professors, new and old. With a protection like the Academic Bill of Rights in place to prevent political discrimination, tenure would then serve only to protect poor performance, rendering it clearly absurd.

The issue of tenure has come under scrutiny in the past few months because of Ward Churchill, a University of Colorado professor who wrote an essay comparing 9/11 victims to “little Eichmanns” who deserved their fate. While the First Amendment should discourage the idea of firing Churchill because of his offensive remarks, the situation still justifies a reexamination of the notion of tenure.

Churchill’s essay does bring his competence as an educator into question; it seems highly unlikely that someone who would make such irrational claims would be capable of responsible research. Someone like Churchill should never have become a tenured professor, and certainly not the head of a department — but the current system allowed this to happen.

In addition to being completely contrary to common sense, tenure is becoming obsolete at institutions like UC Berkeley. Few instructors at this university are actually tenured professors. Instead, many are lecturers or visiting professors. If these instructors don’t have any sort of special protection from accountability, it is illogical that full-time university professors should be free from consequences if they do not do the best job they can to educate their students.

Tenure harms students not only at the university level, but also in the K-12 system. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken the first step to correct this situation in California by putting forth an initiative to base “employment decisions, including hiring, compensating, promoting, demoting, terminating, transferring, and assigning employees” on teacher performance rather than seniority. Although it doesn’t dismantle tenure, it does make individual instructors, including those with tenure, less immune from accountability.

In the same spirit, universities should recognize that tenure removes incentives for professors to worry about their teaching performance. If universities abolish tenure, we can finally hold professors accountable and see their true political leanings. This would provide students with the best possible education and grant new professors the same academic freedom that their more experienced colleagues enjoy.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider supporting the Patriot