Academic Tenure

  Universities have been a frequent subject of this blog [1,2,3,4].  I therefore wasn't surprised when a reader asked for my thoughts on tenure, the sacred cow of academia.  It's a tough topic—one can't help having mixed feelings, because tenure can be not only the fundament of freedom of inquiry and speech, but also a distasteful source of sinecure.

  I was exposed to the academic-freedom aspect of tenure early in my university career. When I arrived at UC Berkeley in 1960, the infamous Loyalty Oath dispute, although by then resolved, was still an active memory.  A decade earlier, during the initial anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War, new state legislation suddenly required faculty members to sign a codicil to an oath already mandated by the California constitution, which had until then required only an affirmation of support for the state and national constitutions.  The codicil said, "I am not a member of the Communist Party, or under any oath, or a party to any agreement, or under any commitment that is in conflict with my obligations under this oath."  Those who did not sign it would be fired, tenured or not.

  The faculty objected to the new oath on many grounds, among which were: it constituted a political test for employment (the Communist Party was and is a legal party in California); it violated the privilege of tenure, i.e., not to be fired without just cause, as adjudicated by a faculty investigation; it contravened the state constitution, which proscribed requiring any additional oath by the faculty beyond that already included in it; and it violated the constitution's requirement that the University be solely under the governance of the Regents, with faculty advice but without legislative interference.

  During the controversy, dozens of faculty members who refused to sign were indeed fired, although court decisions by mid-decade had reinstated them.  By the time I arrived at the University, the situation had been restored to the status quo ante, but wounds still festered.  I believe the open sore was one of the sources of the Free Speech Movement [3] of the early 1960s, when the University's administration, succumbing again to outside political pressure, denied students their long-recognized right to organize on campus for political causes—the immediate target this time being freedom marches to the South.  It was another assault on free speech at the University by the same actors who launched the Oath, and the faculty overwhelmingly supported the students' cause.

  The Loyalty Oath dispute limned the upside of tenure for me: freedoms of speech, association and inquiry are intimately part of it, and any trimming of its prerogatives attacks the core of academic freedom.  That freedom had been hard-gained as tenure grew in the 19^th century from an ill-defined de facto principle in a select group of universities to the virtually universally accepted practice it is today, with more or less uniform standards throughout the country.  Weakening tenure's shield could be disastrous, as the Loyalty Oath conflict showed.

  As my career at UC unfolded, however, I also saw the downside of tenure: the accumulation of deadwood within the faculty—people who no longer seemed to be sharing the full load of research and teaching.  As a chairman of a department and later the dean of a school, I was appalled by the few who I felt were taking advantage of tenure to slide into academic lethargy.  They were a source of faculty and student discontent—even ridicule—and a waste of precious resources.

  At first thought, one might imagine that "just cause" for dismissal could be enlarged from travesties such as academic dishonesty—e.g., falsifying research—to a requirement that those with tenure live up to the same standards of teaching and research that gained them tenure in the first place.  But this could be a slippery slope with a quagmire at its bottom.  It is one thing to require young faculty members to demonstrate during their initial 6-8 years that they deserve tenure—that itself creates undesirable pressure on them in formative years to adhere to the safe and acceptable, to eschew the risky.  It is a huge step to require senior faculty continually to pass judgment on their peers, risking imposition of a lifelong conformity on academic inquiry and teaching that could stultify the entire academic venture.  The Einsteins among us, whose ideas are far out of the mainstream, probably could not maintain tenure under such a regime nor would they want to make the sacrifice of creativity needed to do so. 

  The trick, I think, is to make as sure as humanly possible that new hires have the character and intellect that will assure their attaining tenure and thereafter remaining fully contributing members of the faculty.  I believe that can be done by meticulous, multilevel screening of candidates before their initial appointment as well as at the tenure decision.

  In my ruminations about the differences between UCLA and UC Berkeley [2], I opined that UCLA's initial-appointment system was too lax, depending on only a dean's approval.  That depends too much on the dean's judgment, leaving the brunt of evaluating qualification for tenure to later events; but it is much harder to discharge a colleague after 6-8 years than not to have appointed him or her at all.  Some universities avoid this dilemma by setting up "horse races," appointing several assistant professors for each tenured position that will be available, with the understanding by all that at most one will win.  I think such an approach is cruel, for it can tarnish many excellent academics early in their careers. 

  I believe that the system at UC Berkeley strikes a happy medium.  The initial appointment is first very thoroughly scrutinized at three or four levels before being sent to a disinterested and demanding campus-wide committee of faculty.  That committee has standards constraining it to approve only candidates who will almost certainly achieve tenure and not thereafter become deadwood.  Knowing these standards, lower-level evaluators daren't forward a case that doesn't meet them.  The same campus committee constantly monitors a newbie's progress and has the final word on the tenure decision.  Under this regime, it is the rare assistant professor who doesn't clear the tenure hurdle by some margin, and even rarer that, once awarded tenure, doesn't remain a fully productive member of the faculty.

  My answer to my reader, then, is that I am four-square in favor of academic tenure in universities as it generally exists today, not only as a safeguard of academic freedom, but also as a nurturer of the unorthodox among us.  If the system of appointment to the faculty is sufficiently finely tuned, then the overhead of the few who later become deadwood is not too much a price to pay.