The tenure system is a hot topic right now (or at least a few days ago, but I’m slow) in the academic blogosphere, specifically due to Andrea Smith’s tenure denial at the University of Michigan. The banter on the one hand reassures me that I am not the only person who finds this system perplexing, and on the other hand confuses me because I don’t know what would be a viable alternate system. To sum up some of the best posts on the Smith decision and personal experience with the tenure process:

• Tenured Radical’s post highlights the emotional impact of the tenure process;
• Tim Burke’s post notes that the process is necessarily confidential and mystical to protect professional identity;
• Oso Raro problematizes the aspect of “fit” in the tenure process and how fit might operate as a code word for sexism, racism, or just not liking someone else professionally.

And then the proposed solutions:

• The Constructivist suggests movement towards strong faculty unions; and
• Community College Dean (Dean Dad) suggests multi-year renewable contracts.

I want to believe that Dean Dad’s multi-year contract idea would work. I worked at an institution that had converted to that model (and was, as I understand it censured by the AAUP for doing so). Though there were some of the same issues that I see in tenure environments, I felt like my opinion as junior faculty mattered. A lot. On the other hand, I’m sure the 50% of the faculty body that were adjuncts might not have felt quite the same way.

A key issue is also portability. Tenure is the collateral of higher education. If some institutions move the cheese, while others do not, I suspect faculty will become even more invested in their “type” of institution than they already are. At the same time, at the community college level, for example, where the only requirement is effective and intensive teaching, and where tenure operates similarly to the public school system as in automatically after x years of service (and I’m sure I’ll get flak for this but seriously, why do public school teachers need tenure?!?!?!?), what is the point? (Please correct me if publications are required at some community colleges, but my experience was that the teaching load was so high that it was not realistic to expect.)

But the key elements Dean Dad calls for are transparency and reciprocity. I would call the review practice in my tenure track job pretty transparent. All department faculty and all students evaluate tenure-track people every year. Anonymously. Tenured professors get evaluated once every five years or something. That feels pretty transparent actually, though I might have enjoyed it more the first time around if I’d been informed of these processes before they happened. (YES, I realized I was going to be evaluated by students). But the stakes are high for the institution, because if they agree to tenure me, they (feel they are) stuck with me for the next thirty years of my career. It’s the all-or-nothing aspect of tenure that is the most inhumane, the rest-of-your-life or FIRED mentality, but I can also see how the abuse of a contract system or creating different tracks of faculty (tenured research versus untenured renewable contracts teaching) and other variations of unfairness might be just as inhumane.

And then reciprocity. What *is* the issue between administrative and faculty power? I’m not literally asking for an explanation, I just don’t understand why many in higher education feel that higher education is somehow exempt from planning and standardizing curriculum, identifying key objectives across courses, assessing outcomes–both student and institutional, supporting students in other areas besides their coursework, and so on. Higher education might not be corporate, but it is still an industry.

Ultimately though, I think this has been such a hot topic because the tenure system is already broken beyond repair. The only people who truly benefit are those who are tenured or on the tenure track. A recent study at least supports The Constructivist’s suggestion for unions in the sense that more faculty at institutions with unions are tenured or tenure track as opposed to adjunct. The army of adjuncts that do the majority of teaching speak to the true injustice in the attention given to one tenure decision of a top researcher.

The one theme I haven’t heard in any of these posts is what tenure means for students? I don’t know of any institution of higher education that exists without students. For the majority of institutions of higher education, teaching and working with students is still essential. Does the tenure system with jobs for life, painful rejection, and army of adjuncts help or hurt students? Thoughts?

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