Dividing Academia

Controversies surrounding tenure decisions annually make headlines on college-campus newspapers nationwide. The promises of ensuing changes in review processes, however, disguise a fundamental characteristic of tenure:

In lofty philosophical terms, tenure is intended to protect the ideal of academic freedom. Yet, in application, the tenure process too often seems to be a capricious, arbitrary act. Not only does a public dissociated from academia find fault with a system that grants absolute job security to a select few, but a conflicted academy is often at odds with this basis of university employment. Even those within the academy-the very people who are supposed to benefit from such an ideal, the professors-

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Tenure has come under attack Tenure is heralded as a strong-armed fortress wherein lies that sacred ideal of academic freedom. Its position in the academy has been likened to sex in the Victorian era-completely untouchable.

Like the forbidden secret of the Victorians, however, the repression of any discussion on tenure's merit is sometimes regarded as a deadly force, particularly when comment is limited to protesting unjust tenure denials rather than how and why it functions.

Many outside of the academy view its purportedly greatest strength-the protection of the university's community members-as its greatest fault. For them, tenure is chiefly a division between the haves and the have-nots. The suggestion that tenure is a measuring rod of status rather than a reward for excellency threatens to shatter the innocent image of academic pursuit.

"The value of tenure has been under attack in the last several years," Robert Kreiser, associate secretary of the American Association of University Professors, says. The issue has certainly been controversial at Duke University where two recent tenure decisions have brought the process as a whole under sharp fire from students and community members. Changes proposed in the University of Minnesota system, which would change faculty policy on four campuses in that state, have fueled a national debate.

If tenure does enjoy a relative strength today this is perhaps the result from a deepening legitimacy which followed the criticism of '70s. Several universities and independent national commissions instigated tenure review committees in response to the situation two decades ago. "When they got through considering the alternatives to tenure, they concluded that tenure has lots of costs," Vanalstyne says referring to one such committee at the University of Utah. "But it's the least-worst system we have been able to turn up. There wasn't one major review that recommended the junking of the tenure system. Not one."

Such a title as "least-worst" does not initially sound attractive, however, and does not seem to have prevented subsequent attacks on the system. Current debates imply that this contradiction in terms may no longer be good enough-that in the past 20 years the value of such a conclusion has become insupportable. The paradox is important, though, because it indicates the intricacies inherent in tenure.

Though much of the controversy surrounds the fragile balance between these two fundamental aspects of a professor's responsibilities-a balance jeopardized by the difficulties of measuring teaching abilities-the tenure question cannot simply be equated with another concurrent and somewhat parallel discussion in academia as to the nature of the research university. The distinction between the goals of a large research university and those of smaller liberal arts colleges have generated much debate within communities such as Duke, where a transformation from one to the other has recently taken place. Though the vocabulary overlap between the two discussions is high, and arguments concerning each question sound remarkably similar to points in the tenure debate, the latter actually reaches much farther.

The early history of tenure in the United States was largely influenced by the example of the preeminent European education system in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. The philosophical basis of tenure derives from the traditional German notions of "lar freiheit," or "teacher's freedom." In Germany, universities were supported entirely by the state and professors were required make reports to government officials. The commitment to freedom described by the phrase was the key to the international fame and respect accorded to German scholarship. "In the view of the leadership-the Prussians-they wouldn't get good science if they put controls on what it was that would fascinate their researchers and what avenues or what directions it ought to take and if it seemed very unsavory or peculiar or eccentric or unpromising from some political point," Vanalstyne explains.

"You want to have a faculty who feels free to explore issues on the cutting edge," Kreiser says. He believes that because such issues are characteristically controversial, their study might jeopardize professors' jobs. The controversy over tenure may reach even farther into the American psyche where academic freedom does not appear entirely desirable, however. "The life of the mind is scary to some," Kreiser adds. College campuses are popularly regarded as hotbeds of liberalism, places whose difference from mainstream life is illustrated by such phrases as, "Everyone's a Liberal until they grow old." Whether a lot-or even a little-of truth lies behind this aphorism is not the point. The fear "that someone is thinking controversial thoughts," cannot always be soothed by the vision of scholarship as essential to progress, Kreiser says. Innovation and orginality can be threatening to some while positive to others.

The converse is also true, though. A large proportion of complaints about the tenure system suggest that its relative job security promotes negligency on the part of senior faculty. After all, if there is no recourse for resting on your laurels, the existence of sufficient motivation for continuing academic inquiry becomes suspect. These criticisms paint the picture of an elite, intellectual fraternity of scholars who are simply looking out for themselves and their cronies instead of making assessments as a responsible professoriate.

Obviously the German system is different from our own: private four-year institutions outnumber their public counterparts two to one in the United States today. It is fair to say, therefore, that direct governmental control is precluded in at least two-thirds of America's institutions of higher learning.

This does not mean that political bias could not be imposed by administrative officials in private colleges and universities, though. There have been cases, such as the one that occcurred at Brigham Young University several years ago, where a professor has been disciplined because the administration deems that individual's scholarship to be too disparate with the university's religious foundation and climate as a whole.

Tenure is intended to protect faculty from capricious and arbitrary administrative actions. Indeed, a significant portion of academia's internal debate on the tenure process has focused on the right of a university to dismiss one of its members when that person has strayed down a path which does not represent the interests of the community as a whole. The example of a Havard faculty member who issued public letters supporting the Germans during World War II is keenly appropriate. In this case, which elicited public indignation, private action and professional affiliation were deemed sufficiently unrelated by university officials and the tenured professor retained his post.

Today, the withholding of salary raises is used to discipline unproductive tenured faculty members when actually breaking the formal tenure contract is unwarranted. This practice of monetary awards being conferred on those who appear to be in line with projected production quotas is analogous to the characteristic ladder climbing structure of the business world. Yet the increase of such measures may signal an infiltration of business attitudes into academia-a phenomenon that is viewed negatively by many within the academy. "Most people who attack tenure don't understand what academia is all about," Kreiser says. "They rely on a business or industrial model." Their critique of the tenure system, and subsequent suggestions for change, are formed by philosophies of life very different from the one that has traditionally supported the ivory tower.

Of course, the market forces which impact the scholarly enterprise can influence the outcomes of tenure systems. The limits on faculty size any institution can support have been drastic enough at some schools to warrant a complete restructuring of faculty policies and relations. Places as large as Duke University have an easier time avoiding such problems. "If we bring someone onto the tenure track, we are sure that there will be a place for them," Duke University provost John Strobehn says. "I don't expect us to be in that category," he continues, referring to institutions who have been strapped for available positions and have had to deny tenure on that basis.

This is perhaps no where better illustrated than in recent events at Vermont's Bennington College in Vermont where President Elizabeth Coleman abolished two years ago the "presumptive tenure" system in place. Professors now hold jobs with renewable contracts, but cannot presume-as they did formerly-that they would keep their jobs unless they were found to be negligent in a standard five-year review. Although this "presumptive tenure" was different from the traditional tenure of other schools, the system which replaced it is even more radical.

The process of restructuring was partly a response to lower enrollment numbers and growing budget deficits. Bennington had a reputation for experimental education, and the plan which eliminated several departments such as political science and economics as well as the presumptive tenure systems, proposed to employ working artists who would teach interdisciplinary courses incorporating the subjects that had been eliminated.

One solution to faculty questions that is becoming more prevalent on college campuses pinched by financial considerations is the increase of non-tenure track positions. Typically these positions follow the formula of three- to four-year appointments with renewable contract options. Some small colleges such as Amherst College, located in Amherst, Mass., employ fewer than 10 full-time, non-tenure track employees referred to as "lecturers." Others, such as Hampshire College, Amherst's sister in the Five College Consortium of central Massachusetts, rely solely on this type of non-tenure positions. Along with Bennington's rare example, however, the figure of this school hovers at the edge of tenure debates, spectres of what might be if the tenure system is slowly phased out.

The process of awarding tenure tends to be polarized between two factors: scholarship and teaching abilities. Those on the outside of the process are encouraged in this view by statements from tenure committees which fluctuate between the two. One year denial might be justified on the grounds that a certain candidate was "a gifted scholar, but less than stimulating in the classroom." The next year's candidate is similarly denied, though this time because he or she, "though terrific in student-teacher relations, had failed to produce enough scholarly work."

Fluctuation of this nature can create an illusion of sloppy disregard on the part of tenure review committees if it is frequent enough that it becomes routine. In which case, many critics are led to consider tenure with cynicism and bitterness rather than support. Poet and novelist at Middlebury College Jay Parini has even gone so far as to call tenure review "lynching season."

To safe-guard against such a detrimental separation, many schools approach tenure assessment from a two- or three-pronged evaluation standard. Administrators at Amherst College refers to the "holy trinity" of tenure review: scholarship, teaching and service to the community, the latter of which refers to active participation on committees within the college community and to the broader community of academia as a whole. "The presence of any two doesn't make up for the absence of one," Sarah Sutherland, assistant dean of faculty, says.

"While everyone who is denied tenure believes they should have gotten tenure, if they were unable to demonstrate that they should receive it, they shouldn't," Kreiser asserts. "This is a self-regulating system where peers sit in judgment of one another." In fact, the crux of an ideal tenure procedure is intended to be this rigorous peer evaluation.

To counteract such a situation, many universities have developed hierarchical review systems "to make sure that the work is really being done rather than cronies casually assembling from time to time and casually canvassing one another as to whether they have read Professor X's work and do they find it okay and and what about the teaching and so on," Vanalstyne explains. The purpose behind such a structure is to ensure that each separate department is doing its work in terms of evaluating. "Otherwise mediocracy within a department may ensconce itself generation after generation," Vanalstyne says.

This image of a cosy fraternity has been a basis of the recent protests that have taken place regarding protests at Duke and which are duplicated on campuses nation-wide, against tenure denials in recent years.

This process of evaluation and recommendation sometimes seems too hierarchical, however. Many who are at the bottom-especially students-are left feeling alienated and walked on. In their eyes, scholarship often seems to be reduced to a question of publication-or in the extreme, to a minimum number of published pages. And teaching does not even appear relevant.

Yet members of university communities, as well as those on their fringes, indicate that they value teaching and research equally. "What needs to be avoided is the tendency that teaching and research be separated from one another," Kreiser says. "It strikes me as a false dichotomy to say that teaching and research are not intricately related."

Lest the professoriate be reduced to a population of sinecures, the image-which is undergoing a resurgence as a popular stereotype largely because of today's tenure debate-of the scholar-teacher needs to be recalled.

Typically one enters the profession not because it pays well; it often does not, particularly for a post on the junior faculty. Nor does one decide to become a professor because of the plethora of job openings; a system which operates according to tenure guidelines is not prone to high turnover rates. Nor does an aspiring professor even have a reasonable guarantee of achieving tenure; as Duke University provost Strobehn explains, "It's an in-or-out process." That years of work, which often begin during undergraduate study, threaten to come down to a yes or no judgment must seem daunting to anyone seriously contemplating the pursuit of a professorship.

Often overlooked when public furor over a particular tenure case rises is the fact that the participants in the decision process have every reason to seek excellency above all else. And for this pursuit to work, freedom must be cherished.

But it worries faculty a lot and I think students often misunderstand that senior faculty don't care about them or disparage their enthusiasm or their opinion. Maybe and that is undoubtedly sometimes true. But some of this is they care a lot and they are very uncertain about these judgments and they have stuck with making them and they have very much less reliable responsible material of the kind they can confidently judge, and if for instance they find that the scholarship and research tends to be less excellent than they hoped it would be, they can't help but worry that this may also be the feature of the teaching even when the teaching is going splendidly well. Even when it is well performed.