The American Professoriate: Going Away from Tenure

Memo 10 (Week 11)

Gordon (Guoping) Feng, 11/13/2014

From its origin, the university has been a community of scholars. The unique tenure system created in the USA a century ago has played a big role in protecting academic freedom and hence helping with American universities’ rising to preeminence. In the past decades, however, with the strain of financial resources, the commercialization and bureaucratization of university operations, and a host of other reasons, American colleges and universities have increasingly replaced tenure-track faculty with non-tenure-track and part-time employees, leading to a tipping point that now more than half of the teaching staff is not on the tenure track (Finkelstein, Galaz-Fontes & Metcalfe, 2009). Faced with ever-increasing external forces for accountability (Altbach, 2011), the university administration resort to de-tenurization as the strategy in employing the teaching and research staff. How does this strategy fare?

While it should be acknowledged that in some situations employment flexibility is necessary and employing non-tenure and part time faculty is beneficial to both the university and the students, having a faculty which is dominantly non-tenured is very problematic. To begin with, to deny tenure to fully qualified candidates just for financial considerations is bad to the teachers involved, to the students, and to the institution in the long-term, because this practice prevents faculty’s full devotion to the institution. More importantly, this practice brings a poisonous ethos to the institution. A university or college won’t be a community of scholars any more, but merely a bureaucratic or business organization trying all means to reduce cost. Without a higher ideal to motivate the most talented people, such an organization will be doomed to failure in long-term competition. From another perspective, who knows best about curriculum and other academic matters? Some states are requiring the faculty in the state universities a certain amount of teaching time, but  Fairweather and Beach’s study has shown that such a bureaucratic demand is so casual and impractical and therefore harmful (2002). If we don’t regard the faculty as a university’s most important asset (they should be the owners) and give them the deserved trust, we are interfering in academics with politics and bound to bring damage to both the academy and society.

When asked about the tenure system in another class yesterday, University of Rochester’s Provost Peter Lennie said that if the Ivy League decides to get rid of this system, it will be gone; but if they intend to keep it, other universities aiming for prestige will follow suit. I believe the advantage of the diversity inherent in the American higher education system will show itself and may even exert a pull-back force when the swing is now moving to the other side. After all, a wholly devoted faculty is the guarantee of any institution’s long-term success and students and the society will embrace such institutions.

References

Altbach, P. G. Harsh realities: The professoriate faces a new century (2011).  In Altbach, P. G., Berdahl, R.O., & Gumport, P.J. (Eds.), American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Social, Political and Economic Challenges. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press.  

Fairweather, J.S. & Beach, A.L. (2002). Variations in Faculty Work at Research Universities: Implications for State and Institutional Policy. Review of Higher Education, 26(1), 97-115.

Finkelstein, M.J., Galaz-Fontes, J.F. & Metcalfe, A.S. (2009). Changing Employment Relationships in North America: Academic Work in the United States, Canada and Mexico. In J. Enders & E. De Weert (Eds.), The Changing Face of Academic Life: Analytical and Comparative Perspectives. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.