This week’s NYTimes featured a much discussed Op-Ed by Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia. Taylor argues that in order for colleges and universities to thrive in the 21st century, they must be ‘rigorously regulated and completely restructured.’ While I certainly agree with Taylor about many of the problems associated with the current paradigm, not all of his recommendations make much sense for the sciences. Specifically, his call to abolish tenure:
Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.
While tenure can limit the scope of innovative ideas, I’m not ready to cast it aside quite yet. Some folks complain about the ways it can be abused to protect lazy professors and rightly point out that the timing of the tenure push often conflicts with starting a family. No doubt, the system is flawed. On top of that, universities are already cutting back on tenure offers and–according to the National Postdoctoral Association–the probability a Ph.D. recipient under 35 years old will obtain a tenure-track job lingers at 7 percent.
But despite the odds, I’m convinced tenure matters. It not only affords faculty the freedom to teach controversial subjects and write critical letters when appropriate, but more importantly, it serves as a strong motivating factor for many researchers to stay in academia. Early career scientists already subsist on meager salaries while balancing endless grant applications, teaching and advising responsibilities, committee meetings, the rigorous peer review process, irregular hours, departmental politics, running a lab, and the pressure to publish constantly. I suspect that denying them the hope of eventually achieving job security on top of everything else would result in the loss of a lot of very talented individuals to industry and alternative careers.
Finally, let me add that I’ve noticed a trend among friends when we discuss this subject: higher education for scientists. Science faculty members, postdocs, and those in pursuit of a PhD tend to share my perspective, while science writers, policy folks, and non-science professors are more inclined to agree with Taylor. I’m curious to hear thoughts from readers…
May 1st, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Well – I am a faculty member, although I am a clinician scientist, so you can probably predict where I am coming from…..
The basic fact (in my opinion) is that we are taking pay cuts to be in academia. If you were to tell me that I would lose tenure for this contract system – I would be in the pharmaceutical industry earning double what I earn now and have better working conditions.
May 1st, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Taylor seems to be working under the assumption that tenure is a guaranteed job for life, which is a common perception, but not, I think, an accurate one. People don’t know about post-tenure reviews. My impression is that tenure has been slowly eroded, and tenure does not do all that much if an institution gets determined to remove faculty members.
People also don’t know how much hoop jumping has to occur to even get to the tenure stage.
May 1st, 2009 at 2:26 pm
I completely agree; without tenure there would be no incentive to slave for years. At the same time the difficulty of getting tenure puts off some people. I am clearly on your side on this one, although as you noted I would have taken that stance given that I am not a policy wonk but a scientist like you.
May 1st, 2009 at 2:31 pm
I thought the NYTimes opinion piece was completely out of touch. Agreed on tenure. It matters a lot.
May 1st, 2009 at 2:41 pm
I just received tenure at a liberal arts college, so I’m probably biased. However, I think that Taylor misses an important aspect of tenure. Tenured faculty can act as checks and balances on university administration. Because the deans and presidents of the institutions make tenure decisions, pre-tenure faculty will be quite hesitant to criticize the administration. Tenured faculty can question the policies of deans and presidents without wondering if it will hurt their chances to remain employed at the institution. In Taylor’s model, who would make the decisions to renew those 7-year contracts? Probably the deans and presidents. That would have the chilling effect of suppressing dissent. Of course, I have seen some tenured faculty just act as thorns in the side of the administration because of personal dislike for the dean and/or president. However, I have also seen numerous instances of legitimate criticism of administrators. Removing tenure would result in stifling that criticism. I thin that would be bad for our institutions of higher learning.
May 1st, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Great post and great discussion!
May 2nd, 2009 at 8:00 am
On the other hand, tenure means that Lehigh Un. can’t get rid of Michael Behe.
May 2nd, 2009 at 10:00 am
OK, I hear this “pay cuts to be in academia” thing a lot, and I don’t completely believe it.
Partly this has to do with the fact that I moved from being an assistant professor to working for a high-tech San Francisco company as a computer engineer, to only a small increase in salary.
Partly this has to do with reading newspapers about the median and average salaries, and knowing what kind of money tenured professors at research Universities make.
The fact is that University professors at research Universities, at least in the sciences, make quite good money. Yes, perhaps you can make more in private industry. But if you consider the secretaries and janitors and administrative staff who are working next to you in your Universities, hearing you complain about how much money you’re making is a more minor version of hearing football players who make less than a million dollars a year complaining that they’re underpaid. I’m sure all of us good liberal academic type like to decry the huge salaries in football, but the fact is that they have a point– there’s huge disparity in football salaries, with the “superstars” making an order of magnitude more than the rank and file without whom they couldn’t do their job.
Heck, consider community college teachers or high-school teachers in comparison to the salary of a tenured Unviersity professor.
Now, it *is* true that you subsist on a meager salary as a graduate student. What you’re making there is way less than you could have made getting a “real” job out of college. And, as a post-doc, you’re making what you could have made your first year out of college in a real job. But once you’re a tenured professor, you’re doing pretty well….
On to the other things. Tenure. Great perk. I believe that the “dead weight lazy professors who can’t be fired” thing is overblown. Sure, it exists, but I don’t think that it’s all that big a problem. A few do it, most don’t. Most who get that far got that far partly because they love what they do. I suspect that some who get lazy do so because the tenure process burned them out and destroyed their soul.
But the tenure process itself– a friend of mine (and a blogger at scienceblogs) said that she doesn’t know *anybody* who didn’t go through the tenure process without having it screw them up. Heaven knows that the tenure process screwed me up, as anybody who followed my blog during that time knows. I didn’t even go through all of it; the depression of dealing with it became overwhelming, and I left a year before I would have start putting my tenure file together. If I hadn’t, I can’t guarantee you I wouldn’t have sat down in front of a train or some such in stead of face going through all of it. The tenure process itself is tremendously stressful, bordering on the inhumane, and University administrators paint a happy face on it with their statistics that completely ignore the fact that they’re stomping all over human beings.
My attempt to go for tenure was at the worst possible time– between the Clinton investment in the NSF and the economic collapse that is prompting Obama to invest in the NSF. See more about it here: http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/blog/?p=75 . Astronomy proposals were only being funded at the 1-in-5 or 1-in-6 level. Yet, the University didn’t give a shit if the conditions were different. They aren’t interested in evaluating individuals, they’re interested in “metrics”.
The comic embedded in the post is very key. There is this idea that people do their best work when they’re young. It’s usually justified on the basis of how flexible our brains our, but I think that’s mostly BS. If people do their best work when they’re post-docs right now, what is the surprise in that? By the time they’re professors, their primary job is no longer the research that they love and have trained to do. They become fundraisers, blowing huge amouts of creative time on tilting-at-windmills grants, and then trying to deal with the assault on their sense of self-worth that comes from repeated denial of those grants coupled with the fear that that means that they’re going to no longer be able to do, at least sometimes, the science that they love and wanted to do.
May 2nd, 2009 at 11:23 am
I’m questioning the 7% statistic. In the humanities the figure cited is typically that only ~50% of PhDs will end up in tt jobs and the sciences are at least anecdotally higher. Is the 7% stat a result of the 35 cut-off? Given that for women the average age of receiving a PhD is 34 (I think this stat is from the AAUW but not sure) there might be sample size issue. Anyways just on the basis of my own observations that statistic seems off. But the point about tenure is a good one. Tenure and the freedom to pursue riskier work with some job security are part of the drive to stay in academia.
May 2nd, 2009 at 1:21 pm
There was lots wrong with Taylor’s piece. It seemed to be coming primarily from the view of someone in the humanities, not the sciences. For example, he claims that PhDs have no marketable skills. That may be true in the humanities (though I bet some of his colleagues would disagree even there). That’s definitely not true in the sciences.
And on the subject of tenure… you seemed to concede that “tenure can limit the scope of innovative ideas.” I’d argue the exact opposite. One of the main advantages of the tenure system is that it frees people to work on difficult and risky problems. A researcher who faces contract renewal in 7 years is going to stick to stuff that’s likely to generate funding and results.
As just one example… Scientific American recently had an article about Thomas Stoffregen’s research on motion sickness. (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=finding-balance-seasickness) Stoffregen is pursuing an alternative theory, which he first published in 1991, that runs completely counter to the standard one. (In brief: the standard model is that motion sickness derives from conflict between sensory systems: motion sensing in the inner ear vs. visual input from the eyes. Stoffregen proposes that motion sickness is a motor-control problem, not a sensory one, stemming from an inability to maintain postural stability when the body is moving.) Stoffregen’s research has implications not only for motion sickness but for a broader understanding of how the brain controls the motor system. He is doing slow, careful science, and has been at it for years. Finally now his results are starting to get more attention and grudging support, but he’s been at it for 2 decades. There’s no way that this work would have survived a 7-year contract renewal cycle.
May 2nd, 2009 at 2:47 pm
[...] academics and policy-makers weigh in on Mark Taylor’s doomsday Times op-ed about the state of higher [...]
May 2nd, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Marfk misses the point he criticizes thusly:
Tenured faculty can act as checks and balances on university administration. Because the deans and presidents of the institutions make tenure decisions, pre-tenure faculty will be quite hesitant to criticize the administration. Tenured faculty can question the policies of deans and presidents without wondering…
Faculty own our institutions of higher education. Administration does their bidding. This means these institutions are not led but handheld by puppets lacking all courage to be different. Diversity in higher education gets stamped out by the cartel function the tenured inflict on uncinventional leadership,. Such conformity has led to creative stagnation in education.
This stagnation is only remedied by those fields with the most contact outside the universities, as W. W. Bartley, III showed in his Unfathomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth: On Universities and the Wealth of Nations., ie, by exposure to the rewards of real competitive markets.
As Rafe Champion summarized Bartley’s deep argument:
…[T]he universities defy market principles in that consumers (students) do not buy, producers (staff) do not sell and owners (Boards and trustees) do not control. This structural defect, assisted by constraints on the free trade in criticism imposed by the prevailing justificationist attitude, has converted the academies into a network of fiefdoms, guilds and mutual protection rackets.
SEE http://victorian.fortunecity.com/beardsley/700/bartrev1.html
One obvious way to beak out of this stale conformity is the above – eliminate the tenured cartel and introduce a genuine but diversified performance standards, in place of the pro-forma of “post tenure review.” This redistribution of power hopes to change the enervation now rampant by re-introducing competition into academe.
The truth is that liberal arts and science are afraid of being more consumer sensitive like B-schools, and more accountable to those funding them like bio-tech and IT . In other words, they are afraid to meet the standards of discipline and productivity expected of their more capitalistic betters.
Critics like Rob Kopp above ignore the truth that college presidents used to spend a decade or more at the helm decades ago. Today the average is measure in the few single years, ;less than five. This metric shows how little real power or impact administration leadership has on institutional direction, and how careerist and ineffective academic leadership has become since the 1960s. This means the tenured really exercise the power to control universities. The tenured are the real owners – not trustees and boards and alumni. This inverts fiduciary principle-agent relations, constrains institutional productivity, and means the consumer – students — is overcharged and underserved.
May 2nd, 2009 at 8:53 pm
I think it does matter; why work my ass off knowing full well I can be dismissed at the end of my contract? There are far less strenuous jobs than teaching while writing research proposals while trying to get a little research done too. The case of lazy profs would be the exception rather than the rule – now and then a moron will get through the system and be given a position they don’t deserve – but anyone who thinks that can be altogether avoided is delusional. If any changes are to be made, tie the tenure to ongoing obligations – I for one would expect ongoing obligations otherwise it is a sinecure.
May 3rd, 2009 at 3:54 pm
“I think it does matter; why work my ass off knowing full well I can be dismissed at the end of my contract? ” says MadScientist. Because, as in any long-term worthy endeavor, rewards may be found elsewhere. Academics too often imagine that their work is irreplaceable and their contribution unique. Only sometimes, some places, for a certain few: nearly all of us are replaceable!
“The case of lazy profs would be the exception rather than the rule….” As an undergrad, I made avoiding deadwood at university an avocation, because it was ALL too typical of the many universities I attended (and because of difficult and episodic mental illness, I attended far more over many more years than any typical student). The claim that it is rare is ignorant nonsense.
While many here are willing to admit to problems in the humanities and certain social sciences, few will point of the institutionalized rot within institutionalized science. A sterling example is the Wang, et al, fraud in paleoclimatology – scientific fraud influential for the IPPCs dodging that lingers unresolved now for many years.
SEE summary and update here
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/03/climate-science-fraud-at-albany-university/
Real education is far too important to left to the tenured feudal class. Let us liberate them – and their minions in the process!
May 3rd, 2009 at 10:02 pm
There seem to be two debates here: the process of getting tenure versus the institution itself. Working in industry, but as a research physicist, I live a bit in both worlds.
The institution of tenure seems to be something valuable that sets the university professors apart from their industrial counterparts. It seems to me to be good to have both kinds of research: that motivated exclusively by curiosity (i.e., the university type) and that motivated at least in part by potential applications (the industrial type). In my field, university scientists compete directly with industrial ones for NSF and NASA money, and the proposal peer review process connects the two worlds in a collegial but competitive way.
Also, it seems that univeristy scientists have more freedom to commercialize their good ideas than one has in industry. At the university I worked at as a grad student, the faculty could still be “full time” and spend 20% of their time on outside projects, such as tech startups. Take all the IT and Biotech startups not started with a full-time professor involved, and see what’s left. I suspect you’ll see some really important things missing from the commercial landscape.
Now, as for the process of getting tenure. That seems really, horribly flawed. The most successful postdocs and tenure track researchers I know are making huge family sacrifices to stay on track (i.e., they have no family). In my company, and in the national labs, which also don’t have tenure, families start earlier and, I would argue, are not sacrificed to nearly the extent they are at the university. Further, the pay gap is enormous. The tenured facutly really do reap the benefits of the untenured junior scientists’ work. It’s clearly exploitive.
I think we can make a lot of progress to improve the tenure track process, without necessarily sacrificing the freedom to go on wild-goose-chases that can be healthy in a tenured environment.
Full disclosure: I am a 33 year old male, with 3 young children (1, 4, and 6). My spouse is a military officer. I make somewhat more than she does, but we obviously have to share the parenting duties. I have been with my employer for 7 years, and one military relocation. From the day we are hired, our employer plans to keep us until we retire, but we have no contractual tenure arrangement.
May 5th, 2009 at 6:28 am
Orson completely ignores the substance of my post and does not even address the part of it he quotes, instead making the unsubstantiated claim that administration does the faculty’s bidding at institutions of higher learning. This claim suggests to me that Orson has little idea of the dynamic between faculty and administration at institutions of higher learning. I have been at three major research universities and three liberal arts colleges in my career, and all of them have had administrations that acted independently from the faculty, even to the point of aggravating the faculty. That’s hardly “doing the bidding” of the faculty.
The rest of Orson’s post is littered with more unsubstantiated claims and unproven assertions.
November 6th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
My PhD adviser (science) was bringing in the 2nd highest research grant money in the dept but did not make the tenure because of politics; he was ‘decently’ kicked out along with a good-for-nothing prof! Both moved to different univs and got a full prof position.
About a 1/3rd of the full profs in my dept are freeloaders – it will look like they are doing research (each owns a lab and couple of clueless grad students), they are publishing (mostly conf. papers), and teaching (same old stuff that they developed during tenure). However you got to be inside the system, i.e. an admin/prof/grad student, to know about the stuff in the brackets. From outside – dept brochures, dean/head of dept. talks – every full time prof is ‘contributing’ to some great cause blah blah blah.
I also would like to point out that the words used to defend tenure, “….affords faculty the freedom to teach controversial subjects and write critical letters….” is used by writers in many forums, just like politicians using ‘talking points’. In my short span of 3 yrs in PhD I have seen 2 star profs (different dept) being slandered and humiliated because of their views and goals, so please do not try to sell this crap about freedom and immunity. People in power can always find ways to mess you up. Side note: one of the profs took a lower position and stayed and the other moved to a different univ.
So please remind me what is the goal of the tenure system?
And don’t get me started about ‘cutting edge research seeping into classes’ when the tenure system itself claims that teaching has the least significance during a tenure process.