By Thoreau
The non-academic blogosphere is taking notice of tenure. Whenever people talk about tenure and the alternatives, the question always comes up “Why not multi-year contracts that provide some stability and moderate security but also accountability?” Hey, I’d gladly sign off on that. I don’t really believe in tenure as anything virtuous. Give me a multi-year contract for some mix of teaching, research, and service, and a higher salary to compensate for the loss of a chance at permanent security, and I’ll go for it.
There are two reasons why this won’t happen:
1) Did you notice the part where I said I’d want a higher salary to compensate for having less security? Yeah. See, lots of people are willing to slave away in grad school and postdoc positions and adjunct positions in exchange for a shot at the tenure lottery. Dilute the value of the prize, and suddenly people start wanting more money in return. A lot of smart, highly-educated people will start looking at other white collar career paths if academia doesn’t provide a shot at life-long security, or at least higher pay than is currently on offer. Take away tenure, and not only do you pay more for the people that you ultimately hire for full-time positions, you also have to pay more for all of the grad student TA’s and research assistants and postdocs and adjuncts who are trying to claw their way to a full-time position.
Why, pray tell, would the administration go for that bargain?
Put it this way: Suppose that tomorrow the NBA drastically reduced salaries. A lot of college kids would still be willing to play basketball, but they might also want to spend more time studying, even at the expense of practicing, because the expected return from practicing basketball would go down relative to the expected return from studying. Schools could still get student athletes, but they couldn’t get as many student athletes who are willing to utterly forsake the “student” part.
2) The choice in academia isn’t between tenure and long-term contracts. It’s between tenure and cheap part-timers with no security. Why convert my position to a multi-year contract with higher pay when they could wait for the next 2 retirements and replace them with cheap part-timers? And keep just enough tenure-track positions around so that the people earlier in the pipeline are willing to accept low wages in exchange for a shot at life-long security.
That’s not to say that tenure-track positions will disappear completely. Although part-timers are often excellent (not always, of course, but the same could be said for certain tenured people on my hallway), they don’t usually get involved with student advising, student activities, research with students, curriculum development, service, etc. Now, some of these tasks could be assumed by full-time specialists or administrators, but not all of them, and they’ll still need a “farm team” of permanent faculty to train for some of these roles. So, the future of academia is a smaller and smaller corps of tenure-track faculty being groomed as management trainees and a larger and larger cohort of cheap part-timers.
One might say “OK, you make the case for keeping some full-timers, but why give them tenure?” The answer to that is “See Point 1 above.”
Now, in the academic blogosphere, as soon as the topic of teaching vs. research gets thrown into the mix, somebody invariably asks “Why not full-time faculty positions that are teaching-only, with no research expectation?” The answer is that many schools have a few of these, and often even give these people some form of job security. Usually they have titles like “Lecturer” or “Senior Lecturer” or “Lecturer with Security of Employment” or whatever. However, in general these positions are rarer than the tenure-track positions OR the adjunct positions. Why? Because the tenure-track faculty do the research that brings prestige (and may or may not bring money), and the part-time adjuncts are cheap. The full-time lecturers aren’t as cheap as adjuncts and aren’t as prestigious as tenure-track faculty.
So, tenure won’t disappear. It will just shrink. And that’s a shame, because I’m confident that I could do an excellent job that would justify the higher salary associated with a multi-year contract.
ADDENDUM: To the extent that all the “We need to get more Americans into grad school!” talk is actually grounded in evidence of “not enough” American grad students, perhaps the suckitude of the long training path and the low odds of winning the tenure lottery are contributing to that? Yeah, yeah, grad students aren’t fully informed of what they’re getting into, but even if they have only partial information, the worse it seems the fewer people they’ll find to play that game. Getting rid of tenure will not scare everyone away, but it will reduce enrollments. The system will have to pay more for trainees in order to persuade them to pursue advanced degrees.