There is a good article about the decreasing number of tenure-track faculty, reduced to around 30% of all college teachers. There are bills being introduced in some states to reverse that proportion, which seems like an excellent proposition to me.
Lecturers are not only poorly paid, over-worked, non-tenured, and without almost any benefits (from basic health care to basic office supplies), but they are also seldom able to find full-time, tenure-track positions of their own. Ironically and tragically, that is precisely because college administrations are outsourcing the work to them rather than hiring teachers in the proper way–with the proper compensation and the proper protections–to do the work that is necessary to educate students.
Eastern should be proud to be one of the first universities to unionize its lecterers, or at least some of them–far too few lecturers have that protection. Yet Eastern also needs to ensure that the pool of tenure-track faculty returns to a reasonable proportion in relation to the number of students in the classroom.
This article points out that colleges with a high proportion of adjunct faculty, colleges like our own, also have a high proportion of students who fail to graduate, which is unfortunately true in our case as well.
Decline of the Tenure Track Raises Concerns”
Professors with tenure or who are on a tenure track are now a distinct minority on the country’s campuses, as the ranks of part-time instructors and professors hired on a contract have swelled, according to federal figures analyzed by the American Association of University Professors. …
Three decades ago, adjuncts — both part-timers and full-timers not on a tenure track — represented only 43 percent of professors, according to the professors association, which has studied data reported to the federal Education Department. Currently, the association says, they account for nearly 70 percent of professors at colleges and universities, both public and private. …
Several studies of individual universities have determined that freshmen taught by many part-timers were more likely to drop out.
“Having an adjunct in a course is not necessarily bad for you, but having too many adjuncts might be,” said Eric P. Bettinger, an economics professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
ps. Sitedad: can we have a category on teaching, the classroom, education and all that good stuff rather than “Faculty Life” or “Student Life” alone?
The question of tenure is an interesting one and one that is often criticized as an unjust job-protection scheme.
Looking at colleagues of mine who have gone into very high caliber research jobs, Bell Labs, the national labs (Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, … ), GM Tech Center, etc, they don’t have the job security that I, as a tenured faculty member at a second tier school, do.
To be frank, I can only reconcile myself to having tenure in two ways:
(1) academic freedom is *key* to quality higher education. Without the protection of tenure, I think academic freedom would be doomed. As a simple, and trivial, consequence, I post and comment here under my real name.
The corollary to this is that if a tenured faculty member is too cowardly to exercise academic freedom when indicated, that person is unworthy of tenure (IMHO).
(2) protection against arbitrary and unjust administrator decisions. This is the reason faculty at EMU organized into the AAUP in the first place (so I hear). A passive faculty enables a dysfunctional administration. And though EMU faculty are tenured, it is largely passive (though it may be this is changing). In my opinion, the passive EMU faculty have contributed to an environment where administration can make the boneheaded moves they’ve made and where administration feels free to obfuscate the budget the way they’ve been doing.
A university administration, even though it is untenured, is in the position of (relative) greatest power in the university; any group that has power will protect itself. Tenure for faculty provides some balance to administration’s power.
Professor Susan, you nailed it on all accounts! Tenure exists to protect academic freedom – not as a job security plan.
It was created to allow scholars and teachers to pursue the “truth” as their disciplines and research leads them, without
risk of political interference. Indeed, tenure and the high quality of research and teaching that it has promoted at American universities in the last 80 years is one of the major features of the American system of higher education — a system that is hardly perfect, but which is widely recognized as the best in the world.
And at EMU, traditionally, too many professors have been too unwilling to speak up. Part of the duty of being a professor involves the obligation to advocate for improved conditions for teaching and research.
Without tenure, it’s unlikely that American universities would be able to draw the required numbers of highly educated, professionally accomplished individuals who are needed for the faculty. We are relatively poorly paid compared to others of similar education, but we have reasonable assurances thru the tenure system that if we fulfill our professional duties, we will have job security — and thus not be required to drink various Kool Aids (“University House is a wise investment in EMU’s future,” “evolution is just a theory,” “smoking does not cause cancer,” “the CIA created AIDS”, “Ronald Reagan was as wise as any leader ever has been”) that may be promoted from time to time by powerful university officials or outside pressures or wealthy donors.
American university faculty members have more protections of our free speech, and more duty to use it, than just about any other category of people on earth. This hardly means professors have a monopoly on wisdom; far from it, we’re as foolish as any group of people. But in our fields, we are experts and our duties include speaking the truth as our experience and discipline and research requires. Smoking does cause cancer. The CIA did not create AIDS. Evolution is a theory and a fact that explains the origins of life.
EMU has been badly managed in a variety of ways for years.
This is a complicated matter for all sorts of different reasons. Basically, I do agree that tenure is important and primarily because of academic freedom, though I agree also with what Susan says about tenure being a balance against over-reaching administrators. Tenure does equal very strong job security as well, but college professors are hardly the only group of people in the work force that enjoy a high degree of job security. A few examples off the top of my head: partners in law firms and medical practices, state/federal employees, most employees “vested” within a company, K-12 teachers (often the term “tenure” is applied in those spaces, too), and most union workers.
Still, I think that tenure is not perfect. Along with other things that protect job security, tenure is often abused/misused as an excuse for faculty to “check out” by not continuing to innovate in their teaching, by not keeping up a research agenda, by doing no service, by being absent from basic things like department meetings. When tenure is combined with promotion to full professor, the potential for checking out increases. I was promoted this year, and while it’s nice, it is a problem that I have essentially “topped out” in terms of pay increases and the like with at least another 25 years until I can probably afford to retire– unless I go the route of administration, which is one of the main reasons why so many faculty go that route.
So, in my perfect world, tenure wouldn’t exist because it wouldn’t be required. Or tenure would exist differently in that it would not be possible to misuse and abuse tenure because faculty who check out would face challenges from both colleagues and department heads. But I don’t live in my perfect world, so….
Steve – you identify a bunch of real problems that do occur among professors (such as not being innovative or responsive to new trends, not being engaged with teaching, research or service), but I don’t think you establish that the tenure system is really to blame for any of these. Similar problems of poor performance can be identified among members of any profession.
And you write that you “do agree that tenure is important and primarily because of academic freedom, though I agree also with what Susan says about tenure being a balance against over-reaching administrators” as if there’s a conflict between tenure as a protection of academic freedom and it “being a balance against over-reaching administrators”. Violations of academic freedom almost always arise with “over reaching administrators”. Academic freedom is not a narrow thing – it covers retaliation from an administrator against faculty who criticize the administrator’s job performance, as well as protection for a professor who carries out a scholarly research project that somehow offends university officials: And at EMU, I know of recent cases in which distinguished faculty members were put on suspension and faced the threat of termination because EMU officials objected to the faculty members’ criticism of their department head or objected to how the faculty member carried out entirely ethical, natioally and internationally respected, scholarly research.
Happily, in both of these cases, the faculty members were vindicated (but not made entirely “whole”) and they remain valued members of the EMU faculty. Higher level administrators backed down from their earlier attacks on these two faculty members’ academic freedom. In these two cases, I served as these faculty members’ Grievance Officer, and the affected faculty members were given de facto apologies by management. There have also been many instances of far less serious violations of academic freedom at EMU.
So tenure is the protector of academic freedom, which is rarely threatened by anything other than over reaching administrators.