Tenure Remains Vital to Academic Freedom

                             By James E. Perley

We have seen major social and economic changes in all sectors of our lives
in the past 20 years, and it is very clear that those of us who have devoted
our professional lives to academic teaching and research are not immune from
the pressures caused by these changes. The earth is shifting beneath our
feet, eroding our job security and our role in shared governance of our
institutions.

Faculty members like me are being asked to cooperate as our institutions are
changed for us by a growing number of professional deans and presidents,
leagues of academic legal experts, and scores of consultants. It surely
would be convenient for trustees and academic administrators if they had to
deal with faculty members who were agreeable and compliant at every turn. It
does make sense that we should be called on to help contain costs and
sponsor new programs, and, in fact, most of us have done so during the past
decade. If higher education has done anything for this country, it has been
to consistently produce education of the highest quality through cooperation
among teachers, administrators, and boards of trustees.

In the last several years, though, this tradition of cooperation has been
forgotten -- even actively rejected -- in a series of published "studies" of
higher education, often financed by foundations, which increasingly are
influencing the directions of academic policy. The American Association for
Higher Education has commissioned a series of position papers that proclaim
the advantages of "other pathways" -- outside of tenure -- to careers in
colleges and universities. These studies convey the notion that academic
freedom can flourish without tenure, that the growing hordes of part-time
and non-tenure-track faculty members in the professoriate are "satisfied"
with their status, that younger aspirants for tenure would be glad to have
it eliminated, and that institutional flexibility can survive only in a
free-market employment structure.

Then last fall, the Association of Governing Boards published a blue-ribbon
study called "Renewing the Academic Presidency," which complained that
including the faculty in shared governance had been the source of many ills
in the modern university.

Flowing from the reports I've described has been a flood of attacks on
tenure -- almost in hopes that if the "sacred cow" is wounded, it may be
time for the kill. The assault on tenure has developed in stages, though,
over the past four or five years.

First, we saw some moves to eliminate tenure altogether. The most notable
was at Bennington College (which had only "presumptive tenure" to begin
with). There, the move to fire many long-term faculty members was hidden
behind a proclaimed need to achieve structural and programmatic reform. The
faculty was told that the president and board had new visions for the
institution and that they were frustrated by the complexity of consultation
with faculty members. These leaders expressed concern about principle, but
found basic fairness to their faculty to be dispensable.

The remarkable thing about this case and others in which tenured faculty
members have been fired in the name of "flexibility" is that they have been
accepted by some as a brave new model for managing the faculty. Richard P.
Chait -- a consultant who has found fame and a tenured position at the
Harvard School of Education based on his views on alternatives to tenure ("A
Scholar Provides an Intellectual Framework for Plans to End or Revamp Tenure
Systems," The Chronicle, February 14) struck the motto in his unfortunate
statement, "Let Bennington be Bennington."

It also is significant that the sternest critics of faculty tenure and
shared governance have become the heroic models in a new style of academic
management. We see their presence in the latest phase of the onslaught
against the tenured faculty -- the emergence of demands for "post-tenure
review." Proponents seem to assume that faculty members are lazy and
unproductive, never reviewed, and extremely complacent. Even those who
should know better -- proclaimed friends of higher education such as C.
Peter McGrath, a former university president and now president of the
National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges -- have
taken up the call. He attacked tenure in The Chronicle recently
("Eliminating Tenure Without Destroying Academic Freedom," Point of View,
February 28), writing as if he didn't know about the careful reviews given
faculty members every year by their peers in the process of setting raises
and promotions.

He and other critics fail to acknowledge that we have always had post-tenure
reviews, although we have tried to emphasize improvement over punishment in
them. But those of us who are evaluated both by students and by our peers
know that our annual reviews can bite pretty deeply into our income over
time. Faculty members, however, cannot accept a kind of post-tenure review
that gives administrators a unilateral right to terminate tenured faculty
members without respect for due process. Many professors believe that
trustees and administrators would like the freedom to change programs at
will, without attention to standards of collegial governance. And they also
suspect a desire to convert most of our positions to part time, producing a
compliant and disenfranchised faculty.

Consultants are very important in these moves against tenure, because they
are thought to understand how to manage in a new "age of management." Highly
paid, they are ferried from one institution to another to condemn or bless
the schemes that emerge from boards and administration buildings. They tell
impatient business people on boards of regents what they want to hear, using
the language of the market.

If I write with some anger here, it is because these trends are dividing an
academic community that has valued collegiality in the past. Suddenly my
colleagues and I feel that we have become villains. Why? Because we want to
prevent the conversion of stable positions to temporary ones, and we insist
that faculty members not surrender their mandate to question the new
orthodoxies laid upon them. Not satisfied that increasing numbers of faculty
members now hold positions in which they will never be eligible for tenure
(22.7 per cent of those held by men and 36.4 per cent held by women), the
new managers in academe seem to want more. Why shouldn't we suspect that
they want us all to be disposable?

What kind of intellectual community would that produce on our campuses? What
kind of courage to instill a suitable skepticism in students? My guess is
that Richard Chait will want the very best education for his daughter who is
about to go off to college. Surely he would prefer to have her taught by
full-time faculty members who will be available to answer her questions, not
by teachers who must hurry off campus to teach at some other institution.

The most recent justification that we have heard for eliminating tenure is
an ingenious but seriously flawed proposition: One can separate academic
freedom from tenure. Tell that to Joycelyn Elders, who was almost denied the
right to return to her tenured medical-school position because of comments
she made as Surgeon General about such forbidden topics as masturbation,
condoms, and the decriminalization of drugs. Tell that to the teacher of
introductory biology who is threatened with dismissal by a politicized
school board for criticizing creationism. And tell that to the part-time
faculty member who knows that getting a contract to teach next semester
depends on satisfying the needs of the "consumers" in the classroom this
semester. Academic freedom and tenure are inseparable because you can't be
free if you're afraid of losing your job. If we faculty members are guilty
of anything, it is our failure, to date, to rise as one and assert that
essential link.

The argument is being made that we no longer need tenure because our speech
in the classroom is protected by the First Amendment. Perhaps, but I remain
a skeptic. The First Amendment forbids the state to infringe upon
free-speech rights. Thus it reaches state colleges and universities, but not
private institutions like the College of Wooster, where I teach biology.
Further, many activities that academic freedom covers may not fall into the
legal category of speech. Curriculum design, textbook selection, syllabus
preparation, and grading are everyday faculty activities that the courts may
not equate with speech.

The new economic realities reinforce faculty members' need for guaranteed
academic freedom. Professors know that administrators do not want them to
flunk students; they know that administrators tend to intervene in grading
disputes to mollify students who feel that once they have paid for their
credits, they deserve a grade just for working hard. If not protected by
tenure, what faculty member would dare say that the child of a trustee had
not earned a passing grade? The best lesson one of my sons learned in
college came when his institution asked him to leave for a semester because
his work was less than satisfactory. The lesson has returned great benefit
to him in the years since his graduation.

Finally, the argument that other workers in society are suffering and
faculty members should not be immune from similar hardship is macabre. Why
should we accept serenely the misfortune of others in an increasingly
fractured economy?

Despite the assaults against faculty members, I do see some encouraging
recent developments. Faculty members have begun to defend their stake in
higher education. The faculty at the University of Minnesota publicly voiced
its deep concerns about the erosion of collegial governance that would have
resulted from policies developed by its Board of Regents without faculty
input. And the heroic efforts of the faculty at Adelphi to save the
university from the mistakes of a dictatorial president and his supportive
Board of Regents have sent principled warnings to trustees about their roles
as guardians of a precious resource. These faculty members have added to
their "proper" work enormous responsibilities as academic citizens.
Committed faculty members want to be allies in running colleges and
universities for the greater good of our society.

Yes, there have been changes in the culture of higher education in the past
few years. But tenure and collegial governance, linked firmly to academic
freedom, have served us all, creating a model structure for the rest of the
world. Abandoning those concepts threatens to bring the structure down.

*Copyright (c) 1997 by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc.
http://chronicle.com
[April 1997]