Most people either don't understand academic tenure or regard it as a flagrant scam -- nothing more than a lifetime cushy job burdened with little work and rewarded with long summers vacations. Popular wisdom is entirely incorrect. Tenure is a good deal for those who achieve it and it's a bargain for America.
The conventional defense of tenure is that it protects freedom of speech. Professors, it's thought, are natural born dissenters who are likely to propound unusual ideas, which, unless they're 'dangerous,' should be tolerated. (Even though it should be obvious that it's only the dangerous ideas that need protection.)
There's some truth to this proposition. Some jobs have been saved (but those who remember the McCarthy period know that university administrators often tripped over themselves to appease the attackers). The professoriat should be encouraged to dissent -- it's good for the country to encourage divergent and challenging views. But it's also true that on the whole, professors are not particularly controversial. If there have been cases in which scientists, or business faculty, or professors of literature or music have needed the protections of tenure, they must be rare indeed. Occasionally, very occasionally, a social scientist says something just a bit too anti-establishment, and then along comes some yahoo legislator to demand that the dissenter be fired and tenure be 'investigated.' Nevertheless, it's hard to make the case that a hundred thousand faculty in non-controversial fields need to be tenured so that one or two people a decade can say something outrageous. I myself think that first-amendment rights as confirmed by the courts are just as good and perhaps better protection than tenure for dissenting views.
In my opinion, the best justification for tenure is not freedom of speech but frugality. Let's begin with the self-evident truth that a person who earns tenure in a respectable institution possesses some very positive intellectual and psychological traits. While one doesn't have to be a genius to write a dissertation, one has to be able to amass evidence and structure a logical argument and write a decent sentence or two. One must be diligent; one must be self-motivated (only half of people who finish graduate courses manage to complete a dissertation); moreover, in the process of securing tenure, a person gains experience in presenting information to groups and also learns a great deal about management and mentoring. These various skills are readily transferable to the private sector of the economy where they would be well rewarded. But when a person of talent and ability chooses to work in the academy, he or she forgoes a large part of his potential earning capacity. nstead of a high salary, he receives a lower salary plus the security which comes in the form of tenure. So it's perfectly reasonable to conceive of tenure as compensation in lieu of cash.
When an accomplished individual accepts tenure and a diminished salary, society benefits in a number of ways. It hires talent on the cheap, so education becomes less expensive. If universities had to match private-sector salaries, the cost of sending a million young adults to universities would become prohibitive. There's also a less obvious but equally important benefit. Without tenure, only the independently wealthy would be able to specialize in, say, in old Mayan, or Tokugawa Japan, or any of thousands of subjects that require concentration and effort but do not have any particular market value. These important but exotic subjects would either disappear from the curriculum, or they would be taught by faculty who would bring to the table the biases of the moneyed classes. (This was indeed the case in America before the 1940s when tenure became institutionalized.) Faculties would revert again to what they were when Harvard had its Gold Coast: social clubs for amateurs and coupon-clippers. More than any other innovation, tenure has produced the modern democratic university, where faculty can be drawn from any social class.
I don't mean to say that there aren't problems with tenure. Tenure is difficult to obtain, but it's also difficult to lose, and faculties could do a much better job at self-policing. If a professor isn't doing his job, isn't keeping up with his subject, isn't make a good faith effort to make a contribution to learning, then he should surrender his claim to lifetime employment. There certainly is such a thing as "deadwood"-- though much less of it than popular mythology would claim. But the deal is this: lifetime security for a lifetime of learning. Those who don't honor the agreement should be speedily purged. No free rides for the lazy dogs. But this caveat aside, tenure is a fine, successful institution.
American universities have become and still remain the envy of the world; the tenureless university would be less innovative, less democratic, and less distinguished.
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