This post by Megan McArdle is a bit old, but I think it is important to expose the utter intellectual bankruptcy of her arguments. This will be a long post.
The arguments for academic tenure have always struck me as pretty weak, and more to the point, transparently self-serving.
The debate over tenure is, like most debates about academia, almost entirely between academics. As such, any academic arguing for tenure will be "transparently self-serving", whereas any academic arguing against tenure will be a brave soul fighting against their best interests. This, however, says nothing about the quality of the arguments either for or against tenure.
The best you can say of the system is that it preserves a sort of continuity in schools that is desireable for the purposes of cultivating alumni donations.
Really? This is the best you can say of the system? You can't say anything about it allowing professors to do controversial research, or that it helps to shift the balance of power away from university administrators (who often have no long-term allegiance or loyalty to the university) towards professors (who have a powerful interest in having a well-run university).
But the cost of such a system is simply staggering.
Consider what the academic job market now looks like. You have a small elite on top who have lifetime employment regardless of how little work they do.
This is simply not true. While a professor can surely slack off after gaining tenure, they still have to teach courses.
This lifetime employment commences somewhere between 35 and 40. For the ten-to-fifteen years before that, they spend their lives in pursuit of the brass ring. They live in poverty suck up to professors, and publish, for one must publish to be tenured.
The only people in a university who could be said to "live in poverty" are graduate students. Abolishing tenure would do nothing to alleviate the chronic money problems of graduate students. Before getting tenure, a professor works as an assistant professor, where
salaries range from a median of $44,731 for a new assistant professor in "Theology and Religious Vocations", to $81,005 for an assistant professor in "Legal Professions and Studies".
It's very unfortunate if you don't have anything much worth saying; you need to publish anyway, in order to improve your chances. Fortunately, for the needy tenure seeker, a bevy of journals have sprung up that will print your trivial contributions. If nothing else, they provide a nice simple model which helps introductory economics professors explain Say's Law.
Professors and graduate students who "don't have anything much worth saying" tend not to get published. When they do get published, they get published in lesser journals. Although it is a flawed metric in many ways, the
impact factor attempts to provide tenure committees with a basis for determining the impact of the candidate's work. Simply put, tenure-track professors who publish rarely, and in second-rate journals, tend not to get tenure.
More importantly, though, abolishing tenure would do nothing to alleviate this problem. Even if there were no tenure-track positions, universities would need a way to rate their professors. This rating system would undoubtedly look almost exactly like the system currently used for establishing tenure.
At the end of the process, most of the aspirants do not have tenure; they have dropped out, or been dropped, at some point along the way. Meanwhile, the system has ripped up their lives in other ways. They've invested their whole youth, and are back on the job market near entry level at an age when most of their peers have spent ten years building up marketable skills.
Academia as a profession is best looked at as a tournament model, similar to professional sports. The problems McArdle cites above are caused by too many applicants seeking too few academic jobs. As a result, many applicants must be weeded out before a winner is finally selected. The only way that abolishing tenure could solve this problem would be if it somehow increase the number of jobs available (highly unlikely), or if it reduced the number of candidates for each job. However, with fewer candidates for each job, the quality of the selected candidate would also decrease. Such a trade-off (or any trade-off, in fact) is never mentioned by McArdle.
Many of them will have seen relationships ripped apart by the difficulties of finding not one, but two tenure-track jobs in the same area.
This is a real problem, but it cannot be fixed by getting rid of tenure. In Canada, a number of universities have started
spousal hiring programs. If a newly hired professor has a spouse who is also seeking a job as a professor, the university makes an effort to hire the spouse as well. Of course, granting preferential treatment to the spouse of a faculty member "can compromise the bigger principles of open hiring". Among people who actually care about the problem of finding jobs for academic couples, this is the debate that is being argued. Tenure has very little to do with the debate.
Others will have invested their early thirties in a college town with no other industry, forcing them to move elsewhere to restart both their careers and their social lives.
Of course, if there weren't any tenure, a professor in her mid-40s who is fired would face the exact same problem. Except, of course, that she would have put in an extra 10 years in the college town. How exactly is this preferable?
Or perhaps they string along adjuncting at near-poverty wages, unable to quite leave the academy that has abused them for so long.
It's funny that McArdle, who is such an advocate of personal freedom when it comes to payday loans for the poor, suddenly has her heart-strings tugged by the thought of PhD's working at "near-poverty wages" in the hope of getting a job as a professor.
Is this producing better education? Doubtful; there's no particular relationship between scholarship and the ability to teach.
Here, McArdle is arguing that, if our goal is to produce better education, we should judge professors more on their ability to teach. I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, I think there should be a greater push towards hiring great teachers for most introductory-level courses, and have great researchers teach the more advanced courses. However, this issue, like most of the issues McArdle raises, has very little to do with tenure.
How about valuable scholarship? Well, define valuable--in many liberal arts fields, the only possible consumer of the research in question is a handful of scholars in the same field. That sort of research is valuable in the same way that children's craft projects are priceless--to their mothers. Basically, these people are supporting an expensive hobby with a sideline business certifying the ability of certain twenty-year olds to write in complete sentences.
Assuming her premise to be true, what does this have to do with tenure? McArdle is arguing that in many liberal arts fields, the research being performed is useless, and the teaching performed by the professors is the only socially valuable part of their job. It is unclear why eliminating tenure would change this in any way.
And what about the people who do get tenure, and are producing scholarship in areas that other people care about? Doesn't tenure protect free intellectual inquiry? Diversity of thought? Doesn't it allow teachers to be more demanding of students?
Finally, halfway through her post, McArdle decides to join the actual debate that is occurring regarding tenure. Her argument:
Perhaps--but the question is, at what point? Most scholars in their sixties are not producing path-breaking new research, but they are precisely the people that tenure protects.
The implication of what McArdle is arguing is rather scary. She is effectively arguing that most older academics would be fired if tenure were abolished. This is a few paragraphs after she argues against academia because it causes people to waste their youth, and enter the job market at entry level after their peers have spent years "building up marketable skills".
Scholars in their twenties and thirties, on the other hand, have no academic freedom at all.
No academic freedom at all? Really?
Indeed, because tenure raises the stakes so high, the vetting of future employees is much more careful--and the candidates, who know this, are almost certainly more careful than they would be if they were on more ordinary employment contracts.
This is almost definitely true. However, there is clearly a trade-off involved here. After obtaining tenure, academics have significantly more freedom then they would ever have under "more ordinary employment contracts". McArdle does not try to argue that the trade-off she proposes is superior. In fact, she argues that "the people that tenure protects" are "scholars in their sixties" who "are not producing path-breaking new research". This is simply wrong.
As a result, the process of getting a degree, getting a job, and getting tenure has stretched out to cover one's whole youth. So tenure makes young scholars--the kind most likely to attack a dominant paradigm--probably more careful than they would be under more normal employment process.
This may be true, but it also hides a larger truth. The best way to gain the attention of a tenure committee is to produce ground-breaking research that replaces the current paradigm. Universities love to have professors who can be called "path-breaking".
The same is true of diversity. Academics within the tenure system are probably more careful about weeding out heresy, because they'll be stuck with it if it manages to sneak in.
So, within the tenure system, academics will weed out heresy because they will be stuck with it forever. By implication, without a tenure system, these same academics would allow the heresy to flourish because they know they can weed it out whenever they want. This is exactly what tenure is designed to prevent.
Tenure can easily be used to entrench the ideological or scholarly commitments of a department's powerful members, reducing diversity rather than enhancing it.
So can any other hiring system. This has nothing to do with tenure, but rather with the method for rating professors.
The current tenure system only protects revolutionary, dangerous ideas to the extent that they spring full blown from an academic's head after he has secured tenure, startling the hell out of everyone who hired him. Or perhaps after he's secured his full professorship. Or after he's managed to move to a better class of research institution with a nicer salary.
Since I don't know of many cases where this has happened, I find it hard to believe that tenure is crucial to preserving the spirit of free inquiry at our nation's colleges.
Well, if McArdle does not know of many cases where this has happened, that settles it for me.
I'm sure it's protected more than one scholar from getting fired after making stupid remarks to a class. And we would all of us--not just academics--like to be immune from getting fired for making stupid remarks. But what's not clear to me is that this has, in any instance, protected Very Important Scholarship from being censored for the benefit of Mrs. Grundy.
Even if it were, I'd want to know if all that Very Important Scholarship were worth the enormous cost of this outmoded system. And advocates would have a steep uphill battle to convince me that it is.
McArdle speaks of the "enormous cost" of the tenure system, but most of the costs she describes (wasted youth, publishing useless articles, academic couples) exist independent of the tenure system. For an economics blogger, it is also surprising that she fails to mention the significant increase in salaries that would be required as compensation for no longer having tenure.
