The Weakness of the Case Against Tenure

From Christopher Beam at Slate:

Mark C. Taylor ... calculates that someone who serves as an associate professor with tenure for five years and then becomes a full professor for 30 years costs a private university $12.2 million. Public universities pay $10 million over the same period. And because most universities pay tenured professors out of their endowments, each professor freezes up tens of millions in otherwise-liquid endowment money for a generation. University debt jumped 54 percent last year, with an average debt of $168 million. If the average university tenured about 15 fewer professors, they'd be in the black.

This has to be the worst math I have seen in a while. Using the private university's cost of $12.2 million over 35 years, we get an annual cost of just under $350,000 per professor. Note that the median salary for full professors in law (the highest-paid field for professors) is $136,634, so the majority of the cost per professor is not actually the professor's salary. Beam shows his numerical illiteracy by saying that by simply having about 15 fewer professors, they would not be in debt. Of course, the university would have needed to have 15 fewer tenured professors over the past 35 years to accomplish this savings. Of course, cutting 15 tenured professors would also have a fairly substantial negative impact on the university as a whole. Either class sizes would have to increase (bad for students), professors would have to teach more courses (bad for professors), or fewer students would be admitted (bad for the university's revenue). To lightly toss off the suggestion to fire 15 professors suggests that Beam does not have even a basic understanding of how a university operates. Lastly, here is Beam concluding the article:

Evergreen State College in Washington implemented renewable contracts back in 1971. Florida Gulf Coast University scrapped tenure when it was established in 1991. Boston University now offers salary premiums to professors who decide not to take tenure. Market forces will drive other universities to follow suit, whether they want to or not.

So, Boston University has found that cutting tenure requires an increase in salary. What an awesome money-saving technique!