Tenure: An idea whose time has gone.
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
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.
Sure they may not provide a lot of utility in terms of increasing production, but they do have a lot of perspective to offer to students.
I was responding to the author's dig at liberal arts fields above. That while they may seem like expensive hobbies, they are expensive hobbies that are important for society to have.
We looked up Wisconsin and the pay scales were similar.
I believe every state has a database of state funded university professor salaries, it's pretty eye opening.
Someone who is a B-school prof isn't necessarily going to make $300K in industry. I mean, this is the University of Minnesota B-school, teaching classes like "Leadership." Not exactly the purview of captains of industry. Likewise, industrial chemists do not typically make $190K. That's $50K more than what my uncle makes as an industrial chemist. Also, these are all taxpayer funded jobs. It seems like the salaries factor in to the new American trend of public sector employees making MORE money than they would in private industry.
Tenure is a fantastic perk, and if it didn't exist, academic salaries would have to be a helluva lot higher.
Now, tenure for schoolteachers, that's crazy.
(a) because few people will risk 15 years of their life on a career that is more likely to unceremoniusly eject than to reward them,
and (b) because there will never be nearly enough openings for tenured professors to make use of all the talent vying for those roles.
As always, it's not that the perk is bad, it's that it comes at cost disproportionate to its value.
What really needs to be addressed is the vast pyramiding of talent between the PhD and the tenure-track level (I'm talking about sciences, not humanities, which have other problems). The current system of postdocs sitting in a long-term holding pattern until they either get picked for a permanent position or give up doesn't actually reward talent, it mostly just rewards patience, being independently wealthy, or having nothing better to do. A young scientist's level of talent should be apparent by the time you finish your PhD -- let the universities snap 'em up for tenure-track positions then, instead of six years later.
(Why yes, I am a fifth-year postdoc, thanks for asking.)
Then, when/if they go into academic tenure-track positions, they'll have more experience to draw upon to do more fruitful and valuable research.
Consider: I could conceivably become an MD at this point in my life, but stand zero chance of becoming a professor of English. This seems warped.
Students pay tuition that is only dependent on the number of hours they take regardless of what type of course. An industrial technology major has roughly the same tuition as an english major. Students are also shielded from the costs of the system by scholarships, loans, and parents money. They are thus less motivated, less concerned about university waste, and burdening other people with these costs or burdening their own future through debt. Additionally their unmotivated, uninformed choices are putting them behind the educational steering wheel of tax payers' and society's money. It's no surprise that people complain about the lack of funding for science and emphasis on college sports. Those are the choices students have made with OPM (other people's money).
Similarly, faculty are paid for their experience and not subject area. An exception at one university I know: the faculty in one department gamed the system by rotating several people in and out of the department head position so that they each could gain and keep a higher salary when they returned to their non-department head position. Being paid the same leads to some departments having overpaid professors who wish to protect their jobs from the hordes of graduate students by raising as many artificial barriers as they can(tenure, excessive grad student burdens, etc). Other departments may have underpaid, overworked professors who are preparing students for relevant and highly paid positions in the workforce, but who are nevertheless given the same salary as the overpaid professors.
Students are not given the choice of paying less for courses that are taught by an instructor vs by a professor. It would be nice if colleges offered something like that following:
$600 for a course taught by a tenured professor
$300 an instructor
$150 by a teaching assistant
$50 self-taught with exams at a university or third party testing center
Such an unbundled tuition package would quickly expose the inefficiencies of the university system.
Tenure works in a similar way by bundling the good and bad professors together so that they must be accepted as a package deal, much like the way unions work. I think most tenured professors are decent teachers and the truly bad ones are exceptions, but the lack of flexibility to hire cheaper instructors where there is a demand and the lack of choice for students is the real problem. Even if a department had all really good tenured professors and no instructors or non-tenured staff, the costs to students would be too expensive.
Similar to the above bundling, state government jobs often require a Bachelors degree...any major...for positions that should only require a HS diploma. This is especially bad for non-teaching staff jobs at universities which require a college degree(any major) for many jobs that only require a HS diploma...part of the universities' way of promoting their own.
The whole system is designed to shield participants from free market forces by bundling everything together and offering consumers and tax payers one bundled choice.
The university system has not changed despite increased information availability provided by the internet and online ordering of books. Most of the actual learning is done outside the classroom and verified by in-class tests. Surely a better system is available in this information age.
Full disclosure: I do tech support at a university. When I see the outrageous salaries that some professors make, tenured or not, sometimes it is infuriating. Especially when they don't understand the basics of using a computer.
Dean Dad has a good discussion of this in today's post, The Tenure/Adjunct Dialectic: http://suburbdad.blogspot.com/2010/07/tenureadjunct-dialecti... :
"The cost of tenure goes far beyond the salary of the tenured. It includes the opportunity cost of more productive uses that had to be skipped to pay for a decision made decades earlier in a different context. (We actually have people for whom staff jobs were created when their tenured speciality went away. That’s a direct cost of tenure.) It also includes the cost of the various bribes that have to be paid to the tenured to get them to step up to acknowledge institutional needs: course releases (a direct cause of adjunct hiring), preferential scheduling (whether it makes sense for students or not), and even cash stipends (which have to be paid for somehow).
Whenever we allocate course reassignments for full-time faculty, we hire adjuncts to make up for it. Sabbaticals? Adjuncts. Grant work? Adjuncts. Someone has to teach the classes the tenured faculty won’t. (As one embittered adjunct put it in a department meeting, “I teach so you don’t have to!” Exactly.) Aristocrats need serfs, and the tenured need the adjuncts.
It starts earlier than that. The ‘bait’ of tenure is part of what lures so many young idealists into graduate school, replenishing the reserve army of the adjuncts. That oversupply allows the adjunct trend to continue. The crushed dreams of a generation of underemployed academics are a cost of tenure."
In addition, I still haven't seen anyone address Lorne Carmichael's argument in "Incentives in Academics: Why is There Tenure?":
"Loosely, tenure is necessary because without it incumbents would never be willing to hire people who might turn out to be better than them-selves.
The analysis is consistent with several other aspects of the academic environment. It provides a rationale for "tenure-track" appointments and says something about the standards that can be used for tenure decisions. The job security derived here is not absolute. Incumbents (454) can be released if they fail to meet exogenous standards of performance (i.e., engage in "gross moral turpitude") or if the separations are voluntary (contract "buy-outs" or early retirement). In times of financial crisis, when involuntary separations are inevitable, the model suggests that entire departments be eliminated. This is because the members of one department do not choose the new hires of another. The framework used for the analysis is quite general, so it also makes predictions about the form of other organizations in which members have input into overall decisions" (455).
Until you get past the hurdle of having only people within the discipline being able to evaluate others within the discipline and those in a department not wanting to hire themselves out of a job, I don't think you'll have a sufficiently persuasive case to get rid of tenure altogether, whatever the benefits.
The problem that tenure solves is that politics is the enemy of truth. In any organization without some form of tenure, an individual is going to have to be very political to stay employed, advance, etc. (When I say politics, I don't mean left or right or democrats or republicans. I mean the process whereby humans jockey for position in a social hierarchy.)
Tenure is an (imperfect) way to remove people from the political game, thus enabling them to tell the truth and think honestly. It's not perfect or complete, but it works better than nothing and it's simple.
Tell me another simple way to enable people to be honest or tell the truth.
Edit: there's another related reason, and it came to mind when I was thinking about Paul Graham's latest startup essay about keeping your most important idea in mind...
Political maneuvering is hard. Political maneuvering with honesty and integrity is even harder, since lying and deception are often quick and easy shortcuts in political games. (This is why so many salesmen lie so often. Lying is the lazy solution.)
What you want academics to be thinking about is their field of inquiry, not politics. But without tenure, politics will get in the way and distract people from doing their real job. Not only that, but those that lie and cheat will find themselves with more free time than those that try to play the political game honestly. Are those the folks that you want as intellectual leaders?
McArdle isn't arguing that people should be made more accountable to politics. She's pointing out the hard-to-deny fact that tenure has warped the market for scholastic talent. What part of that argument do you disagree with?
It's one thing to say that we should make it hard for professors to be fired for saying unpopular things or taking research risks. It's another to say that it's acceptable for a lifetime in academia to require a 15-year longshot gamble that leaves you penniless and unhireable at the end. I think a reasonable person could argue that the latter problem is has a greater chilling effect than the former.
But I think what I said still stands. I think that tenure represents an example of a really expensive solution to a nasty problem. The nasty problem is that politics makes it hard to be honest, think unpopular thoughts, speak truth to power, investigate unpopular topics, etc. It's also a huge distraction and time sink. Tenure is the only solution we've come up with to this problem that's workable. It's an ugly and hugely expensive solution, but nature favors ugly solutions over no solution.
In other words: it might be worth employing 10 space-filling past-their-prime tenured professors and destroying the careers of 100 aspiring students who don't make it to buy 5 free thinkers with the time and resources to ask tough questions and protection from politics.
A very loose but economically similar analogy would be VC investment, where it's worth funding 99 failures to get one Google.
Unless your science PhD is in Biology.
People overstate how easy it is for a science PhD to get a "good" job in industry.
In relation to tenure, what you are proposing is already in place. When a tenured prof dies, they don't replace him, they just hire 2-3 adjunct faculty.
With this in mind, the article is somewhat pointless; most universities have been in the process of effectively eliminating tenure for at least a decade. The ones that don't have billions of dollars worth of endowment money, so who really cares what they do?
The key is to actually go all out in your new field. It's pretty obvious when you talk to people whether they actually want to pursue their new field, or whether they view it as a poor substitute for academia. Obviously, the latter attitude doesn't go over so well.
In academic math, you prove things. In a hedge fund, if it makes money it's correct.
It's not simply the fact that you have to get another job when you inevitably (yes, even in CS) fail to land a tenured position. It's that you've sacrificed 10-15 years of earning potential to reach that point. That's a monstrous economic cost. The top talent in the hard sciences are plenty smart enough to understand this and, accordingly, rule out a probably-doomed run for office in academia.
Again, politics is dangerous, but the marketplace we've created for academic talent is even more treacherous, and may create an even greater chilling effect.
That will not be solved if you remove tenure. People will still be badly paid. But now everyone will be badly paid and scared for their entire careers, while before a lucky few could segue in a career of being badly paid but with safe jobs.