Tenure & the State of Higher Education

I woke up at 4:15 one morning recently thinking about scheduling, and I was unable to go back to sleep. Something I’ve been doing for the last several years that I felt very strongly about was forefront in my mind, and suddenly, I was doubting the validity of the practice, the very need for it. The practice is using past enrollment data to determine which classes to offer and which modalities to recommend that faculty employ to teach those classes. In the wee hours of the morning, this practice suddenly seemed very authoritarian and even unnecessary given the expertise of our faculty leadership, and the changes that have taken place that have, perhaps, made this practice obsolete, at least for the time being. 

I flipped my phone on to entertain my busy mind and hopefully put myself back to sleep, and all over Twitter were stories of colleges revoking tenure. I found this coincidental, because I had just been grappling with issues of trust and faculty expertise. I pondered my own evolving relationship with the idea of tenure.

My first run-in with a tenured faculty member who had "checked out" left me frustrated and wishing it didn't exist. Despite my irritation, I knew that the vast majority of faculty members were working exceptionally hard and reading dossiers honestly left me in awe. While there is a lot of grumbling about the process as it currently exists (that's another blog post), one professor's comment still stays with me today: "I love the tenure process. It allows instructors to really document their productivity growth and personal and professional development. It's a very valuable exercise."

Now, I have something to admit. Until recently, I never really got the importance of tenure for protecting free speech. I've often thought that the fear pervasive among faculty that admin or senior faculty or whoever would keep them from getting tenure was unnecessary. I say this, however, from the viewpoint of an administrator, one who couldn't imagine attacking someone for expressing their opinions, no matter how I might disagree. I can think of many times where I heard that faculty were talking about this or that, and my concern is only whether they are breaking policy or being uncivil.

You may point out that I don't have to create a document that my entire career depends upon that is, admittedly, at the center of a somewhat subjective system. You would be right, but I am also not guaranteed to keep my job year after year unless I do it properly, and I, too, worry that my outspokenness or opinions will make me unpopular. I know that I am protected from being fired without cause, but I would say the same for faculty. Still, our situations are not the same.

I was naive. Considering the political climate in our nation where we live in bubbles surrounded by people who think and speak and act the same way we do, where we can easily shut out the voices of opposition and relegate them to other, I had to consider the arguments that the attack on tenure is an exercise to silence the voices that we don’t want to hear.  In fact, we now have evidence showing this is true.  

Another argument is being made that revoking tenure is an opportunity to save money for colleges that are facing severe budget cuts and a suffering economy. Our students are flowing away in droves.  "[Tenure] prevents institutions from being nimble and reacting appropriately to enrollment fluctuations" (Chronicle, 2022, p. 16). I have to ask, do we really want to be so nimble? Academics is, at its core, a slow process. I agree that we could be more efficient, but time is fundamental to deep, critical thinking. 

If our primary duty is education, cutting dedicated, experienced faculty members goes counter to the mission in service to a business model of education. Plus, we are forgetting that faculty - real people - are what's at stake in this conversation of responding to market trends. Isn't there a happy medium? 

There has been talk nationwide of replacing tenure with multiyear renewable contracts, but most of the rhetoric surrounding this argument is focused on four-year institutions. Also, the term is misleading; there is a big difference between multiple short-term contracts (1- or 2-year) and multiple contracts that increase in length as time goes on (2-year, then 5-year, then 7-year contracts). I have no opinion on tenure at universities, except how it may affect us as part of the UH System, which includes six (6.5, really) community colleges. 

I don't hate this idea, but I would not trade in tenure without a complete system overhaul that put faculty at the center of the discussion as the key constituent. Regardless of the state of tenure, there has been an inexorable creep toward the use of lecturers - non-tenured, contract instructors. This is both unfair to lecturers themselves and to the colleges. With every tenured faculty member lost to retirement, we lose institutional knowledge. We decrease our ability to meet the essential, daily workload of the college. Most importantly, we lose our ability to support students.

We are in the middle of a painful process of learning to be more efficient, to do the same work with fewer people. I predict that the next few years will be about prioritizing what is truly important to us and making changes to our work processes. It is not the time to attack tenure. In fact, tenure may be the only thing keeping us afloat.