What is Tenure? (The Good Morning Show — KFAB)
This morning at about 8:40, I spent about 12 minutes as a telephone guest on a morning talk show on KFAB in Nebraska, where I was brought in to provide context for the Ward Churchill controversy at the University of Colorado. My role was to explain tenure.
A Google search for “tenure” brings up an informal “What is Tenure” handout that I created in 2000 and posted to the “Frequently Asked Questions” of my website. When the host first contacted me, he mentioned having found my work online.
I presented myself on-air as a guy who happens to earn a living being a college teacher, and tried to described the process in simple terms. When discussing how tenure might differ at different kinds of institutions, I managed to work in some good references to SHU’s faculty-student interaction and small class sizes (I mentioned that I teach one class with 30 students, three with about 13, and one with five). In response to a hypothetical question about how my school would respond to the presence of a holocaust denier on our faculty, I worked in a reference to our National Catholic Center on Holocaust Education.
At one point, I noted that there are some cold and insensitive people who are great teachers; there are some kind and loving people who are not; and there are some people who say offensive and odious things who meet the terms of their employment contract. That was the main thing I tried to emphasize – that tenure is a contract, with terms that both ends have to hold up. I noted that tenure would not protect the employment of a faculty member whose scholarship and teaching did not continue to meet the appropriate criteria.
After one of the hosts offered the hypothetical scenario of a rich donor saying that he would donate $10 million to SHU, but only on the condition that Dr. Jerz be fired for voicing an opinion that he finds offensive, I explained the importance of academic freedom.
When I noted that there’s a line in our faculty handbook that specifically states that tenure will not be revoked as a way of clamping down on academic freedom, I heard music start to play in the background, and the host thanked me for my time.
Personal Reflection
During the interview, I was consciously thinking of a Salon article I blogged about years ago, “Ambushed on Donahue,” in which MIT scholar Harry Jenkins describes being invited on the show to have an intellectual discussion about videogames in culture, but instead found himself facing angry mothers who had been spooked by Donahue’s repeated screening of video clips showing the most violent, out-of-context scenes in Grand Theft Auto 3.
Jenkins kicked himself afterward for not sticking to a simple point and hammering it at every opportunity. So I offered a quick answer to the direct questions posed by the host, and then tried to shift as soon as possible back to the narrative I had prepared in advance. I was delighted to hear that music in the background just when I got to the line about the faculty handbook, because I had aimed for that to be the climax of my prepared remarks.
I had a few things in reserve, in case I needed them. The station has a lot of sports programming, so I was also going to use the analogy of a pro team paying big money in order to recruit and retain superstars, or colleges offering athletic scholarship for a similar reason. Had the environment become a little hostile, I was going to say “Hmm” thoughtfully, and then suggest that someone in Nebraska start a university that doesn’t offer tenure, and publish a report on what other benefits they needed to offer in order to recruit and retain qualified faculty members. But the need never arose. In fact, the hosts gave me a few generous softballs to speed things along, and when it became clear that I wasn’t going to speculate about Ward Churchill, they offered some hypothetical questions in order to keep me talking.
I tried to record it via the station’s website, but I couldn’t get through. Perhaps angry mobs called in to mock me after I went off the air, but I’m satisfied with the experience.
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I do agree with you that some universities aren't primarily teaching institutions. The big schools are called "research institutions" because they get a huge chunk of income due to their professor's research activities. That means tuition is less important to the institution as a whole. If good teaching is important to you, go to a small teaching school. If you want to work in the best labs with the most current, most expensive equipment (biggest libraries, professors who travel the world delivering their papers and hearing cutting-edge research presented at conferences, student TV stations and student papers that come out daily, that sort of thing), then go to a big research school (where grad students teach most of the lower-division courses).
Since I don't have tenure, I haven't sat in on any tenure-related deicisions. But let me return once again to the idea of a contract. If a faculty member's teaching is marginal, but everything else is fine, then you're probalby right, tenure would protect that individual. It's part of the principle of academic freedom that the tenure net probably protects some people who don't deserve tenure, but that's considered preferable to letting a dedicated and talented person get fired because he/she teaches something controversial that the department chair does not like.
But cheer up, Will -- only half of the people who start PhDs finish them, and only half of those ever even get a tenure-track job. The numbers are different for different disciplines, of course. Still, an increasing number of faculty positions are being filled by part-timers, who earn no benefits, and are paid for nothing but teaching. Of course, these faculy tend to move around a lot, so they never stick around long enough to do something like start a new program.
So...well, I can't help but find this amusing, as it sounds like really what your saying supports what I'm saying.
People that can't teach very well and really just want to do research end up teaching because it's a more stable position. So professors that are very poor at teaching but good at research end up teaching.
Since personnel records are private, there isn't any way to know if anyone has ever been fired for poor teaching. Without naming any details whatsoever, have you ever known a tenured faculty member to be fired for poor teaching? I'm under the distinct impression that it just doesn't happen nowadays because there's to great of a threat of a lawsuit for firing someone for something as vague as "poor teaching". So I'm going with "no tenured faculty get fired for poor teaching". Denied raises or promotions, certainly, but not fired.
Good teachers get denied tenure because of insufficient scholarly requirements - well, a university is sounding less and less like a teaching institution.
In my time in college, I had one professor that was borderline sadistic, and I was told by the administration that basically, if he didn't stop showing up and didn't do something clearly illegal, they couldn't fire him because he had tenure.
All the other professors were fine. I mean, sure I didn't agree with some of them, but even those were alright. It was just this one that's spawned my distaste for tenure.
Heh. There are research-only positions, but they are dependent upon the ability of somebody else to raise the money. If the grant runs out, the position disappears. Most researchers don't want to take jobs like that -- so they choose to take the job security offered by a school that does offer tenure.
I gather that you've had some bad experiences with tenured faculty members... Most faculty do a pretty good job, I think!
As for whether there are articles about tenured faculty members fired for poor teaching -- those kind of personnel records are private, just as the grades you recieved are private (unless you choose to release them by giving a transcript to a potential employer).
It's actually much more common to hear about teachers who were rated highly in the classroom and who were well-liked by students, who were denied tenure because they didn't meet the scholarly requirements of their tenure-track years. That's typically because the students protest the loss of their favorite teacher.
I just thought of the best comeback for your statement:
"But you do have a point. If somebody invented a drug that cures cancer, bringing in millions of dollars in grant money, but can't lecture, then from the viewpoint of the whole school system, and the advancement of science and improvement of the human conditoin, then that person is worth keeping."
Then no, they shouldn't be working and teaching at a university. They shouldn't be wasted half their time on classes and students, when they could be spending that time advancing science and improving the human condition!
ha! :-)
"If somebody invented a drug that cures cancer, bringing in millions of dollars in grant money, but can't lecture, then from the viewpoint of the whole school system, and the advancement of science and improvement of the human conditoin, then that person is worth keeping."
...yes, obviously, but then should the students have to suffer through classes under them? Shouldn't there be a magical "research only" position for them?
"The worst teacher in the state would have to be very, very good at something else in order to be kept around"
Well, I can only repeat what I was told. I was told that there were only 3 ways to fire a tenured professor. 1 - They violated the law. 2. They stopped showing up, or teaching classes, or something like that. 3. Their horrendous behavior or incredibly outdated knowledge was massively documented over a period of several years. I was also given the impression that no one in the administration wanted to do number 3, both because the time they spent on that would subtract from the time they spent on their other professional duties, and because as an administration official, they didn't want look like they were singling one person out.
I was told firing a tenured professor in any way other than the 3 above would put the university at to great of a risk of a costly prolonged lawsuit by the fired professor.
If you know of any articles about how tenured professors have been fired for poor teaching, I would really like to know about them. But my impression is that if a professor has tenure, the worst they can do is stop giving him raises.
Er... the quote I put in comment #3 above refers to their "professional capacities as teachers or researchers".
But you do have a point. If somebody invented a drug that cures cancer, bringing in millions of dollars in grant money, but can't lecture, then from the viewpoint of the whole school system, and the advancement of science and improvement of the human conditoin, then that person is worth keeping.
At UWEC, good teaching was 80% of the formula they used to determine promotions and such. At my current school, it's 50%.
So, yes, it is possible that a faculty member who excels in areas other than teaching, and who is less than stellar in teaching, may be kept on.
The worst teacher in the state would have to be very, very good at something else in order to be kept around -- it's not enough simply to publish some papers.
Theoretically. By what you're saying seems to be ano optimists view. Try proving in court that someone didn't recruit students into the major, or that although they served on committees, they didn't really do anything.
Also, notice that none of the criteria you mentioned covers any of their actual teaching of classes. They're the worst teacher in the state, but it's ok - they published some papers!
That depends on how you define "duties". If you mean "take attendance, give quizzes, and hold office hours," then you're right, almost anyone can do that.
If you define "duties" as contributing to the advancement of your field by conducting original research for publication in scholarly journals, recruiting students into your major and mentoring them through graduate school, serving on committes for the purpose of hiring new colleagues, proposing new courses and majors, writing textbooks or reviewing and critiquing chapters in your speciality that will be part of a proposed new textbook, and generally participating in a virbrant intellecutal campus life, then it would be hard to imagine that Prof. Deadweight would meet those criteria.
"Tenured faculty members can be let go for a mental or medical condition that makes it impossible to continue their duties"
Well, it's exactly what I thought. "impossible to continue their duties". That's not a misconception - like I said, as long as they show up, and aren't blatantly abusive, it's still "possible" for them to continue their duties, isn't it?
And that's a misconception I wanted to address.
Tenured faculty members can be let go for a mental or medical condition that makes it impossible to continue their duties, for financial reasons (i.e. the school is shutting down a department), or other professional concerns. Each university probably has its own language, but the AAUP recommends this language: "Adequate cause for a dismissal will be related, directly and substantially, to the fitness of faculty members in their professional capacities as teachers or researchers." (5a)
I can imagine that, in borderline cases, the university typically doesn't want to risk the bad publicity and expense of a lawsuit.