All the reasons it’s important to keep tenure for professors
Last month, a piece on academic tenure appeared in this newspaper. In “Let’s do away with tenure — and not because of politics,” George Heitmann argued that tenure should be eliminated based on a limited and misleading portrayal of the job of a college professor.
Coming from a tenured college professor, the piece is all the more disturbing in its attempts to attack the institution of tenure from within the academy. As a former tenured college professor, I’d like to offer a more complete and accurate picture of the profession.
Heitmann made no mention of the service component of the job. All faculty know that there is a “three-legged stool” on which a successful career, and tenure, is based: teaching, research and service. He described the professional duties of professors as “keeping up to date with developments in their academic field, conscientiously preparing for class and continuing to actively pursue their research.”
But a study by The Chronicle of Higher Education found that about 30% of faculty time is devoted to meetings and email, and another 11% to grading. That’s more than 40% of what professors do.
He also wrote, “Life for professors who do little more than meet their classes can be very easy, a full salary for the equivalent of less than six work weeks per year” and noted “a long summer break that is free from teaching responsibilities.”
But, for most professors, at least at private colleges, the contract is for nine months, not 12. I typically spent much of my summers keeping up with developments in my field, carrying out research, going to workshops, preparing for upcoming classes, attending conferences and handling disciplinary matters.
These were unpaid summers, and hardly free from the responsibilities of the profession.
More problematic was the hackneyed calculation of the amount of time professors spend in the classroom, the “six weeks” of work, as if that is all they do. The same Chronicle study found that professors estimated their time commitment at an average of 61 hours per week during the semester. That included about 10 hours on weekends, which would often be spent on grading.
The teaching portion of the profession can be viewed more like the career of a Broadway performer or a professional athlete. The actual time playing or performing might be only a few hours per week, but few would argue that they are lazy, or indeed that the job does not require a high level of expertise and dedication.
Heitmann also argued primarily from personal opinion, rather than providing any real data to back up his argument. He said economics “suggests” there would be a rise in faculty salaries if tenure were eliminated. I highly doubt that, especially given the current economic strain many colleges are under. He said there “is a reason to believe” teaching and research would improve without tenure. He said he believes there is a correlation between professors’ age and the declining quality of their work. Presumably, he expected these suppositions to carry weight with his readers because he was a tenured professor, but they were suppositions nonetheless.
In persuasive writing, it is an effective rhetorical technique to anticipate counterarguments that the reader might be thinking of, and then to rebut them. Heitmann attempted to do this when he conceded that most professors work far more than the minimum. He mentioned a Penn State professor who was rumored to have reported working 168 hours per week because he was a Freudian who claimed even his sleeping should be counted. This was presumably a joke, and in any case did nothing to counter the point that most professors put in far more hours than the minimal number he used to arrive at his six-week calculation.
Later he said most tenured professors discharge their duties responsibly, but there are a significant few (what proportion?) who do not, and “still more (what proportion?) that are somewhat lax in meeting their reasonably expected responsibilities,” concluding that “they should be dismissed.” Yes, he conceded, most are responsible, but lots aren’t and so they should not be protected by tenure. But being “somewhat lax” is surely not grounds for dismissal. If that were the standard, most employers would have to dismiss large portions of their workforce.
Every profession has its slackers, and higher education is no worse than any other, even with the institution of tenure. Tenure is an important incentive to attract committed faculty members to remain in the profession and provide stability and collegiality, despite the fact that they are generally underpaid compared with what they could make in the private sector.
Tenure also is important to protect professors’ freedom of speech, particularly at a time when there is added political pressure to restrict that speech on college campuses and elsewhere.
Heitmann concluded by saying that “Job security should be based on performance not tenure.” But tenure itself is based on a very rigorous assessment of performance (and potential performance), and thus job security is based on performance. Tenure moves that security to an early point in the career, allowing faculty to pursue their jobs relatively free from the politics of the administration, but also to make a very demanding profession attractive enough that dedicated individuals will continue to enter into the bargain.