The Question of Tenure

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Edited by Richard P. Chait

Harvard University Press

Due/Published March 2002, 352 pages, cloth

ISBN 0674007719

Tenure is the abortion issue of the academy, igniting arguments and inflaming near-religious passions. To some, tenure is essential to academic freedom and a magnet to recruit and retain top-flight faculty. To others, it is an impediment to professorial accountability and a constraint on institutional flexibility and finances. But beyond anecdote and opinion, what do we really know about how tenure works?

 In this book, Richard Chait and his colleagues offer the results of their research on key empirical questions. Are there circumstances under which faculty might voluntarily relinquish tenure? When might new faculty actually prefer nonÜtenure track positions? Does the absence of tenure mean the absence of shared governance? Why have some colleges abandoned tenure while others have adopted it? Answers to these and other questions come from careful studies of institutions that mirror the American academy: research universities and liberal arts colleges, including both highly selective and less prestigious schools.

 The Questions of Tenure offers vivid pictures of academic subcultures. Chait and his colleagues conclude that context counts so much that no single tenure system exists. Still, since no academic reward carries the cachet of tenure, few institutions will initiate significant changes without either powerful external pressures or persistent demands from new or disgruntled faculty.

Contents

List of Tables and Figures
Acknowledgments

 Introduction
Richard P. Chait
1. Why Tenure? Why Now?
Richard P. Chait
2. What Is Current Policy?
Cathy A. Trower
3. Does Faculty Governance Differ at Colleges with Tenure and Colleges without Tenure?
Richard P. Chait
5. What Happened to the Tenure Track?
Roger G. Baldwin, Jay L. Chronister
6. How Are Faculty Faring in Other Countries?
Philip G. Altbach
7. Can Colleges Competitively Recruit Faculty without the Prospect of Tenure?
Cathy A. Trower
8. Can Faculty Be Induced to Relinquish Tenure?
Charles T. Clotfelter
9. Why Is Tenure One College's Problem and Another's Solution?
William T. Mallon
10. How Might Data Be Used?
Cathy A. Trower, James P. Honan
11. Gleanings
Richard P. Chait

 Contributors
 Index

Review

As financial constraints have weighed more heavily on colleges and universities in recent years, discussions of tenure reform have become particularly heated. Opponents argue that tenure provides no faculty accountability and restricts an institution's flexibility to hire and fire professors. To others, tenure is essential to guarantee academic freedom. As Richard Chait argues in his introduction, this debate has been fueled mostly by rhetoric, anecdote and very little actual data.

The invaluable Questions of Tenure informs "discussions of faculty work life through research-based, data-driven answers to important practical, and frequently posed questions about tenure policy and practice." Drawing on data from a variety of schools, the contributors to The Questions of Tenure carefully analyze the procedures used to grant tenure, how tenure empowers the faculty in campus governance, the recent shift toward part-time and non-tenure track jobs, the effect of other incentives besides tenure in luring faculty, and how data can best be used to inform decisions regarding tenure. The contributors discover that different schools view tenure very differently with some seeing it as the culmination of satisfactory work and others as an uncommon reward for extraordinary achievement. However, tenure is still the "gold standard" of academic life, conferring status and security for faculty. Other incentives (higher pay, improved quality of life), while attractive fail in comparison. The contributors also find a generational split among professors about the criteria for tenure. More specifically, younger professors want the process of granting tenure to be more open and should prize work done in collaboration, across disciplines, and in the classroom as well as individual research. The Questions of Tenure concludes that tenure reform is unlikely to come from within, and that change is most likely to come as a result from external pressures such as U.S. News & World Report (and other rating systems), interest groups (NAACP, NOW, etc.), legislators, and Boards of Trustees. The Questions of Tenure is an illuminating and refreshingly balanced account of contemporary academic life and contemporary debates about tenure.