January 2001
Academic Tenure Promotes Mediocrity
According to an anonymous student subjected to "a pathetic display of teaching" in one of his or her courses, "... the idea of tenure for university professors has no place in the real world" ("Tenure has no place in the real world," The Manitoban, November 22). Though I am a tenured professor, I strongly agree with this assertion.
Academic tenure, the expensive and permissive lifelong sinecure enjoyed by over 25,000 Canadian professors, is an institution that has long needed abolition.
I say this knowing that those who support tenure, namely most professors, the central administration, and the faculty association, argue that tenure is necessary to protect academic freedom, the right of academics to freely and openly address controversial and unpopular issues without fear of censure or reprisal.
Nearly 30 years at the University of Manitoba (U of M) has taught me that this view of tenure is grossly misleading because it ignores the fact that, in the real world of mediocre ivory towers like the U of M, tenure either discourages or is indifferent to unfettered original research or uncompromising social criticism.
The unwillingness of most tenured professors to challenge, except in hushed tones, the heavy-handed implementation of repressive, albeit politically-correct, university anti-free speech codes suggests that moral cowardice, not breaches of academic freedom, is what needs to be protected against.
If tenure were abolished and those of normally faint heart (i.e., most of the professoriate) chose to speak out on controversial issues, this could readily be accommodated with clear, ethically defensible, and mutually enforceable codes of academic freedom.
Neither are most tenured professors innovative cerebral gadflies intellectually or politically out-of-step with those around them. Rather, most spend their time and energy currying collegial and other favour by assiduously sympathizing with whichever intellectual paradigm happens to be the flavour of the week.
Conversely, systemic creativity and risk-taking are found in the private sector, not in government or in the public (i.e., government) university.
Tenure actually stifles creativity by selecting for civil-service-minded, risk-averse individuals attracted to academe by its job security and lack of accountability to peers, superiors, or the tax-paying public. (It should be no surprise, then, that most university professors strongly resist the idea of university privatization and commercialization.)
A secure and unsupervised job, as this anonymous student has recently found out, is also a license for indifference to the learning outcomes of students.
Even if most tenured professors actually aspired to scholarly independence and brilliant teaching, few would be able to satisfy this ambition because most academics at most universities are intellectual lightweights. The top 10 to 20 percent of professors produce over 50 percent of the articles in the leading journals in their disciplines; early research output generally nosedives, sometimes to nothing, after that cherished "appointment without term" is secured; over 50 percent of liberal arts academics publish only the equivalent of a single book and less than a dozen scholarly articles over an entire 30-year career; most of this "scholarship" goes unread or is of no lasting importance.
This is not an indictment of the scholarly life, but reflects the simple fact that, even during non-brain-drain times, great minds and great ideas are always in short supply.
Since most professors are academic clones or drones, why should any but the brightest and best of them deserve the honour and protection of a lifetime appointment that has so many rights and so few responsibilities?
The gradual enshrinement of tenure in union contracts has also made it virtually impossible to remove poor performers, another lesson our anonymous student has learned. "Persistent neglect of duty, incompetence or gross misconduct," the grounds for dismissal in the faculty association contract with the U of M, are so ambiguously defined that they are nearly impossible to prove except in the most egregious of cases.
Since tenure is relatively easy to obtain at the U of M (publish a few trivial and incomprehensible articles in a few arcane journals while sucking up to your colleagues and you're sure to get your iron rice bowl), this means that bad tenure decisions lock the university into academically destructive and costly 30-year contracts.
This is made worse by the fact that turning a tenure candidate down is a virtual academic death sentence: if you get tenure, you are in for life; if you don't, you are fired. This makes compassion, not performance, the determining factor in too many tenure decisions.
Two types of non-tenure employment contracts make tenure all the more problematic. The first is the "probationary appointment," a "tenure-stream" position of three or more years leading to tenure consideration.
Since such appointments always end with a tenure hearing, and since the rare negative decision always leads to dismissal, and since this almost always leads to years of costly litigation, probationary appointments have themselves become quasi-lifelong jobs.
U of M administrators have reacted to the inflexibility this creates by limiting most new appointments to the second type of contract, the eight-month sessional appointment. Those who fill these positions, almost invariably bright young academics eager for a career in higher education, have less job security than most supermarket employees. If they hope to enter the tenure stream, they must be inspiring teachers and productive scholars.
Many of these young savants have already outperformed full professors in their sixties, though they earn one-quarter of the latter's salary.
There is a ready solution to all these problems.
The exploitation of sessional lecturers and the excesses of tenure could both be addressed by replacing tenure with renewable multi-year performance-based contracts. Tenure could even be retained to grant ultimate academic autonomy to truly exceptional scholars, the tiny intellectual elite, to dissuade them from taking positions at other institutions or in the private sector.
As for the rest—the mass of average performers—the future of higher learning and advanced research, the interests of students, and the needs of society would all better served if they were emancipated from this pernicious institution.
[To order copies of Rewarding University Professors: A Performance-Based Approach (at a cost of $7.49 each, which includes shipping, handling, and GST), call 1-800-665-3558, ext. 580.]
Hymie Rubenstein is a professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and author of the recent Fraser Institute Public Policy Source, Rewarding University Professors: A Performance- Based Approach. This article was first printed on December 6, 2000, in The Manitoban.
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