You describe the tenure process and work schedule for a professor at a top 100 research school, which is probably all you are familiar with and which obviously clouds your perceptions of "normal." In reality, there are something like 3000 colleges and universities and most professors' normal teaching load is 4x4 if not more. There are no TAs and classes can be anywhere from 20 to 100 students, which means one person has to handle a lot of grading. The notion that you only have to prep once and then recycle it forever might be true for tenured professors at R1 schools who give the same lecture you can find on YouTube, but again, in the real world of higher ed where 99% of faculty work, we are expected to actually teach students through varied pedagogies, including simulations, projects, and numerous other approaches that take a lot of time. Our service expectations are much greater too. Does all of this justify tenure? As a politics professor at a regional public university who is actually teaching hundreds of students each semester, I sure as hell want the protection of tenure in case some woke administrator or overly sensitive sophomore gets offended by something I say. This is why we have tenure, not to protect R1 faculty from their next big Peer Reviewed Article that 30 people will read and one will cite.
You want protection? Me too. In my job. But I dont have it, and no one else does.
What make your job so special, your 'work' so special, that it needs protection against sensitive sophomores, and more than I need protection against some sensative client or collegae. It aint special what you do.
A world in which fewer people are fired arbitrarily is in fact a better world in my view. And professor is a job based on speech in a way that an office worker who suddenly stood up and made a harangue on his various opinions would not be. But as the article occasionally mentions, it is all moot anyway since tenure is dying.
Interesting take. But it wasn't always this way with faculty being afraid of offending students. It may be that tenure now serves this purpose but it hasn't always been so.
I sympathize with your general point about tenure, but your estimate of how little time is spent on teaching by the typical tenured professor is badly exagerated. Do you literally spend zero minutes all semster reviewing your class material? Do you never write new exam questions or meet with students during office hours? My rough estimate is that your teaching time estimate is off by a factor of 3 per course. Even so, tenure is a pretty sweet deal.
Agreed, it's crazy to assume that a typical tenured professor walks in cold for every lecture, never meets with students, never grades exams, never makes new exam questions or assignments, etc. I agree that tenure is a sweet deal, but it's obvious that his assessment is rigged and it hurts his credibility.
I'm in engineering and our accreditation requires assessment and "continuous improvement" of student learning outcomes. Even for assignments or exams on which an outcome is not assessed, I'm always trying to figure out what students aren't understanding in one year and make notes so I can improve my teaching the next year.
Yes! This is exactly my thinking. When I discover an author obviously exhagerating about something I'm familiar with, I'm forced to discount heavily what they say about other things that I'm unfamiliar with.
Your points do not present a case for tenure - maybe you work 40 hours a week ... tenure means not being fired basically. Whether you work 5 or 50 hours a week is not relevant ... why should you have a guaranteed job?
The case for tenure is a little bit stronger than you make it out to be.
1. It's true that no other industry uses something like tenure to incentivize over-the-hill employees from blocking the careers of up-and-comers. But tenure defenders argue that that in other industries, there exists managers whose jobs are not threatened by the up-and-comers and who are able to evaluate the quality of the new hires' work. And the claim is that this is different in academia -- the only people capable of evaluating the work are those whose jobs are in jeopardy.
2. Another argument for tenure starts with the observation that almost all of the valuable research is done early in researchers' career. Therefore it is much more important to incentivize hard work early on than it is to get any effort at all out of workers later in their career. Tenure accomplishes this -- a big prize that can only be won through lots of hard work early on. This applies more to Top 20 institutions than to middling ones where the required research for tenure isn't that impressive.
I'm not sure if I believe either of these, but Bryan should be attacking the strongest version of the arguments for tenure.
Isn't part of the reason great work isn't done later in one's career because they are no longer incentivized to (they have tenure)? That said, I don't totally buy it that the possibility of tenure incentivizes valuable research. More likely it incentivizes various bad practices to achieve the publications needed for tenure, which is orthogonal to good research.
Does anyone have data on the career trajectory of "productivity" (e.g., publications, citations, grants, research expenditures, PhD students graduated) of faculty across Untenured, Tenured Assoc Prof, and Tenured Prof? Even a snapshot for a given year would be useful. The truth is that many Tenured facutly work harder and more more productive post-tenure; they have often build labs/groups that requires them to continue chasing funding and publications to keep their staff/students employed.
The largest proportion of American faculty are neither tenured nor tenure track.
They are either contract lecturers (hired to teach for a certain number of years; no tenure protections) or, more likely, adjuncts: temps hired to teach individual classes.
The awful status of adjuncts is well known, if scarcely acknowledged, within higher ed: lousy pay, zero benefits, no admin support (office, staff). They are the backbone of US colleges and universities and lack the academic freedom protections you rightly ascribe to the tenured.
At this point if people are still signing up for grad school in areas where they have no tt job prospects, it's on them. That cat has been out of the bag for a while now.
On the one hand, plenty of folks have warned would-be PhDs against grad study, citing the odds.
On the other, enough people feel they can beat those odds. And they have some reason, having been successful at the .edu game, as the other Bryan describes.
Meanwhile, most grand schools keep maintaining classes which are too large.
Agree. I thought I could beat the odds. And I did but barely. I was bitter about that for a while, blaming whomever I could blame but myself. In hindsight, I know I would not have listened to anyone.
I don't at all like that there is pressure to recruit PhDs and MAs to fill classes, to make our department look "healthy", etc. But I feel ok if I know I've been honest and haven't been trying too hard to woo anyone. In my experience, people are generally rational actors when it comes to such choices. If they had better options, they'd pursue them.
I feel this post didn't fully address the pro-tenure argument of "guaranteed job security gives researchers the freedom to say and investigate whatever they choose". As exemplified by the fact you just blew a whistle and will (presumably) face no career consequences. Compare that with my field (I work for a private consulting company), where I have criticisms of the industry that if shared publicly could lose me my job and mark me as untouchable to my company's competitors.
I agree that job security removes incentives, but perhaps that is an unavoidable tradeoff with honesty? Plus doesn't the grueling road to tenure (a road that I certainly could not handle) remove anyone who has any intention of just "phoning it in" for the rest of their career?
I don't think the grueling road removes all or most of those who would later phone it in. And some decide along the way. As he noted, there are tons of tenured faculty who do no research and barely teach.
Without seeing any stats (though I would be interested to have a look) I would agree it doesn't remove "all" but my intuition is it probably removes "most". I'm also really curious how this plays out generationally. My graduate supervisor outright admitted that he would not have made it to being a prof if he was starting out today. Could it be today's new profs are less likely to be coast-after-getting-tenure-types (genuinely just wondering out loud)?
I've heard profs say that yet they came from the Ivy league, they just had fewer pubs, in part because people weren't playing the quantity over quality angle so much yet. They had connections, and today many still get their positions that way. You're right--it's an empirical question, but I suspect there are still many who get tt positions at unis in the top 100 who will coast or otherwise not be very productive after tenure. Many aren't that good before tenure! They just have good credentials and no one has the heart to fire them. But to your point, I think it could be that academia increasingly selects for productivity vs other things, and maybe those folks are more likely to stay hyper productive. But they could also burn out right after tenure...
Part of this is unique to English/humanities professors. When I look at tenured professors in STEM fields they often continue to run huge labs and churn out lots of work.
Regarding the issue of tenure making for bad incentives that depends hugely on a number of assumptions. How do you value the production of papers in an existing paradigm relative to the costs of being blind to an alternative approach or heretical view? Are academics primarily motivated by monetary compensation or social status in their field? Is it even politically possible to pay a market wage at state schools for talent w/o this security..
Yes, ofc, professors don't offer any real teaching value or resource. But, as you've convincingly argued, the vast majority of education is about signalling and to signal high status you often need to engage in some kind of costly signalling. **A system where that costly signalling produces positive externalities in terms of research and human knowledge is a huge win**. If we give it up we won't lose the costly signals but it will just all go into having fancy dorms, greats sports etc etc
The issues of publication here are not so unique to the humanities as you believe. STEM professors churn out lots of publications through their labs (when they have them, not all do by a long shot), but the quality of those publications is extremely questionable. Indeed, it is beginning to be questioned quite severely as we find that many do not replicate at all, and fraud is distressingly common. It isn't a problem of pointless papers, or "After study we have determined that, yes, the sky is still blue", but papers that are false and mislead our knowledge for years all while being cited and built upon by others.
You say all that as though it is a good thing, instead of suggesting that the entire process is a money sink. It would be better if most of those researchers were not funded, by anyone but certainly by government money.
The bigger issue is that people are willing to fund universities because they believe the universities are 1: educating the young and 2: performing valuable research. In fact, they do neither with the vast majority of that funding.
It's a question of alternatives. The only question that matters is if a change can make things better. Obviously it would be great if we had a better system that more efficiently encouraged knowledge generation but that's a very hard problem. The system we have now lead to huge increases in human std of living so until we have a better more efficient system let's not throw it out.
Some activities are just pretty hard to meaningfully incentivize. The best the smart ppl at many funding agencies have been able to come up w/ for grant funding is now: maybe we should give up on even trying to evaluate quality ahead of time and just try handing most of them out randomly amoung the plausible applicants.
You are neglecting the very important option of "Stop spending a huge amount of money on something that doesn't do what it is supposed to do." Even spending less would be an improvement.
The notion that the current system is responsible for the huge increases in standard of living is... well it is a hell of an assertion, on that I do not think would hold up at all upon reflection.
Do you mean just stop sending people to colleges? But there would still be the same incentives to single quality as a potential employee and it would result in similar waste...just probably with less positive externalities. The need to signal quality drives the institutions to spend money on costly signals of their value and we'd see the same thing if we replaced college with private accreditation companies.
Do you mean the gov should just stop funding all university based research. But even if it's pretty ineffecient it's still a very positive ROI (and better than trying to pay corps of basic research).
Also, I want to suggest that academics play an important role in society as a force for stability and a mechanism for formulating an elite consensus. Humans are weird creatures who wouldn't respect academics to play such a high status role if they weren't awarded markers of high status (tenure substitutes for massive pay).
In other words yes, we may be paying them to sit around and sound erudite but that has value.
Sure, but two issues: First, most professors could have been paid very well in the private sector so you need to give commensurate compensation. I doubt many public and many private universities would be willing to pay google style salaries to their CS profs etc so they instead compensate them in job security.
Also, we do want many of them to do research etc. Now if the bar is super easy to clear for continued employment it doesn't offer much -- if any -- benefit. Indeed, it likely floods journals with really crappy papers spit out to meet pro-forma requirements.
Ok, what if we use more robust evaluation. But now you have the problem tenure was designed to fix. Everyone stays to narrow safe research that never has a chance of discovering new paradigms and certainly doesn't challenge sacred cows.
--
Realistically, there are better rules that differ from department to department but once you give up the notion of a shared tenure system no one would trust that reasonable rules would be implemented.
Bryan, you are taking the picture of the 1% among profs and acting as if it's the universal. In fact, what you've described here is entirely false for anyone not at an R1. A 4/4 load with no TA is much more normal.
These same arguments would apply to college football coaches. Although their contract is not for life, the relative payouts are so huge that they arguably could be. For example, Jimbo Fisher gets a guaranteed $75 million over 10 year whether he wins national championships or loses so many games they remove him and does no coaching. His only incentive for winning is prestige. To what extent is that relevant to tenured college professors as a motivator?
Many profs work their asses off, post tenure, in pursuit of prestige (I wish I could say it was in pursuit of truth or scientific knowledge but that would be naive). I am not sure about football coaches. Is there evidence that many slack off once they have the contract in hand? With profs, there's no publicity or public shaming if one slacks...which goes back to Bryan's point. Most profs labor (or fail to) in obscurity and relative anonymity.
"If the result is that I lose my dream job for life, so be it." No, you're safe: They have given it to you, they can't now take it away. Even if tenure is abolished, you'll be grandfathered in.
But I worry that the system won't work any better without tenure than it does with tenure. Even in the for-profit business world, it is hard to monitor individual performance. In the nonprofit world of higher education, the incentives are so weak the task is very unlikely to be done at all well. As you say, nonprofits function badly.
I forwarded this to my daughter who is in the process of completing her dissertation, but she's in social science so it's not too hard. And she's a woman so that helps. After completing my two Masters (MS, MBA while working and raising a family - I am a quant time master) and feeling the groove, I asked my (now ex) wife in what field she though I should pursue my PhD. Came the answer "What do you think your next wife would like?" Back to the mines went I.....
Bryan, there is another reason virtually everyone gets tenure at the lower ranked institutions, beyond nepotism (which I am skeptical about--I mean, it's not clear we like our colleagues more than we like status that comes with having colleagues who are highly productive/high impact). It is risky to deny tenure as there may not be the option to replace that person with another better one. Harder to get approval for new hires these days and some institutions no longer track "lines". For example, in my dept a colleague retired a couple of years ago and in the olden days, we'd be guaranteed approval for a new hire to replace that person. Not anymore. We have to argue for the hire much like we would for any position. And if the college doesn't see much $$value$$ in the position, then it's a no go.
And with this comment I figured out that I'll probably get tenure, as long as I'm not so bad that others would want to risk not being able to replace me with someone else. Yay!
Up until a little over a year ago, I reported faculty salary data to various national surveys annually on behalf of the University of California's campuses, including the AAUP survey and surveys conducted by the Association of American Universities Data Exchange (AAUDE).
One year I managed to break the data submission program for one of AAUDE's faculty surveys. There was a two digit field for reporting the average age for a given record (which is an aggregate of all the faculty sharing the same values for numerous categorical variables). However, one of the records for UC San Diego had three digits, which the input program refused to accept. The AAUDE programmer thought I must have made a mistake in generating my UCSD input file.
I looked up the relevant personnel record and discovered that I wasn't mistaken--the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UCSD actually had a hundred years-old emeritus professor who was still working part-time and drawing a salary ( https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/photo-week-100-walter-munk ), and thus had to be included in the survey. The AAUDE input program was rewritten to accept three digits.
Correction: a strong case can be made that academia as a whole has become a scam -- Exhibit A: "replication crisis" in the social 'sciences'; massive levels of research fraud (from routine p-hacking to outright data fabrication); peer-review gate-keeping and circle-jerking, etc etc
As someone who, after seven years, didn't get tenure at one university but quickly acquired it upon getting a position at another, I've thought a lot about the economics of the tenure system. And I wholeheartedly agree with your essay. But there's another small element that should be noted: By requiring a person who is denied tenure to leave employment in that school, the supply of non-tenured applicants for teaching positions increases, putting downward pressure on wages for that class of job seekers. Could it be that the AAUP is following other unions that promote minimum wage legislation in order to reduce competition? And why must the denial of tenure be accompanied by the loss of a job? Why not allow him/her to keep teaching without it?
You describe the tenure process and work schedule for a professor at a top 100 research school, which is probably all you are familiar with and which obviously clouds your perceptions of "normal." In reality, there are something like 3000 colleges and universities and most professors' normal teaching load is 4x4 if not more. There are no TAs and classes can be anywhere from 20 to 100 students, which means one person has to handle a lot of grading. The notion that you only have to prep once and then recycle it forever might be true for tenured professors at R1 schools who give the same lecture you can find on YouTube, but again, in the real world of higher ed where 99% of faculty work, we are expected to actually teach students through varied pedagogies, including simulations, projects, and numerous other approaches that take a lot of time. Our service expectations are much greater too. Does all of this justify tenure? As a politics professor at a regional public university who is actually teaching hundreds of students each semester, I sure as hell want the protection of tenure in case some woke administrator or overly sensitive sophomore gets offended by something I say. This is why we have tenure, not to protect R1 faculty from their next big Peer Reviewed Article that 30 people will read and one will cite.
You want protection? Me too. In my job. But I dont have it, and no one else does.
What make your job so special, your 'work' so special, that it needs protection against sensitive sophomores, and more than I need protection against some sensative client or collegae. It aint special what you do.
A world in which fewer people are fired arbitrarily is in fact a better world in my view. And professor is a job based on speech in a way that an office worker who suddenly stood up and made a harangue on his various opinions would not be. But as the article occasionally mentions, it is all moot anyway since tenure is dying.
Interesting take. But it wasn't always this way with faculty being afraid of offending students. It may be that tenure now serves this purpose but it hasn't always been so.
I sympathize with your general point about tenure, but your estimate of how little time is spent on teaching by the typical tenured professor is badly exagerated. Do you literally spend zero minutes all semster reviewing your class material? Do you never write new exam questions or meet with students during office hours? My rough estimate is that your teaching time estimate is off by a factor of 3 per course. Even so, tenure is a pretty sweet deal.
Agreed, it's crazy to assume that a typical tenured professor walks in cold for every lecture, never meets with students, never grades exams, never makes new exam questions or assignments, etc. I agree that tenure is a sweet deal, but it's obvious that his assessment is rigged and it hurts his credibility.
I'm in engineering and our accreditation requires assessment and "continuous improvement" of student learning outcomes. Even for assignments or exams on which an outcome is not assessed, I'm always trying to figure out what students aren't understanding in one year and make notes so I can improve my teaching the next year.
Yes! This is exactly my thinking. When I discover an author obviously exhagerating about something I'm familiar with, I'm forced to discount heavily what they say about other things that I'm unfamiliar with.
Your points do not present a case for tenure - maybe you work 40 hours a week ... tenure means not being fired basically. Whether you work 5 or 50 hours a week is not relevant ... why should you have a guaranteed job?
The case for tenure is a little bit stronger than you make it out to be.
1. It's true that no other industry uses something like tenure to incentivize over-the-hill employees from blocking the careers of up-and-comers. But tenure defenders argue that that in other industries, there exists managers whose jobs are not threatened by the up-and-comers and who are able to evaluate the quality of the new hires' work. And the claim is that this is different in academia -- the only people capable of evaluating the work are those whose jobs are in jeopardy.
2. Another argument for tenure starts with the observation that almost all of the valuable research is done early in researchers' career. Therefore it is much more important to incentivize hard work early on than it is to get any effort at all out of workers later in their career. Tenure accomplishes this -- a big prize that can only be won through lots of hard work early on. This applies more to Top 20 institutions than to middling ones where the required research for tenure isn't that impressive.
I'm not sure if I believe either of these, but Bryan should be attacking the strongest version of the arguments for tenure.
Mayeb most good work is done before tenure because after it you dont have to do any work.
Every other job requires good work on day 1 AND 5000. Why is teaching any different?
Isn't part of the reason great work isn't done later in one's career because they are no longer incentivized to (they have tenure)? That said, I don't totally buy it that the possibility of tenure incentivizes valuable research. More likely it incentivizes various bad practices to achieve the publications needed for tenure, which is orthogonal to good research.
Does anyone have data on the career trajectory of "productivity" (e.g., publications, citations, grants, research expenditures, PhD students graduated) of faculty across Untenured, Tenured Assoc Prof, and Tenured Prof? Even a snapshot for a given year would be useful. The truth is that many Tenured facutly work harder and more more productive post-tenure; they have often build labs/groups that requires them to continue chasing funding and publications to keep their staff/students employed.
The largest proportion of American faculty are neither tenured nor tenure track.
They are either contract lecturers (hired to teach for a certain number of years; no tenure protections) or, more likely, adjuncts: temps hired to teach individual classes.
The awful status of adjuncts is well known, if scarcely acknowledged, within higher ed: lousy pay, zero benefits, no admin support (office, staff). They are the backbone of US colleges and universities and lack the academic freedom protections you rightly ascribe to the tenured.
You don't mention graduate students. Many depts have grad students teach classes. But if these folks had better options they'd go after them.
Quite true. Lots of grad students, which is one explanation for the adjunct explosion.
And this is also where you see some rising unionization.
At this point if people are still signing up for grad school in areas where they have no tt job prospects, it's on them. That cat has been out of the bag for a while now.
We've been talking about this since the 1990s.
On the one hand, plenty of folks have warned would-be PhDs against grad study, citing the odds.
On the other, enough people feel they can beat those odds. And they have some reason, having been successful at the .edu game, as the other Bryan describes.
Meanwhile, most grand schools keep maintaining classes which are too large.
Agree. I thought I could beat the odds. And I did but barely. I was bitter about that for a while, blaming whomever I could blame but myself. In hindsight, I know I would not have listened to anyone.
I don't at all like that there is pressure to recruit PhDs and MAs to fill classes, to make our department look "healthy", etc. But I feel ok if I know I've been honest and haven't been trying too hard to woo anyone. In my experience, people are generally rational actors when it comes to such choices. If they had better options, they'd pursue them.
I feel this post didn't fully address the pro-tenure argument of "guaranteed job security gives researchers the freedom to say and investigate whatever they choose". As exemplified by the fact you just blew a whistle and will (presumably) face no career consequences. Compare that with my field (I work for a private consulting company), where I have criticisms of the industry that if shared publicly could lose me my job and mark me as untouchable to my company's competitors.
I agree that job security removes incentives, but perhaps that is an unavoidable tradeoff with honesty? Plus doesn't the grueling road to tenure (a road that I certainly could not handle) remove anyone who has any intention of just "phoning it in" for the rest of their career?
I don't think the grueling road removes all or most of those who would later phone it in. And some decide along the way. As he noted, there are tons of tenured faculty who do no research and barely teach.
Without seeing any stats (though I would be interested to have a look) I would agree it doesn't remove "all" but my intuition is it probably removes "most". I'm also really curious how this plays out generationally. My graduate supervisor outright admitted that he would not have made it to being a prof if he was starting out today. Could it be today's new profs are less likely to be coast-after-getting-tenure-types (genuinely just wondering out loud)?
I've heard profs say that yet they came from the Ivy league, they just had fewer pubs, in part because people weren't playing the quantity over quality angle so much yet. They had connections, and today many still get their positions that way. You're right--it's an empirical question, but I suspect there are still many who get tt positions at unis in the top 100 who will coast or otherwise not be very productive after tenure. Many aren't that good before tenure! They just have good credentials and no one has the heart to fire them. But to your point, I think it could be that academia increasingly selects for productivity vs other things, and maybe those folks are more likely to stay hyper productive. But they could also burn out right after tenure...
Part of this is unique to English/humanities professors. When I look at tenured professors in STEM fields they often continue to run huge labs and churn out lots of work.
Regarding the issue of tenure making for bad incentives that depends hugely on a number of assumptions. How do you value the production of papers in an existing paradigm relative to the costs of being blind to an alternative approach or heretical view? Are academics primarily motivated by monetary compensation or social status in their field? Is it even politically possible to pay a market wage at state schools for talent w/o this security..
Yes, ofc, professors don't offer any real teaching value or resource. But, as you've convincingly argued, the vast majority of education is about signalling and to signal high status you often need to engage in some kind of costly signalling. **A system where that costly signalling produces positive externalities in terms of research and human knowledge is a huge win**. If we give it up we won't lose the costly signals but it will just all go into having fancy dorms, greats sports etc etc
The issues of publication here are not so unique to the humanities as you believe. STEM professors churn out lots of publications through their labs (when they have them, not all do by a long shot), but the quality of those publications is extremely questionable. Indeed, it is beginning to be questioned quite severely as we find that many do not replicate at all, and fraud is distressingly common. It isn't a problem of pointless papers, or "After study we have determined that, yes, the sky is still blue", but papers that are false and mislead our knowledge for years all while being cited and built upon by others.
It depends on the area, but those publications are enough to bring in grants etc etc so they'd equally fool a body reviewing employment.
Indeed, the less we think it's possible to evaluate the quality of the work the less benefit you are able to derive by incentivizes.
You say all that as though it is a good thing, instead of suggesting that the entire process is a money sink. It would be better if most of those researchers were not funded, by anyone but certainly by government money.
The bigger issue is that people are willing to fund universities because they believe the universities are 1: educating the young and 2: performing valuable research. In fact, they do neither with the vast majority of that funding.
It's a question of alternatives. The only question that matters is if a change can make things better. Obviously it would be great if we had a better system that more efficiently encouraged knowledge generation but that's a very hard problem. The system we have now lead to huge increases in human std of living so until we have a better more efficient system let's not throw it out.
Some activities are just pretty hard to meaningfully incentivize. The best the smart ppl at many funding agencies have been able to come up w/ for grant funding is now: maybe we should give up on even trying to evaluate quality ahead of time and just try handing most of them out randomly amoung the plausible applicants.
You are neglecting the very important option of "Stop spending a huge amount of money on something that doesn't do what it is supposed to do." Even spending less would be an improvement.
The notion that the current system is responsible for the huge increases in standard of living is... well it is a hell of an assertion, on that I do not think would hold up at all upon reflection.
Do you mean just stop sending people to colleges? But there would still be the same incentives to single quality as a potential employee and it would result in similar waste...just probably with less positive externalities. The need to signal quality drives the institutions to spend money on costly signals of their value and we'd see the same thing if we replaced college with private accreditation companies.
Do you mean the gov should just stop funding all university based research. But even if it's pretty ineffecient it's still a very positive ROI (and better than trying to pay corps of basic research).
Also, I want to suggest that academics play an important role in society as a force for stability and a mechanism for formulating an elite consensus. Humans are weird creatures who wouldn't respect academics to play such a high status role if they weren't awarded markers of high status (tenure substitutes for massive pay).
In other words yes, we may be paying them to sit around and sound erudite but that has value.
Could we not use them for that purpose, while still being able to fire them for underperformance? (and presumably not for having unpopular views)?
Sure, but two issues: First, most professors could have been paid very well in the private sector so you need to give commensurate compensation. I doubt many public and many private universities would be willing to pay google style salaries to their CS profs etc so they instead compensate them in job security.
Also, we do want many of them to do research etc. Now if the bar is super easy to clear for continued employment it doesn't offer much -- if any -- benefit. Indeed, it likely floods journals with really crappy papers spit out to meet pro-forma requirements.
Ok, what if we use more robust evaluation. But now you have the problem tenure was designed to fix. Everyone stays to narrow safe research that never has a chance of discovering new paradigms and certainly doesn't challenge sacred cows.
--
Realistically, there are better rules that differ from department to department but once you give up the notion of a shared tenure system no one would trust that reasonable rules would be implemented.
Bryan, you are taking the picture of the 1% among profs and acting as if it's the universal. In fact, what you've described here is entirely false for anyone not at an R1. A 4/4 load with no TA is much more normal.
These same arguments would apply to college football coaches. Although their contract is not for life, the relative payouts are so huge that they arguably could be. For example, Jimbo Fisher gets a guaranteed $75 million over 10 year whether he wins national championships or loses so many games they remove him and does no coaching. His only incentive for winning is prestige. To what extent is that relevant to tenured college professors as a motivator?
Many profs work their asses off, post tenure, in pursuit of prestige (I wish I could say it was in pursuit of truth or scientific knowledge but that would be naive). I am not sure about football coaches. Is there evidence that many slack off once they have the contract in hand? With profs, there's no publicity or public shaming if one slacks...which goes back to Bryan's point. Most profs labor (or fail to) in obscurity and relative anonymity.
"If the result is that I lose my dream job for life, so be it." No, you're safe: They have given it to you, they can't now take it away. Even if tenure is abolished, you'll be grandfathered in.
But I worry that the system won't work any better without tenure than it does with tenure. Even in the for-profit business world, it is hard to monitor individual performance. In the nonprofit world of higher education, the incentives are so weak the task is very unlikely to be done at all well. As you say, nonprofits function badly.
There goes *your* next salary raise.
I forwarded this to my daughter who is in the process of completing her dissertation, but she's in social science so it's not too hard. And she's a woman so that helps. After completing my two Masters (MS, MBA while working and raising a family - I am a quant time master) and feeling the groove, I asked my (now ex) wife in what field she though I should pursue my PhD. Came the answer "What do you think your next wife would like?" Back to the mines went I.....
Bryan, there is another reason virtually everyone gets tenure at the lower ranked institutions, beyond nepotism (which I am skeptical about--I mean, it's not clear we like our colleagues more than we like status that comes with having colleagues who are highly productive/high impact). It is risky to deny tenure as there may not be the option to replace that person with another better one. Harder to get approval for new hires these days and some institutions no longer track "lines". For example, in my dept a colleague retired a couple of years ago and in the olden days, we'd be guaranteed approval for a new hire to replace that person. Not anymore. We have to argue for the hire much like we would for any position. And if the college doesn't see much $$value$$ in the position, then it's a no go.
And with this comment I figured out that I'll probably get tenure, as long as I'm not so bad that others would want to risk not being able to replace me with someone else. Yay!
Up until a little over a year ago, I reported faculty salary data to various national surveys annually on behalf of the University of California's campuses, including the AAUP survey and surveys conducted by the Association of American Universities Data Exchange (AAUDE).
One year I managed to break the data submission program for one of AAUDE's faculty surveys. There was a two digit field for reporting the average age for a given record (which is an aggregate of all the faculty sharing the same values for numerous categorical variables). However, one of the records for UC San Diego had three digits, which the input program refused to accept. The AAUDE programmer thought I must have made a mistake in generating my UCSD input file.
I looked up the relevant personnel record and discovered that I wasn't mistaken--the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UCSD actually had a hundred years-old emeritus professor who was still working part-time and drawing a salary ( https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/photo-week-100-walter-munk ), and thus had to be included in the survey. The AAUDE input program was rewritten to accept three digits.
Correction: a strong case can be made that academia as a whole has become a scam -- Exhibit A: "replication crisis" in the social 'sciences'; massive levels of research fraud (from routine p-hacking to outright data fabrication); peer-review gate-keeping and circle-jerking, etc etc
As someone who, after seven years, didn't get tenure at one university but quickly acquired it upon getting a position at another, I've thought a lot about the economics of the tenure system. And I wholeheartedly agree with your essay. But there's another small element that should be noted: By requiring a person who is denied tenure to leave employment in that school, the supply of non-tenured applicants for teaching positions increases, putting downward pressure on wages for that class of job seekers. Could it be that the AAUP is following other unions that promote minimum wage legislation in order to reduce competition? And why must the denial of tenure be accompanied by the loss of a job? Why not allow him/her to keep teaching without it?