Review Essay

Tenure: Traditions, Policies, and Practices

Philo Hutcheson

William G. Tierney and Estela Mara Bensimon, Promotion and Tenure: Community and Socialization in Academe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 161 pp., index.

Tenure has been a favorite target for critics since its inception in the United States in the early 1900s, but attacks on tenure have increased in the 1990s to a level unsurpassed since the early 1970s (Commission on Academic Tenure, 1973, pp. x-xi); some critics have called for its removal, and others for alternatives.

Two questions tend to dominate the literature on tenure: (a) What is it?, and (b) What should we do with it at the institutional level?

Tenure has different meanings at different institutions, and even the degree of protection it offers must be considered in regard to the institutional setting. Suggestions that institutions cannot dismiss tenured professors are [End Page 303] disingenuous. Certainly there are institutions or systems of institutions where the faculties, as either independent or unionized agencies, are able to forestall if not prohibit the dismissal of tenured professors. Just as certainly, every year there are dozens of institutions that willfully dismiss tenured professors, at times with little or no notice. Annual investigations by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) only highlight such dismissals (Slaughter 1981, 1987, 1994).

Two recent books, The Case for Tenure and Promotion and Tenure, address tenure, albeit in very different ways and with potentially different outcomes. This review essay considers both works, placing them in the history of tenure and in its current context.

The Case for Tenure

The first formal publication of the American Association of University Professors was a report on academic freedom and tenure at the University of Utah (AAUP, July 1915). Not surprisingly, the AAUP brings tradition to any discussion about tenure, and The Case for Tenure is no exception. Although it is not an official AAUP publication, it is very reminiscent of a much earlier work, Academic Freedom and Tenure, edited by an AAUP staff member (Joughin, 1967). The continuity of AAUP treatment of the topic is evident in the historicity of the current volume's contributors. The editor, Matthew Finkin, began as an AAUP staff member in 1967, when William Van Alstyne and Fritz Machlup, whose essays on tenure open the volume, were active in the AAUP. Just as the Joughin volume uses AAUP principles and model case procedures to explain academic freedom and tenure, so too the Finkin work uses AAUP leaders' analyses of academic freedom and tenure as well as sample cases to illustrate the importance of maintaining this complex ideal. Unfortunately, The Case for Tenure does not reproduce the AAUP 1940 Statement on Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure, although the book itself is unabashedly a product of AAUP thinking about the subject.

William Van Alstyne argued in a 1971 article, reprinted in The Case for Tenure, that tenure is not an assurance of lifetime employment. Rather it is an assurance of academic due process: Peers will review a professor in order to recommend dismissal or retention. Furthermore, Van Alstyne argued that institutions may cut tenured faculty when they find it necessary to respond to drastic enrollment declines or financial exigency.

Fritz Machlup's essay, first presented as his AAUP presidential address in 1964 and reprinted in part in the Finkin volume, stated that criticisms of tenure were generally accurate and that tenure is a disadvantage to the academic profession because it keeps salaries low (pp. 9, 20). All of the disadvantages, however, are outweighed by the protection of academic freedom. [End Page 304] Machlup wanted the professor "to be uninhibited in criticizing, and in advocating changes" (p. 23), and he wanted professors to come to the defense of "the 'oddball,' the heretic, the dissenter, the troublemaker, whose freedom to speak and to write is under some threat from colleagues, administrators, governing board, government, or pressure groups" (p. 24). Thus, while he acknowledged some disadvantages in regard to tenure, its protection of academic freedom is overwhelmingly important.

Following those two essays, Finkin uses a variety of AAUP cases to illustrate the principles highlighted by Van Alstyne and Machlup: the protection of academic due process, the acceptability of financial exigency, and the protection of academic freedom. The cases are intriguing representations of faculty-administration relationships. In the words of the committee that investigated faculty dismissals at Bennington College in 1994:

Neither financial exigency nor program discontinuance can account for the disrespectful, petty, indeed vindictive and inhumane, manner in which the terminations were announced and carried out. (Finkin, 1996, p. 57)

Although the words are far stronger than most AAUP reports, the sentiment of administrative intransigence is generally reflective of AAUP reports.

As McPherson and Winston have shown in a number of works, including one reproduced in the Finkin volume, tenure "has some desirable efficiency properties" (p. 101). Nevertheless, institutions see tenure as an economic problem. In one case, the president of San Diego State University anticipated financial problems (not exigency); and in the summer of 1992, he sent registered letters to 111 tenured and 35 probationary faculty members notifying them that they would be laid off effective that fall (p. 130). While the layoffs were rescinded, the message of tenure as a perceived financial constraint, as well as the chilling effect on professors, are clear in the AAUP report.

The end of mandatory retirement and post-tenure review receive brief treatment in the Finkin volume. In both cases, studies of institutional or individual intent and essays (in this work and in the literature at large) predominate; we know little of what institutions or individuals are actually doing. For both retirement and post-tenure review, Finkin's selections suggest that benign institutional approaches should prove successful. It will be interesting, however, to see if, in five to ten years, the AAUP suddenly finds itself repeatedly investigating intransigent uses of retirement policies or post-tenure review.

For the AAUP, then, issues of due process, financial exigency, and academic freedom remain central to any examination of tenure. Institutions, however, may exhibit little regard for some or all of the issues. [End Page 305]

Promotion and Tenure

In Promotion and Tenure, Tierney and Bensimon offer a critique of tenure: faculties and administrations do a simply awful job of bringing talented candidates into tenure's domain and it does not necessarily protect academic freedom. As an untenured tenure-track professor, I found their examination at once familiar and discouraging.

Tierney and Bensimon use over 300 interviews conducted during two years at twelve different institutions to tell the story of promotion and tenure today. First, however, the authors locate themselves in their epistemology. Each has used this device in previous works (Tierney, 1993; Bensimon & Neumann, 1993), and such explicit review of the authors' understanding of the nature of knowledge is more than helpful; it is necessary. Strongly committed to postmodernism and critical theory, Tierney and Bensimon want to protect intellectuals by understanding their relationship with various social constructions of power. Their review of the conservative visions of the academy--a place ruined by its politicalization by tenured radicals--will probably resonate for all professors except for real or erstwhile members of the National Academy of Scholars. Their review of liberal humanists may be more disruptive, however, since so many professors likely adhere to at least many of the tenets. Liberal humanists blame the reward system for undue emphasis on research and specialization. Postmodernists or, more specifically, critical postmodernists use an explicit political ideology (as do the conservatives) with a concern about the structure (like the liberal humanists) to raise questions about promotion and tenure.

Unfortunately, there is little to indicate that postmodernists are any more in agreement than conservatives (Dineesh D'Souza and Diane Ravitch share only some concerns) or liberal humanists (I have never heard Roger Geiger espouse the virtues of Scholarship Re-Considered). It is a useful device to center conservatives, liberal humanists, or even critical postmodernists, but it is indeed a device, an artifice to create an argument. Thus, an analytical ambiguity in Promotion and Tenure is the nature of the presumed advantage of critical postmodernism in changing the academy. Tierney and Bensimon could take another step toward self-identification in this work by acknowledging the privileges of their positions in the academy. The postmodernists seem to attempt a form of reflection about changing the academy that conservatives hardly ever foster and that liberal humanists take for granted. That said, it would be even more powerful for Tierney and Bensimon to make explicit the presumption, reminding conservatives and liberal humanists, that professors' privileges stand in stark contrast to the quotidian aspects of work for most people. In postmodernist terms, we are fighting for privileges that social constructions of power situate us in, and we reify those social constructions with every word (even words that are [End Page 306] "oppositional") that we write. How we define tenure is a important social construction.

Tierney and Bensimon attempt to draw distinctions between professors' exercise of academic freedom in recent years and academic freedom in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Yet their review of early academic freedom cases results in an understanding of academic freedom as traditionally "defined in universal terms of protection against political interference from external forces" (p. 26), an assessment that has little relationship to the complex histories which Hofstadter and Metzger (1955), Veysey (1965), and Schrecker (1986) have written. As Tierney and Bensimon argue, the early framers of academic freedom would have little anticipation of such concerns as a female professor objecting to teaching in a classroom where there is a portrait of a nude woman. Yet the authors of the 1915 Declaration of Principles of Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure addressed concerns about a range of intrusions in writing: "Trustees . . . have no moral right to bind the reason or conscience of any professor" (AAUP, December 1915, p. 23). While Tierney and Bensimon argue that the lack of funding to support research on gay and lesbian issues restricts a professor's academic freedom, such current concerns still have support in the traditional declarations about academic freedom.

The problem may be more a question of who is interpreting the declarations than of the statements themselves. That is, conservatives in the academy might easily state that gay and lesbian scholarship is not substantial scholarship or that it consists of manifestos rather than scholarship. Regardless of such dismissive "definitions," it seems to me that it is the responsibility of other academics, even if they are not postmodernists, to nevertheless interpret the scholarship qua scholarship and to come to the defense of gay and lesbian scholarship. Even if such defense occurs, Tierney and Bensimon point to a key flaw in tenure, carefully argued by another author (Sartorius, 1972): Tenure does not offer academic freedom to the untenured.

Regardless of concerns about this work, it offers a sincere and continuous admonition to institutions and their faculties that they do little to socialize individuals--either as individuals or as members of the caste of untenured tenure-track professors--to the specific behaviors that will most likely result in tenure. Part of the problem lies, as Tierney and Bensimon point out with a surprising amount of restraint, in the tremendous variety of tenure processes at different institutions, within institutions, or even within departments.

There are, however, consistencies in the tenure process, such as the emphasis on research or, at times, on research and teaching. Service never appeared as a convincing factor in a decision to award tenure. Tierney and [End Page 307] Bensimon write, "If one were to contemplate the structure of tenure as if it were a purely rational process (which it is not), one would ask why service remains a category if it is meaningless?" (p. 35). The meaning of the "category" is painfully clear, however. Institutions use untenured tenure-track professors to provide service to the university organization. As a result, in the liberal humanist institutional rush to assure representation throughout the college or university, such tenure aspirants--especially women and people of color--consistently face absurdly high levels of service.

In that regard, Tierney and Bensimon argue convincingly for the provision of formal and informal, individual and collective, socialization. Candidates need to understand the meanings (and demands) of service as well as research and teaching. Furthermore, Tierney and Bensimon want to see such a broad approach to developing an understanding of the promotion and tenure process at all institutions for all candidates. Cultures of exclusion fall upon all tenure candidates, although they reach their deepest form with women and people of color.

Tierney and Bensimon's emphasis on recognizing the gendered, racial, and ethnic aspects of tenure--aspects which reveal weaknesses in the tenure process for all candidates--highlights the failure of Finkin's work. At one point, he notes, "Some people have claimed accordingly that the tenure system works an 'oppression' of those with countercultural ideas" (p. 85), citing a work on race and tenure exclusion. "If the denial of tenure on the ground of a genuine disciplinary disagreement about the worth of a candidate's work is an act of 'oppression,' would it be curmudgeonly to inquire what word would be reserved for detention by the secret police?" (p. 85). Fritz Ringer--a longtime AAUP member--clearly answers, "Yes, it would be curmudgeonly," in The Decline of the German Mandarins (1990). As Ringer shows, ideological activity in the German professoriate in the late 1800s and early 1900s had a great deal to do with the eventual rise of Nazism, including detention by secret police, that "what mattered is that the path of heterodoxy, once entered, could quickly lead to a more fully developed outsider's position" (p. xii). There's no reason to be facile about the complex interplay between academics' ideologies and political activities. Even in Machlup's essay in Finkin's book, there is the sentence, "The impulse to take up the cudgels for the 'odd ball' [the heretic, the dissenter, the troublemaker] is all too easily suppressed if unpleasant consequences must be feared by those who defend him" (p. 24, emphasis added). Tierney and Bensimon make clear that the academy does not gain anything from establishing paths of heterodoxy, that instead the academy should welcome as insiders those previously forced to outside paths.

Tierney and Bensimon note that most institutions use affirmative action practices in recruiting candidates, and the recent increases in untenured tenure-track professors who are women or people of color suggest numerical [End Page 308] success. Unfortunately, salary levels (for example) do not reveal similar successes, and Tierney and Bensimon offer an explanation:

The custom of individual salary negotiations has been shown to place women at a disadvantage, particularly those who had not been mentored as graduate students and instructed on negotiation rituals and courtship customs that are common in hiring practices in the academy. Women often receive starting salaries that are lower than those of their male peers because they don't know what to ask or how to negotiate. (p. 79)

Such early tracking results, of course, in long-term disparities of salaries (or other benefits) in the professoriate. Thus the lack of socialization results in very real economic differences for women and also for people of color.

There are other important differences. While the interview process was generally positive for women and people of color, their arrival on campus and experience as untenured faculty members was consistently problematic. Ambiguity is high for untenured professors; and for those professors outside the traditional norms, the ambiguity levels tended to increase. (An interesting exception was for women and people of color who had received their doctorates from elite institutions. They had established research agendas which seemed to make them much more comfortable in their institutional lives.) Nor did women or people of color receive feedback at the same level as white male professors--not that there was ever that much for most of those professors interviewed. While there were no reports of overt racism, Tierney and Bensimon neatly capture the nature of that omission, that a community espousing liberal values continues to treat women and people of color as different in a marginalized way. A full sense of that discrimination appears in the brief words of an African American woman whom they quote: "'I still feel myself a stranger'" (p. 122).

In their concluding chapters, Tierney and Bensimon offer "strategies" for socialization. They try to differentiate between strategies and rules by arguing that institutional differences obviate rule-construction characteristics, although there is still a sense that postmodern interpretations have yet to come to terms with recommendations for improving the human condition. The strategies emphasize an interactive socialization process, from interview to hiring to mentoring to the promotion and tenure process, a dialogue reflective of postmodern interpretations of individuals and institutions. Tierney and Bensimon frame this dialogue in careful terms, stating:

Our recommendation here is perhaps the most difficult to articulate, yet it is potentially the most important: New faculty should be made to understand that even though their work is inherently ambiguous, they are responsible for the structure of their professional lives (p. 136). [End Page 309]

Yet they add shortly thereafter:

Individuals have the right to know about issues that affect their lives, and how and by whom decisions are made is essential information. Treating people with dignity requires that we ensure they understand the process; to do otherwise makes a mockery of an organization that presents itself as a community. (p. 138)

Those statements lead to their concluding comments about rethinking tenure.

Tierney and Bensimon suggest that structures are fluid and dynamic (p. 141); it is not clear, however, where they see fluidity and dynamism in higher education. For example, they call for historical and comparative perspectives on academic freedom, but citing Hampshire College and Evergreen State as examples of institutions with alternatives to tenure misses a key point in the history of tenure. First, Richard Chait argued in 1982 that contract systems at these institutions result in institutional practices very similar to tenure systems, the major difference being that it may be easier to dismiss professors for economic reasons under a term contract system (pp. 42-66). Second, the University of Texas at Permian Basin (an institution that Chait also studied) and Evergreen State have instituted formal tenure systems (Mangan, 1989; "Nota Bene," 1996). While the Evergreen State decision occurred after the publication of Promotion and Tenure, the University of Texas at Permian Basin decision is now several years old and deserved attention.

Tierney and Bensimon also call for a purposeful and real examination of institutional mission as a way of reexamining tenure and academic freedom, indicating that such an undertaking would need to be philosophical. It is not clear, however, how such a reexamination would avoid mundane versions of strategic planning so often in force in higher education, the very sort of reductionism that Tierney and Bensimon eschew.

In Promotion and Tenure, Tierney and Bensimon argue that tenure does not necessarily protect academic freedom and that it does exclude. They are deeply concerned about these apparent failures of tenure because they are convinced that processes of protection and inclusion are critical to the academy.

Conclusion

These two books highlight tenure's power. Tenure serves as a lifetime assurance that professors will receive due process within the context of the academic institution, although interpretations of its central protection-- academic freedom--vary across higher education's history. Tenure is also a process of exclusion. The tradition of tenure, in its economic and intellectual capacities and social construction, continues to hold considerable influence in higher education. Yet will it persist? [End Page 310]

Many trustees and presidents as well as external critics and a few internal critics have no regard for findings that tenure is economically efficient. They argue against tenure because they see it as financially inflexible. Yet such arguments imply that only institutions--and thus their faculties--that have sufficient economic resources deserve tenure. If a professor is at a poor institution, then he or she has little reason to expect tenure because it is costly. This same professor, of course, "enjoys" a smaller income than colleagues at wealthier institutions and, given attacks on academic freedom in the post-World War II period, faces a greater (although not exclusive) possibility that colleagues and administrators will offer little defense if an attack occurs (McCormick, 1989). Class-based conceptions of who deserves tenure leave even more professors economically and intellectually vulnerable than is the case now.

Options regarding the nature of tenure exist. Institutions may establish post-tenure review to increase institutional and individual flexibility, addressing economic concerns. Finkin suggests the possibility of reinvigorating faculty members by the use of post-tenure review. Nevertheless, Tierney and Bensimon remind us that evaluation activities "all too often serve to sort, filter, and dismiss individuals" (p. 144). Perhaps post-tenure review will improve institutional and individual flexibility; perhaps it will just make the vulnerable even more vulnerable.

More deeply troubling than the economic issue in the tenure attacks is the assumption that somehow we have no need for the protection of academic freedom. Scholars as diverse as Lazarsfeld and Thielens (1958) and Slaughter (1987) have argued that the application of academic freedom has historical specificity. What needs protection in the early 1950s, under the baneful glare of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his followers, is not topically the same as the late 1980s, when Senator Jesse Helms righteously reviewed gay art. Yet in either case, attackers focus on what is suspect as well as anti-American, and their attack calls for a general response--the protection of the freedom of inquiry. While Finkin et al. offer qualified support for tenure and its protections and Tierney and Bensimon call for the protection of academic freedom regardless of heterodoxy, the professoriate still seems to need a call to defend tenure that incorporates the tradition of principled support with the nuanced understanding of the context of the times. While neither Finkin nor Tierney and Bensimon argue for such a defense, their arguments lead us to a reminder that in order to attract and sustain the intellectually curious, the academy must offer protection. Challenges to the heretics may come from outside or inside the academy; in both cases, professors need defense and to defend themselves or they will not be able to dissent from whatever is perceived as self-evident and American.

We have little idea of what attacks on the professoriate will look like in the twenty-first century, but even as a historian (i.e., one who prefers to [End Page 311] look into the past), I predict confidently that the future will bring such attacks. Neither traditional defenses nor alternatives to tenure protect the economic or intellectual interests of the professoriate. The debate about tenure is important and, clearly, it is not finished.

Philo Hutcheson is an Assistant Professor in the Educational Policy Studies Department at Georgia State University. He is the author of a number of pieces on tenure, including "McCarthyism and the Professoriate: A Historiographic Nightmare?" Higher Education: The Handbook of Theory and Research, Vol. 12, edited by John C. Smart (New York: Agathon Press, 1997): 435-460.

References

AAUP. (1915, July.) Report of the committee of inquiry on conditions at the University of Utah. N.p.: American Association of University Professors.

AAUP. (1915, December). General report of the committee on academic freedom and academic tenure. Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, 1(1), 15-43.

Bensimon, E., & Neumann, A. (1993). Redesigning collegiate leadership: Teams and teamwork in higher education. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Chait, R. (1982). Beyond traditional tenure: A guide to sound policies and practices. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Commission on Academic Tenure in Higher Education (1973). Faculty tenure. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Hofstadter, R., & Metzger, W. P. (1955). The development of academic freedom in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press.

Joughin, L. (Ed.). (1967). Academic freedom and tenure: A handbook of the American Association of University Professors. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Lazarsfeld, P. F., & Thielens, W., Jr. (1958). The academic mind: Social scientists in a time of crisis. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Mangan, K. A. (1989, March 1). "Four colleges' experience with alternatives to tenure." Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A10.

McCormick, C. H. (1989). This nest of vipers: McCarthyism and higher education in the Mundel affair, 1951-52. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

"Nota bene: Is tenure Evergreen?" (1996, November/December). Academe, 82(6), 10-11.

Ringer, F. K. (1990). The decline of the German mandarins: The German academic community, 1890-1933 (2d ed.). Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

Sartorius, R. (1972). Tenure and academic freedom. In E. L. Pincoffs (Ed.), The concept of academic freedom (pp. 133-158). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Schrecker, E. (1986). No ivory tower: McCarthyism and the universities. New York: Oxford University Press.

Slaughter, S. (1981). Political action, faculty autonomy and retrenchment: A decade of academic freedom, 1970-1980. In P. G. Altbach & R. O. Berdahl (Eds.), Higher Education in American Society (1st ed.), (pp. 73-100). Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

Slaughter, S. (1987). Academic freedom in the modern university. In P. G. Altbach & R. O. Berdahl, Higher Education in American Society (2nd ed.), (pp. 77-105). Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

Slaughter, S. (1994). Academic freedom at the end of the century: Professional labor, gender, and professionalism. In P. G. Altbach, R. O. Berdahl, & P. J. Gumport, Higher Education in American Society (3rd ed.), (pp. 73-100). Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

Tierney, W. G. (1993). Building communities of difference: Higher education in the twenty-first century. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.

Veysey, L. R. (1965). The emergence of the American university. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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