Academic tenure
Academic tenure is a commitment by a college or university to award permanent employment status. Most faculty contracts stipulate that tenure can only be removed for cause or for financial exigency.
In the last year of my postdoctoral fellowship, I applied for tenure-track positions at various universities around the US. Tenure-track means that the university is looking to hire someone they believe will end up getting tenure. It’s not a guarantee of tenure; I’ve known plenty of people hired on the tenure track who were later denied promotion and tenure and had to leave for failing to meet performance criteria. In the event, I accepted an offer as an assistant professor and was tenured as an associate professor six years later.
Recently, some universities have tried to work around the tenure commitment by cutting faculty salaries. Particularly at medical schools, non-clinical faculty are expected to recover 50% or more of their compensation from extramural grants. Faculty who fail to maintain this level of funding are seeing their salaries reduced.
Tenure has long been a right-wing whipping boy:
“The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has long believed that tenure produces “poor teaching and shoddy research.”
If this were true, elite institutions like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford would have long ago abandoned tenure, secure in the knowledge that their brand would continue to be a magnet for talent. In the real world, all the top universities still grant tenure, so I guess it isn’t quite the problem the boffins at the Heritage Foundation believe it to be. In my own case, most of the publications and grants in my CV came after tenure.
Yes, there are tenured faculty to refuse to retire after they have checked out of the academic rat race. Universities are not without resources to address this problem. My own university offers buy-outs and phased retirement to encourage faculty who aren’t research-active to retire. But it is also the responsibility of chairs and deans to do faculty development, encourage sabbaticals and otherwise make the best use of the human capital they once found sufficiently valuable to offer tenure. Salary cuts are the lazy approach. Cutting salaries may encourage targeted faculty to leave, but who will replace them? Talented people have choices; they research the institutions they apply to and will ignore ads from universities that make a mockery of tenure.
Tufts medical school attacks tenured faculty
In the last year of my postdoctoral fellowship, I applied for tenure-track positions at various universities around the US. Tenure-track means that the university is looking to hire someone they believe will end up getting tenure. It’s not a guarantee of tenure; I’ve known plenty of people hired on the tenure track who were later denied promotion and tenure and had to leave for failing to meet performance criteria. In the event, I accepted an offer as an assistant professor and was tenured as an associate professor six years later.
Recently, some universities have tried to work around the tenure commitment by cutting faculty salaries. Particularly at medical schools, non-clinical faculty are expected to recover 50% or more of their compensation from extramural grants. Faculty who fail to maintain this level of funding are seeing their salaries reduced.
Tenure has long been a right-wing whipping boy:
“The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has long believed that tenure produces “poor teaching and shoddy research.”
If this were true, elite institutions like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford would have long ago abandoned tenure, secure in the knowledge that their brand would continue to be a magnet for talent. In the real world, all the top universities still grant tenure, so I guess it isn’t quite the problem the boffins at the Heritage Foundation believe it to be. In my own case, most of the publications and grants in my CV came after tenure.
Yes, there are tenured faculty to refuse to retire after they have checked out of the academic rat race. Universities are not without resources to address this problem. My own university offers buy-outs and phased retirement to encourage faculty who aren’t research-active to retire. But it is also the responsibility of chairs and deans to do faculty development, encourage sabbaticals and otherwise make the best use of the human capital they once found sufficiently valuable to offer tenure. Salary cuts are the lazy approach. Cutting salaries may encourage targeted faculty to leave, but who will replace them? Talented people have choices; they research the institutions they apply to and will ignore ads from universities that make a mockery of tenure.
Tufts medical school attacks tenured faculty
“Most faculty contracts stipulate that tenure can only be removed for cause or for financial exigency.”
That may be all well and good, but my father lost his job as a tenured scientist with the state of New York. Rockefeller just had his position removed from the budget (not exactly a financial exigency, since the state budget was in surplus.) They claimed that he could stay on. After all, he had tenure. He just wouldn’t get paid. He suspected that funding for his position was eliminated because of his activities in the Civil Service Employees Union. His salary had not kept up with inflation for a decade or more.
@John,
So what happened to your dad could have happened under the sort of contract you quoted.
If you read the link, you’ll see that it is about tenured Tufts faculty who are not being fired but are targeted for salary reduction. As a tenured faculty myself, I was well aware that my tenure didn’t specify my salary. It also didn’t stipulate what fraction of my compensation needed to be recovered from grants, although the figure of 50% was a departmental expectation (few tenured faculty actually met that standard). Of course, I was free to leave. In the event, I never had a salary reduction during my 37 years on the faculty, although some years it was just a cost-of-living raise.
This salary reduction policy is being implementing next year at my medical school.
It sounds like your dad wasn’t a university professor. The sentence you quoted explicitly refers to “faculty contracts.”
He was a tenured associate professor at an Ivy League University research facility that received funding from the state. He was not a teaching professor.
The key takeaway from my father’s experience is that ways can be found to terminate tenured professors. Tenure does not necessarily allow them to teach and conduct research without fear of being dismissed for their views or controversial topics.
@John,
“. . . ways can be found to terminate tenured professors.”
Yep. My post acknowledged that.
“Tenure does not necessarily allow them to teach and conduct research without fear of being dismissed for their views or controversial topics.”
What, exactly, was he teaching or researching that you believe resulted in his salary being zeroed out?
As I said, he was active in the Civil Service Employees Association. He thought his defunding (NOT firing) was attributable to those activities. CSEA was something like an informal union. He was NOT defunded for “cause,” which was evidenced by his employers’ willingness to keep him employed for free. He also had strong anti-fascist views.
@John,
Sounds like what’s called a “soft money” position. His compensation came entirely from extramural sources. Most tenured university faculty have 9- or 10-month hard dollar salary lines. At most medical schools, these are 12-month hard dollar salary lines for basic science faculty. At most medical schools, clinical faculty–tenured or not–are expected to recover >100% of their salary from patient billing.
Soft money positions are common in research institutes, both free-standing and university-affiliated. I’m not sure what it means to be in a tenured position with zero salary.
No, as I said, his funding was cut from the budget of the state of New York. It was not from outside grants.
The employer’s other political motivation besides his CSEA activities was his outspoken anti-fascist opinions. He managed to survive Joe McCarthy era but probably continued to annoy some. As we should all know, in the 1950s, being anti-fascist by pointing out certain US government behavior could have been construed as being pro-Communist, just as being anti-genocide is portrayed as being anti-Semitic. My father was definitely not a communist.
I think that political pressures influence tenured professors, whether by limiting promotability, grants, outside consulting opportunities, or by threatening future wage increases. My pet suspicion is that mainstream economics professors rarely write about inequality precisely because it is not “good form” and could have repercussions, not just to personal prospects, but also to university funding.
Tenure is a nice concept, though I think that it comes with more limitations than advertised.
@John,
” . . .his funding was cut from the budget of the state of New York. It was not from outside grants.”
If the funds were not from the university (hard dollars), they were from outside grants (soft money). By definition.
The whole point of tenure is to protect from political pressure. If he lost his job because of political pressure, he didn’t really have tenure. By definition.
As someone who was tenured for 31 of the 37 years I was on faculty, I have a pretty good idea of what tenure is and isn’t. As someone who worked in academia continuously for over 40 years, I have a pretty good idea what tenure is and isn’t. Nothing you’ve posted on this thread falsifies anything I’ve posted.
What you “think” and what your “pet suspicion” is doesn’t interest me. Opinions are like nose hairs–everybody’s got ’em. I’m interested in facts and evidence.
Sorry, Joel. The state of New York passed a law 19 years earlier that granted tenure to professors and associate professors at his university research facility. They did not fire him. They defunded him.
What good is tenure without a paycheck? Nada.
For your own enlightenment about the dubious value of tenure these days, you should do a search with the following terms: “professor fired despite tenure palestine” Free speech for tenured professors RIP.
Sorry, John.
You have nothing to teach me about tenure. But if you’d read my comments, you might learn something.
I’ll type more slowly this time: The whole point of tenure is to protect from political pressure. If he lost his job because of political pressure, he didn’t really have tenure. By definition.
For your own enlightenment, the same goes for anyone else who loses “tenure” over political activity. They never actually had tenure.
Sorry, Joel. You refuse to address the crucial point I raised: there are ways to work around tenure. As I have said repeatedly, my father was granted tenure by an act of the NY legislature. He didn’t lose his tenure. What he lost was his salary.
Tenure is only as good as a university’s willingness to pay. If tenure is not accompanied by a salary, it is worthless. The ability to stop funding a tenured employee is a very effective way to get a politically non-conforming, tenured professor to shut the hell up.
LOL!
Sorry, John. You refuse to address the crucial points I raised: (1) it’s not tenure if it doesn’t protect from politics and (2) it’s not tenure if you have no salary. Your father’s “tenure” was only tenure in name. It was phony tenure.
In universities such as the one I worked in for 37 years, there was no ability to get a politically non-conforming, tenured professor to shut the hell up. I witnessed this personally, and it is a reality for universities that have *real* tenure. It is the reason tenure exists. Your father’s “tenure” was only tenure in name. It was phony tenure. I’m sorry this is so hard for you to understand.
There are colleges and universities that do have tenure. There are colleges and universities that don’t have tenure. There are faculty at universities that do have tenure who don’t have tenure. And there are colleges and universities that have fake tenure; evidently, your father worked for one of these. He didn’t actually have tenure.
You have nothing to teach me about tenure. Quoting Wikipedia and a part-time research professor (who, by definition, doesn’t have tenure and isn’t on the tenure track) just shows that you don’t understand the subject. I suggest you quit while you’re behind, m’kay?
@John,
I’d have to see his actual contract before commenting further on your father’s specific situation. Tenure can mean different things at different schools.
At my university, a research associate professor is not a tenured position. I have a sister and a sister-in-law who were both “professors,” one at Brandeis and the other at Harvard, and neither had tenure.
The only cases of firing a tenured professor I am personally aware of were for cause, egregious violations of university policy.
Wikipedia: Is tenure (and economic security) granted only to conformists? IOW conformists get freedom of political opinion, others need not apply. “Tenure may have the effect of diminishing political and academic freedom among those seeking it – that they must appear to conform to the political or academic views of the field or the institution where they seek tenure. For example, in The Trouble with Physics, the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin says “… it is practically career suicide for young theoretical physicists not to join the field of string theory …”. It is certainly possible to view the tenure track as a long-term demonstration of the candidate’s political and academic conformity. Patrick J. Michaels, a part-time research professor at the University of Virginia, wrote: “… tenure has had the exact opposite effect as to its stated goal of diversifying free expression. Instead, it stifles free speech in the formative years of a scientist’s academic career, and all but requires a track record in support of paradigms that might have outgrown their usefulness.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_tenure_in_North_America
The problem is rampant in macroeconomics, where mainstream US economists (with a handful of exceptions like UC Berkley), don’t touch inequality with a ten foot pole, even the the IMF has labeled inequality as a major macroeconomic problem.