The Velvet Prison - teacher tenure offers little benefit to students in many cases

Washington Monthly, May, 1999 by Robert Worth

The rigors of the tenure process also encourage young academics to overspecialize, producing work whose scholarly value is marginal at best (who benefits from those papers on "Anality in Little Dorrit" and "Jungian archetypes in Bewitched"?) and exacerbating their fear of life outside the Ivory Tower. Nothing exemplifies this fear better than the subject of tenure reform. Many young professors and grad students have never held a real job, and despite the current job crisis in the humanities, they often seem to believe that the academy owes them a sinecure. Last year Elaine Showalter, then-president of the Modern Language Association, wrote a column in the MLA newsletter urging Ph.D. students to consider alternatives to the badly overcrowded academic market. "Nice Work, and We Can Get It," was her title. A harmless enough thought, you might suspect. But graduate students came down on her with a vengeance. The MLA Graduate Student Caucus published a furious response, deriding her "blame the victim pronouncements" and her "naive effort to get hold of our working lives and prospects with low-rent market metaphors."

What's truly astonishing is that these people aren't simply being snobby about non-academic jobs: The academy has literally blinded them to the power their credentials can wield in the world outside. As Showalter argued, refugees from academia tend to do extremely well in a variety of professions. Richard Preston, best-selling author of The Hot Zone, got his Ph.D. in English at Princeton; John Romano, who taught English at Columbia, now produces the TV show "Party of Five"; the list could go on and on. People with advanced degrees have every reason to be confident about their future, and to take risks with it. Yet the tenure system encourages them to behave like cautious old men who can't survive without a guarantee of lifetime employment.

Finally, tenure's rigidity makes it difficult for schools to adapt to changes in knowledge. When the collapse of the Soviet Union revolutionized the field of Russian Studies, tenure became an enormous stumbling block for the academy. That's not to say that all the older professors in the field should have been fired. Rather, a more accountable system would give universities a stick with which to keep them on the ball. It might also allow schools to fill sudden needs without hiring adjuncts--the slave labor of the academic world--as they currently tend to do. Instead, they could hire on a multi-year contract basis--anywhere from two to 10 years. All of these contracts would be more secure than the current adjunct arrangement, but they'd be more flexible, and far more accountable, than tenure.

Freedom's Just Another Word ...

Many professors will respond to these charges by reciting the standard American Association of University Professors line: tenure is necessary to maintain academic freedom. It's true that for much of this century there was good reason to believe that job security was necessary to protect a professor's freedom of speech. During the McCarthy era, a professor whose politics were a little too pink could be dismissed if he didn't have tenure, and more than a few were. One professor at a Florida university told me his adviser was fired from a Southern college for his too-liberal views on civil rights.