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

Washington Monthly, May, 1999 by Robert Worth

It's also true that witch-hunts like these could always recur. But they wouldn't be quite the same. For one thing, free speech was not protected at the state level until the late 1960s. A faculty member at a public university who announced that he was gay or communist could be fired with impunity. Thanks to a series of Supreme Court decisions, that's no longer true. Although the law doesn't apply to private schools, they tend to follow the public precedent. In any case, says Evergreen College's Jane Jervis, "if anyone was fired for ideological reasons, with or without tenure, they'd have the institution in court so fast you couldn't see straight" In fact, faculty regularly appeal their tenure decisions to the courts, at both public and private schools, and win. Sometimes the threat of a lawsuit alone can push a school to reconsider. That isn't necessarily a good thing, but it does suggest that the AAUP's position on academic freedom is a little paranoid.

"Academic freedom" can also be a code-word for freedoms that most of us cannot and would not expect to be granted. When I asked one University of Massachusetts professor for examples of people who might have been fired if they hadn't been tenured, he described a particle physicist who stopped doing particle research and started doing left-wing political organizing. "If he hadn't had tenure, he might have been fired," he told me ominously. Hmmm. Wasn't he hired to do particle research? When I asked an English professor the same question, he told me about a faculty dinner at which he had mentioned a course he was teaching on Gay Studies to an administrator seated next to him. The administrator frowned and wondered aloud whether that was worth a whole course. This anecdote was meant, I suppose, to illustrate that tenure protects English professors from those philistines who consider Gay Studies an unworthy subject (many of whom, it should be added, are gay). But as a recent Ph.D. in English, I can attest that junior faculty are in much greater danger of being fired if they don't teach Gay Studies.

Which brings us to the strangest thing about the standard defense of tenure as the bulwark of academic freedom: It ignores the academic freedom of untenured faculty, who constitute the majority of teachers in the country. And these are the people whose academic freedom may be most under threat, thanks to the constant pressures for conformity from within the academy. Despite the academy's nominal support for new ideas and unorthodox views, free spirits tend to find themselves left off of conference panels and scholarly publications, while the survivors learn to stay safely within the bounds of what's fashionable in their discipline. Forcing people to spend 12 years or more narrowing their interests to suit academic fashion in the quest for tenure "tends to knock the originality out of young academics," says Louis Menand, an English professor at the City University of New York.

Ultimately, the argument for tenure as a guarantee of academic freedom fails because the two concepts are separable. There's nothing to prevent a school from contractually guaranteeing academic freedom for all faculty members. The handful of colleges that currently operate without tenure already do so. And faculty at those schools don't feel that their academic freedom is under threat, according to a study by Richard Chait and Cathy Trower of Harvard's Project on Faculty Appointments. These schools tend to be unorthodox places with a high degree of loyalty to their faculty. However, it would be easy enough for more traditional schools to supplement a guarantee of academic freedom by forming an internal appeals committee, similar to the grievance panels most schools have already, to hear cases when faculty thought their academic freedom had been violated. J. Peter Byrne, a (tenured) law professor at Georgetown, has argued that such a committee could protect academic freedom effectively and without much cost or bureaucratic trouble.