incredible shrinking faculty: An interview with Lawrence Poston, The

Academe, May/Jun 2000 by Schrecker, Ellen

Blaming tenure for heavier teaching loads or the terrible job market ignores the real problem: funding cuts that are restructuring the nation's colleges and universities and degrading the quality of higher education.

Schrecker: With nearly half the academic positions available being filled by adjuncts and other nontraditional appointments, isn't tenure now a luxury, clogging up the system and making it harder for younger scholars to find full-time jobs?

Poston: Tenure should not be blamed for what is really the result of a failure to fund higher education adequately. One reason there are fewer full-time positions is that many institutions are converting tenure lines vacated by retirements into non-tenure-track and part-time positions. In other words, it is not the institution of tenure that is making the job search harder for young scholars, but the erosion of positions suitable for them and on which in an earlier era they might have been more able to rely. Candidates for tenure-track positions who come through my office want to know that the University of Illinois has a tenure system, and they want to know what steps they must take toward getting tenure. If we did not have tenure as one of our recruitment tools, we would lose our best prospects to institutions that can satisfy that need, and believe me, it's always a seller's market for those best candidates.

Where I sit now as associate dean, I've seen more than one example of how, once given tenure, a young faculty member becomes much more invested in the institution. At my university, we're rebuilding a faculty depleted by resignations and retirements to strengthen existing programs and cultivate new initiatives. In two cases this year, recently tenured faculty have come to me to say, "Now that I'm tenured, I'm really ready to put some time into this project." If that is what is meant by tenure's being a luxury, it seems to me that it's a luxury we can ill afford to forgo. I'd prefer to describe tenure as a necessity for long-term institutional health, because it serves as a device for building institutional loyalty of just this sort.

In short, the question posed here seems to me the wrong one. We should instead ask what the implications are for educational quality when a university begins systematically defunding tenured and tenure-track positions. And I'd suggest that students and their parents have a stake in the answer, especially in large public institutions already rife with complaints that students never see a "real" professor.

Schrecker: There's a related concern here. Doesn't the increasing unavailability of tenure threaten to transform the academy into a two-tiered system, with a shrinking core of fulltime tenured people at the top and a growing number of part-time or off the-ladder appointees at the bottom? And doesn't that situation make it increasingly difficult to attract talented or ambitious students to academic careers?

Poston: This is already happening, and it follows from my previous comment that unless changes are made in the funding of higher education, it will be difficult to attract the best students. Graduate education is a hefty investment. Who wants to make it if all that awaits at the end is a series of parttime or full-time but non-tenure-track positions that pay about a third of what one might make in the lower reaches

of the computer industry the first year after the B.A.? Schrecker: Similarly, doesn't tenure impede diversity within the faculty by locking up faculty lines that could be used for hiring people of color and otherwise diversifying the faculty?

Poston: The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 1996 on an interesting study by the Ford and Spencer Foundations on just this question. A survey of minority faculty taken at that time found strong support for a tenure system, on the grounds that the kinds of scholarly and pedagogical issues that concern many of these faculty are exactly the sorts of concerns that need and deserve the protections of tenure if they are to be explored with some sense of safety. We do a disservice to heretofore underrepresented groups by making the dissolution of tenure the cost of their entrance into academic life. Are they never to have any of the advantages their mostly white, male predecessors had in the academic profession? I should add parenthetically that it doesn't make much sense to talk about tenured lines "locking up" anything, when in absolute terms such lines are themselves disappearing even as we discuss these issues.

Schrecker: What about the argument that tenure decreases the flexibility that academic institutions need in order to adjust to new types of knowledge by fashioning interdisciplinary programs more in tune with the contemporary world? Isn't this particularly the case now that there is no mandatory retirement age within the academy? In short, doesn't tenure protect deadwood?

Poston: This is pious talk from administrators for whom flexibility means freedom to cut lines, not freedom to "adjust to new types of knowledge." Like the other arguments, this one is driven by a steady-state employment market in which few new positions are opening up and funding for tenured and tenure-track positions is going down. Of course, under those conditions you're cutting off the flow of good younger people into the tenured ranks anyway, so the argument is really a species of self fulfilling prophecy.