Is it Time to End Faculty Tenure?
Paul Caron of the TaxProfBlog points to a recent column which explores the subject.
McGinnis & Schanzenbach: It’s Time To End Faculty Tenure
Wall Street Journal op-ed: College Tenure Has Reached Its Sell-By Date, by John O. McGinnis (Northwestern) & Max M. Schanzenbach(Northwestern):
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has come under fire from academics nationwide for calling on his state’s Board of Regents to reconsider the scope of tenure in its university system. Evaluations of faculty members “should be based on performance,” he said this summer, “they should be based on merit.”
With state universities struggling to keep up with rising costs and technological change, one would expect administrators and educators to at least consider proposals that would save money and encourage change.
Strong tenure protections impose significant costs on higher education. Although these costs were voluntarily created when universities adopted tenure in the first half of the 20th century, they were markedly increased in 1994 when Congress prohibited mandatory retirement for tenured faculty.
Guaranteed employment for life will not promote good teaching or scholarly productivity when incentive pay is limited, and employment for life can be long. Studies on the abolition of mandatory retirement have found that it dramatically reduced faculty retirement rates. In addition, surveys recently carried out by investment firms suggest that three-quarters of faculty plan to teach far beyond normal retirement age or never retire.
Research productivity declines with age and the lack of retirement crowds out younger and more-productive scholars. Worse still, tenure has evolved in a way that makes it very difficult for universities to dismiss those who engage in serious misconduct or face the loss of mental capacity that would force them out of other jobs. Even if tenure had been sensible when mandatory retirement was permitted, it may now need to be rethought. …
Comments
It is important to note why tenure was started so that we can consider whether to continue it. It was started to protect badly paid professors who could be replaced by new cheaper faculty paid badly just less so. There were no retirement programs and this led to destitution for those 50 and older. Tenure was a good idea provided that there were regulations which could remove poorly acting or poorly teaching faculty. The AAUP provided very good guidelines for colleges and universities to monitor the faculty. Committees were set up to analyse and try faculty who either stepped over the line sexually or just were not interested in continuing to put out the effort to teach students well.
Then some fools started to mess up the system by stopping the college or university from strongly suggesting retirement for those who were not pulling their weight. Regulations were in place to keep faculty from negotiating lesser salaries and lesser teaching loads. I could go on and on, but there is a time to retire and many of us knew it and some did not. TIAA-CREF is a wonderful retirement system and provides more than enough money for retirement if the professor joins it early enough.
This is not a call for the retirement of most faculty at age 65 because their salaries are the reason that universities charge so much. It is a call for reason. (Let us never forget that the reason that college costs so much is the number and level of compensation of administrators and the interference of the Federal government.)