I turned down tenure; why other professors should, too.

• Author: Helfand, David

I TURNED DOWN TENURE

In the autumn of 1981, I was informed that I would be promoted to a tenured professorship in the Department of Physics at Columbia University. I told the department chair I didn't want tenure.

University officials were bewildered. Why would anyone turn down permanent job security? Was that even allowed? It was the equivalent, one provost told me, of renouncing the liberties guaranteed under the Bill of Rights. After 18 months of negotiation, however, the university began to take my position seriously and agreed to my request for a five-year contract. Renewal of my contract for another five-year term depends on the outcome of a peer review, now under way, of my teaching, research, and "service contribution' to the university and to my profession. By agreeing to this contract, the university will find itself in violation of the guidelines of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Those guidelines state that full-time faculty cannot be employed more than seven years without being granted tenure.

I turned down tenure because I believe that the university tenure system should be abolished. Tenure is rooted in the premise that academic freedom and review of performance are somehow antithetical. It is, however, used more often to deprive young academics of freedom than to defend the senior faculty it is designed to protect. It can exclude productive, energetic scholars from the system, maintain unproductive, unmotivated teachers in our universities, and discourage our best young minds from pursuing academic careers. Finally, it attracts and protects faculty members more concerned about preserving their job security than in defending their convictions, a group carefully selected to nurture established norms rather than one committed to the vigorous pursuit of knowledge.

Protecting the protected

What is tenure? Columbia University uses a rather typical definition of tenure and its professed purpose--the preservation of academic freedom: "To protect their academic freedom, officers of instruction are granted . . . appointments with tenure [i.e. without stated term], in which case they cannot dismissed without cause except in extraordinary circumstances in case of Discontinuance of a Unit.' That is to say, after having been anointed by the requisite number of departmental, administrative, and ad hoc committees, and after receiving a letter stating that one's appointment "will continue during the pleasure of the Trustees,' a faculty member can be fired only for "gross inefficiency, habitual and intentional neglect of duty [habitual or intentional neglect is evidently considered acceptable] personal misconduct,' or the abolishment of his or her department. There follows a description of the tortuous procedure that must be used to prove "adequate cause,' including the establishment of no fewer than four faculty, administrative, and trustee committees to review the matter and an intricate, recursive review of these reviewers. No Columbia professors have been fired under the procedure in at least 20 years, according to the provost's office.

The formal notion of tenure has not always been entrenched. In fact, in the early twentieth century, Columbia's president Nicholas Murray Butler tried to fire professors at will. He successfully sought the dismissal of an irascible but respected psychology professor, J. McKeen Cattell, ostensibly on the grounds that he had signed a petition urging Congress not to allow American troops to be used in World War I. By World War II, though, sensitivity to academic freedom had grown, and in 1940 the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges signed a pact codifying the principles of tenure. Moreover, with so many GIs entering college, the demand for professors was tremendous, and universities not only became reluctant to demand that the right to fire be included in contracts, they began incorporating the doctrine of tenure into their by-laws.

The principal argument for tenure has been that it is essential to the preservation of academic freedom, that it alone can guard the special freedoms that a university must offer its instructors: freedom to teach the material they want to teach, freedom to conduct research and publish its results, and freedom to express opinions and form associations without fear of penalty.

There...