The Velvet Prison.

• Author: WORTH, ROBERT
• Position: Teacher tenure offers little benefit to students in many cases

Why tenure isn't necessarily good for teaching or scholarship

Last year a junior professor in Russian Studies at a major East Coast university--let's call her Karen--breathed a sigh of relief as she delivered the manuscript of her first book to the publisher. The book had already gleaned rapturous praise from some of the top people in her field, so her future seemed virtually assured. But the next day Karen's adviser told her that she'd have to publish another one if she wanted tenure. Why? Her department, after all, is full of senior people who haven't published anything in years, and who haven't even bothered to master the new research techniques that have become possible since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many of these people don't do much teaching either, since the number of undergraduates majoring in Russian has dropped precipitously in the last decade. If they worked at a private company, some of them would be sacked and Karen would be promoted.

They have tenure, however, and Karen doesn't. In theory, this means that they've proved their value to the university. In practice, it means they can't be fired no matter how little they contribute as teachers or scholars. Karen is quick to add that some senior professors in her field have adapted to the post-Soviet world. But many have not. "They've got tenure and they don't have to learn," she says. Meanwhile, Karen will have to work harder than ever to produce another book in the next two years, which is likely to cut into the time she has for her students. At the end of her sixth year, Karen will be judged by a faculty committee, which will consider her scholarship and gather recommendations from scholars at other universities. If they vote to grant tenure, her case will proceed to another committee, which will undertake its own review, and finally to the college president, who has the final word.

If Karen survives this harrowing process, her job will be guaranteed for life. She may well live up to that extraordinary trust by maintaining her high standards for the next four or five decades. However, she may also lose touch with the changes in her field, as so many of her colleagues have, and lose interest in teaching. Either way, she'll be rewarded with less teaching and much less need to prove her scholarship, as a new generation of junior faculty enters the tenure gauntlet.

If she doesn't survive, she may well join the army of "adjunct" or part-time professors who now constitute almost half the faculty in U.S. colleges and universities and do the bulk of the teaching. With no job security and (in some cases) no benefits, these academic journeymen skip frantically across the country in search of work, often forced to cobble several jobs together to make a living. As universities slowly cut back on tenured positions, the ranks of this discontented army will continue to grow, according to a study released in April by two Virginia researchers. Needless to say, this is not a formula for good teaching or good scholarship.

Karen's fate is not unusual. Academia is starting to bear an unsettling resemblance to 18th-century France: a majority with too few privileges tyrannized by a minority with too many. Tenure is the ancien regime that divides these two worlds, preventing schools from holding their faculty accountable or changing with the times. Many faculty would dispute this view and insist that tenure is necessary to maintain academic freedom and to attract talent to the profession. Those claims, however, are becoming increasingly ham to maintain. And tenure's defenders cannot dispute the fact that most people outside the academy see it as an increasingly outdated and unjustifiable perk. "It's nice to have job protection," says Jane Jervis, the president of Oregon's Evergreen College (which does not offer tenure), "but who has that now? I think it's important that people in academia understand that the rest of society sees that claim as preposterous. And the rest of society often has kids in school with a rotten teacher." If the professoriate doesn't want tenure to fall under the guillotine, it had better start paying attention to the case for reform.

Class Struggle

Tenure is an inheritance from the German "research model" that revolutionized American universities during the late 19th century. The idea was to insulate faculty from political and economic pressures by granting them job security. In exchange, they would enrich society with the knowledge gained in their unfettered pursuit of the truth.

The trouble was that "research" rapidly became a self-justifying enterprise, often conducted at the expense of the university's other major goal: teaching. This became increasingly true in the decades after World War II, according to a 1990 report from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, as the focus moved "from the student to the professoriate, from general to specialized education, and from...