Faculty Featherbedding

Almost every campus has them: incompetent professors who cannot be fired, much less shamed into quitting. Losers by almost any academic standard, they are actually winners of academe's choicest prize: "tenure" (from the Latin tenere, meaning to hold or keep). The system has lately been lambasted by three national commissions on education, is under study at the universities of Utah and Wisconsin, and faces attack in the legislatures of eleven states. Tenure, charges John R. Silber, president of Boston University, has become "a device used by the devil to encourage faculty slothfulness."

Why not abolish this sinecure system forthwith? Unfortunately, the very rules that protect a professor's freedom to stagnate--thereby diminishing the academic freedom of his students--are also the rules that safeguard professors who advocate unpopular ideas or pursue controversial research.

During World War I, scores of U.S. professors were fired for failure to follow patriotic orthodoxy. During the McCarthy era, tenure rules helped prevent reprisals, though not entirely. Today, unfair firing is quite difficult. Typically, young teachers get up to seven-year probationary appointments; after six years, a departmental committee reviews each newcomer's work and recommends that he either be let go or "given tenure"--re-hired on a permanent basis.

Bargain Price. After that, he can be fired, but only for compelling reasons such as flagrant incompetence, moral turpitude or his college's dire financial straits. The college must present formal charges, usually before a jury-like panel of the professor's colleagues. The rules are enforced by the American Association of University Professors, which threatens to put violating colleges on a "censured" list that warns other professors to avoid working at the blackballed institutions.

Because the Supreme Court now holds that academic freedom of speech and opinion is a constitutional right, critics argue that tenure is no longer necessary. But professors often need all the defending they can get, particularly at small or politically pressured institutions. Last month the A.A.U.P. added five colleges to its censured list for ousting professors who became involved in local controversies. In addition, some job security is important in any profession. Says University of Wisconsin Political Science Professor David Fellman, a former A.A.U.P. president: "Protecting a few incompetents is a price well worth paying for the great number of good people who also are protected."

Club Protection. The trouble is that more than a few incompetents are involved. During a decade when professors I were in short supply, recruiters offered tenure on such a scale that many campuses are now afflicted with an supply of drones who refuse to make way for younger, more dynamic teachers. The result irks students, to say nothing of diverting tight funds to pay deadwood profs who occasionally neglect their teaching while growing rich on consulting fees. To make matters worse, many administrators are loath to press charges; even when they do, faculty members hesitate to crack down on fellow members of their club.

Tenure review committees are all too well aware that the people who most deserve ousting are those who will have the greatest trouble finding jobs elsewhere. Says Sanford H. Kadish, a law professor at Berkeley and the A.A.U.P.'s current president: "Seven to ten years after a man gets tenure, he has kids in school, he has a house. Forcing him to find another job is not just."

One remedy is simply to limit tenure to perhaps 50% of any faculty, compared with the usual two-thirds to three-fourths who enjoy it now. To that end, some institutions have quit awarding tenure to anyone until their fogies retire, sometimes with the lure of hefty severance pay. The University of Wisconsin's new Green Bay campus is trying a more profound idea: in addition to regular faculty members it hires "lecturers" who agree to waive tenure in exchange for the salary of a full professor.

Peer Pressure. Another approach is to make sure that tenured professors keep working productively. At the University of Utah, for example, Law Professor Arvo Van Alstyne is completing a study of tenure that is expected to propose a new code of faculty performance standards, periodic reviews by a faculty committee to check performance, and a top-level ombudsman to hear student complaints of bad teaching. Even if laggard professors could not be fired, they might be required to take refresher courses. Says B.U. President Silber: "One of the most severe penalties you can impose on a faculty member is the intellectual disapprobation of his colleagues."

Other critics say that such reforms will fail unless backed up with believable threats to fire professors who do not shape up. One proposal: give all faculty members contracts for three-to seven-year terms, renewable only if they stay at the top of their form. Massachusetts' Hampshire College is trying such a system; Maryland's St. John's College has used one for years.

On balance, a total abolition of tenure seems unlikely and perhaps undesirable. Says Utah's Van Alstyne: "If tenure is done away with, particularly in the present political climate, the universities may be destroyed. But we must have tenure with accountability, or the people won't stand for it." Mindful of the current financial squeeze, one college president noted at a recent meeting: "Faculties are going to have to go along with modern management procedures, or they'll be arguing about it not in the faculty lounge but in some unemployment line."

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