What are the purposes of tenure?
Like everybody else, professors want to support their families, educate
their children, and provide for their future. They will not foolishly
risk their livelihood for mere curiosity. But there is a public need
for the study of questions raised by curiosity. The public need
is for people of proven ability at solving
problems to attack new ones -
problems whose solutions are both needed and completely unknown. We have
hired precisely those people to staff our major research universities,
including Texas A&M, and we must provide them with the assurance that
exploring tough questions will not result in job loss. Tenure is that
assurance.
But why would doing the job you're hired to do cause you to lose the job?
There is no point in studying problems whose solutions are already
known, and not much value in studying those whose solutions are
easily guessed. But if we start to study a problem whose answer is
unguessable, we might not like what we discover. Darwin's discovery
of evolution was and remains highly controversial, and it is not what
he hoped to find when he embarked on his voyage of discovery. But
without his work, we would not be seeking gene therapies right now.
And consider the case of Professor Samuel Herrick of UCLA. In the 1940's,
he wrote both professional and popular articles on space flight. Because
space flight was seen as a childish fantasy at that time, his work was
a considerable embarrassment to the university faculty and administration.
Without tenure, he probably would have carried out other, less controversial,
investigations or he would have been fired, and his work would have
been lost to the world. As it was, his promotion to full professor was
long delayed. But by the mid 1950's, he was widely recognized as a
pioneer in the field. His work led directly to our present highly active
space program, including the valuable Hubble telescope and weather
and communication satellites.
Are the only dangers in research that you might appear foolish or not like
the answers?
Not at all! A professor might spend months or even years studying
a subject and mastering a problem, only to have some other person publish
a similar result first. Problems worth studying are known to everybody,
and newly discovered methods of study become tools for the whole
community. Many of us have lost credit for work for just this reason.
But to the outside world, a researcher who works for years on a problem,
only to have somebody else publish first, has done nothing for years.
Are there risks in teaching that justify tenure?
As Prof. James E. Perley said in
The Chronicle of Higher Education,
April 4, 1997, "What kind of courage [does it take]
to instill a suitable skepticism in students?" Our job is to open the
minds of our students, and this cannot be done without challenging them
with new and sometimes unpalatable ideas.
Even discussing controversial subjects in the classroom can lead
to problems. In the 1950's, the philosophy professor who discussed
Marxism with students was at risk. A law professor who wants
to show that some aspects of the McVeigh trial were unfair might have
troubles now.
Also, consider the time it takes to write a
textbook. A well-written text will usually take several years to write.
The professor
prepares and teaches courses, takes care of assigned service
work, and then goes off and works as much
as 5 or 10 hours a day writing the book. The risk is that when
the book is done, it may not be accepted by colleagues as
a ground-breaking contribution to the field.
Wise faculty members would not go so far as to risk their jobs
by doing research or writing
books that could result in nothing. But curiosity and the desire to
teach are strong driving forces,
and experience has shown that faculty members will risk their
next few raises, and even their next promotion, to satisfy these needs.
Tenure limits their risk.
Most businesses would not tolerate a person whose record showed huge
amounts of time spent on unsuccessful research, or time spent on work
that seems
unimportant or unpalatable, or on writing a book that does not sell. Yet
this is precisely the type of work that achieves the big breakthroughs.
It is no accident that most such work is done, and most such breakthroughs
occur, at research universities. There the climate is right, assuming the
faculty have tenure.
So tenure is a way of helping professors keep their jobs while they take
chances for the public. But business people take chances every
day - starting new businesses, changing product lines, and so on.
They don't get any special protection. Why should professors?
Business people are working for themselves. They see good opportunities
and act on them because they will directly benefit from success. But
professors are employees of an organization which may not reward them
even if they are successful, and which is likely to punish them if they
are unsuccessful. They have the option of doing "safe" research -
research that is unlikely to produce major breakthroughs but which is
publishable. Why would they take chances if they could lose their
jobs as a result?
But isn't tenure intended to protect academic freedom?
Yes, and that is exactly what was described above. There is no academic
freedom if one's job can be lost for pursuing hard or unpopular questions
and ideas. The risk is in the pursuit; if it extends to the possibility
of the loss of the job, academic freedom disappears.
The purpose of tenure is to protect academic freedom, the freedom to
pursue original research, and the freedom to study ideas that are new,
unpopular or misunderstood. Such freedom of thought benefits society
by encouraging innovation, independent analysis, and creativity.
Alexander W. Astin, in the March/April 1993 issue of Change (Volume
25, number 2, page 49) said, "One thing that we tend to forget about
academic freedom is that it is not merely an end in itself but that it
has a larger purpose: the pursuit of truth. The link between academic
freedom and the pursuit of knowledge is often overlooked ..., but the
underlying logic is really very simple: the quickest and surest way
to the truth is to encourage the expression of diverse points of view
and to promote active discussion and debate of these different views.
This is really what academic freedom is all about."
Tenure has developed over hundreds of years, and forms the foundation of
the modern university in Western society. Its value in encouraging new
generations of scholars and sustaining the quest for knowledge should not be
taken lightly. Tenure means that a faculty member has earned a secure
position on a university faculty, but it does not prevent dismissal for
poor performance.