After Ashland University on Friday laid off 23 instructors – many of them tenured – and eliminated another nine teaching positions, President Carlos Campo described the future at the financially troubled university as “bright.”
The move is a drastic one. Generally colleges avoid laying off tenured faculty members, and do so only if they’re struggling to pay bills.
Guidelines from the American Association of University Professors implore universities not to lay off tenure-track faculty unless financial exigency – a monetary crisis that threatens the survival of the institution – has been declared, which is not the case with Ashland.
Ashland, a Christian affiliated university in Ohio, has experienced financial difficulty in recent years, but enrollment at the school appears steady and the institution had a near $3 million surplus in fiscal 2014. Officials began considering a restructuring of its academic enterprise a year ago. The move has the support of top university administrators and the governing board, but not all faculty.
tenure is a bizarre thing. I disagree with it. it seems to protect people in the non stem departments who would have a hard time functioning outside of a college bubble. I think schools should perhaps focus more on graduating students with actual degrees that can be used in the real world and strengthen those departments and shrink those departments many refer to as basket weaving.
if an elitist school like harvard or yale wants to have large basket weaving departments and have the money to fund them and have students whose family need not worry about money that is fine.but most schools need to re-calibrate.
this of course my opinion I am sure not everyone agrees.
[quote]
this of course my opinion I am sure not everyone agrees./quote Tenure may be bizarre for some departments, but departments that may involve generating ideas contradictory to those of the college’s leaders is the traditional tenure raison d’etre. This still holds validity. I’ll grant you that tenure can lead to lackadaisical faculty members in some cases.
To each his own, but I expect innovation would suffer if every student graduated with “actual degrees that can be used in the real world” (whatever that means…).
The use of tenure to protect faculty for purely political disagreements with the administration can apply to those in any department.
Of course, tenure as a common institution does create an insider/outsider labor market (insiders = tenured faculty with well-protected jobs, outsiders = those without tenure who have a hard time getting anything more than adjunct jobs if they are looking for academic jobs).
Define “actual degrees that can be used in the real world” and “departments many refer to as basket weaving”.
Sorry but this:
"Tenure may be bizarre for some departments, but departments that may involve generating ideas contradictory to those of the college’s leaders is the traditional tenure raison d’etre. "
is generally NOT limited to tenure-track employees only. Both tenure-track and non-tenure track instructors where I work have full academic freedom protections. The only ones who don’t have that protection are adjuncts, who work on a contract basis only.
Our non-tenure track instructors who are full-time have the same job protections as the tenure-track professors.
Our union contract (covering tenure-track and non-tenure track) includes specifics on layoffs and other similar actions (like being forced to cover for someone else and leave your current job).
(let’s not even get into whether tenure makes sense for public school K-12 teachers who do not publish)
rhandco, many colleges have 2 systems running side by side. cutting edge medical and scientific research with extremely talented professors in high demand who probably do not need tenure. they also have other departments with
questionable value which are staffed with people one step away from working at the corner coffee shop. they fear the loss of tenure and with good reason.
Tenure has many uses beyond “academic freedom” as freedom to particular views.
(1) It also protects researchers who may be following a promising line of research that doesn’t pan out (remember cold fusion). Faculty need to take risks.
(2) It protects research projects that may be a bit long in coming. For example, I was a bit long between books at one point. In the end, the long awaited book won a big award for its innovative thinking, but there were a few years when it would have been hard to prove that I was working.
(3) It protects faculty from arbitrary student complaints, though perhaps too well at times. Still some students complain about hard grading (hence grade inflation), challenging work, group work, etc. Many students understand the place of these in higher ed, but others really resist doing more than they did in high school. Although some colleges have real enrollment problems, faculty, not administrators, must control the classroom.
(4) It protects experts from outside intervention in their disciplines. For example, state legislatures should not dictate curriculum in the arts OR the sciences. Legislators care about getting re-elected, not the cohesion and debate in knowledge creation (think evolution)
(5) it protects curriculum from short terms swings. So thirty years ago, the MBA and law degrees were big deals. Now they are a dime a dozen; from some universities, they may be next to useless. Engineering is on the rise currently. Things change, however, and the demand for certain degrees change pretty fast. A university that quickly cut its law school might be acting precipitously. The slow attrition of tenured law faculty through retirement and moving provides stability in the ever changing work of knowledge creation.
1 - note that depending on the university, it is perfectly reasonable to require various levels of promotion or make an "official request" for the professor to find other work. The college I work at has a multi-step tenure process where the first step is not completely tenure per se, but there are two more steps until full tenure. That may not be true at other universities. There have also been recommendations to change departments or hire staff assistants.
2 - if you were fully funded by a research grant, tenure or not most universities would keep you. If you did not have full funding, my state university will make you teach 3 classes per semester, so good luck finding time to write a book (barring sabbatical which is offered every 8 years or so).
3 - Our non-tenure track faculty are completely protected from "arbitrary student complaints" - see my point about job protection.
4 - LOL, ever hear of Middle States? Maybe legislators have limited power over us, but there are other agencies or organizations that do. If we lost our particular extremely large professional organization accreditation, maybe no one tenured would be fired, but they would be getting no raises and no university support for a while. There are things short of firing that can be done.
5 - I'm not sure about this - do you think non-tenure track faculty who have significant rights if they are terminated as they are on automatically renewed one-year contracts (again, where I work per my friends) have a huge reason to move on? Most of our non-tenure track faculty have been with us for ten or more years. We do have faculty who have 30+ years of experience, but they are a source of instablity and reversion.
If you are talking about graduate schools, that is somewhat different, and certainly my experiences are colored by the universities I have worked and taught at.
It is in our tenured faculty’s contract that they can be laid off, but there are a few procedures in place that have extra protections over others. Same with our non-tenure track faculty as well.
Discussing K-12 in this thread is off topic - Fallenchemist
Tenure is interesting. I know that the traditional justification has been to protect freedom of speech and the willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. I would imagine that there are some professors at the University of Wisconsin who are very happy that Scott Walker isn’t able to fire them because they believe in the theory of evolution or have studies supporting a contention that trickle down economics doesn’t actually work or that countries that institute gun control reduce homicides and suicides relative to countries that don’t.
We are in an era of anti-intellectual Know-Nothingism in lots of state governments and Congress. For that reason, tenure probably is a good thing. What would happen to climate change research in most Republican-controlled states if there were no tenure?
That doesn’t mean its effects are all salutary. If I recall correctly, there is no mandatory retirement age for professors and older professors are deciding to stay unretired for as long as possible. This contributes to unattractive job opportunities for new PhDs and/or younger academics.
In some fields like math and physics, star researchers greatest contributions come in the first decade of their research. Tenure then rewards them, I guess, for having made the great contributions. In other fields, I’m not so sure. I can’t quite figure out what humanities professors actually do for research (for a while, it seemed to be finding racism or sexism in old and new texts and pretty much everywhere one looked). I don’t know if greater wisdom is developed post-tenure. I doubt greater productivity is developed post-tenure.
Having a tenure hurdle early in one’s career can have perverse effects. In some of the fields I am/have been in (I’m a lapsed academic with a vestigial affiliation at a major research university), tenure decisions seem to involve counting the number of publications in those journals deemed high status and tenure winners tend to max out publications, often repeating the same basic idea/technique over and over again to boost numbers. The research often seems derivative and focused on relatively unimportant problems, but if build a big enough coalition of folks who like that kind of work emerges, they can help each other get tenure. The smart ones, after getting tenure, decide to do serious research after that, but most seem to continue on with the trivial, thankfully at a slower pace than before they had tenure.
shawbridge actually tenure would be used to protect a scientist at a university that says… hey guys, the data on your theory about global warming being certain is shaky. it is not to protect the status quo it is protect the scientist who says global warming is far from settled. and protect those people who say it is not a fact that the earth is flat from others in their department, administrators and bureaucrats at those universities and governors like say in california or new york. and perhaps straight up to interference from our current the federal government.
I am unaware of scott walker trying to fire professors who do not agree with him. I would be interested in seeing some info on that.
@zobroward, I agree that tenure protects one who is challenging the orthodoxy, whether that is evidence-based orthodoxy like global climate change (that could still be incorrect) or faith-based orthodoxy like evolution or political desires like insisting that gun control laws cannot eliminate needless deaths.
I began my academic career in the People’s Republic of Cambridge and despite being a political moderate, was seen as a conservative. I saw and we still see people punished because they or their work were not politically correct. At this point, however, I see a greater danger from Know-Nothingism and anti-intellectualism on the right than PC on the left.
With respect to Scott Walker, I had just picked him as an example as I know he is trying to diminish/disempower the University of Wisconsin in a variety of ways including removing from its mission something about the generation of knowledge/search for truth. But, since you ask, here are a few goodies including his desire to transfer tenure from a legal requirement to one decided by the board (whom he controls or would expect to control).
He seems to want a university system that doesn’t produce inconvenient research that can’t be controlled and sees a more limited and vocational role for the university system. He’s a clever bureaucrat, using pretexts to accomplish his objectives.
Most of the growth of the US economy and the vast majority of higher-income jobs follow from the US’s past academic pre-eminence and current academic strength (the pre-eminence has been waning as we’ve been systematically reducing in real terms NSF and NIH funding). Companies founded by Stanford profs and alumni generated $2.7 trillion in annual revenue and created 5.4 million jobs. Companies founded by MIT profs and alumni generate another $2 trillion in revenue and created 3.3 million jobs. Wisconsin is one of the stronger schools in CS and stats, I believe. (See http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2012/11/06/stanfords-2-7-trillion-economic-jolt-beats-mits-2-trillion/)It’s not clear that the strongest professors will stick around as someone is taking a meat cleaver to the budget for political reasons. If I were trying to create jobs, I’d be spending money in a targeted way on higher education (as they have done in Austin) rather than trying to disembowel it.
As a disclaimer, I left full-time academia many years ago. Although I retain an affiliation at my old employer, I have worked as an investment banker, a family office (private equity), and a hedge fund and currently run a boutique consulting firm. So, I’m not a shill for academia. As a matter of public policy, however, I’d be trying to replicate what Stanford and MIT have done elsewhere and put $$$ behind it. That doesn’t mean not eliminating tenure, but I would probably be eliminating tenure at retirement age (or earlier) to enhance productivity.
Wisconsin should (other states too) focus on strengthening the STEM’s as well as nursing, pharmacy etc…the other departments are not part of what a state school’s mission should be. if walker cleans up schools to refocus on what should be the state schools core mission which does revolve around training the next generation that powers the economic engine. as well as research in the stems’s which benefit the state by generating revenue and new companies, …I would not be opposed. but as far as tenure in the departments that some may refer to as basket weaving it is the not left leaning professors who need protection from bullying, it is very much the opposite.
While tenure turns the academic job market into an insider/outsider job market that is even more unfavorable for new entrants, the basic numbers of the academic job market are unfavorable to begin with for new entrants. A faculty member at a research university, over the course of a career, mentors dozens of PhD students to completion of their PhD degrees. This is obviously dozens of times more than needed to replace him/her when s/he retires. Of course, some PhD graduates go to non-research universities, LACs, community colleges, and research jobs not in schools, but are all of these places enough to absorb all of the PhD graduates?
@zobroward, I am sympathetic to your first contention, though boosting STEM research and faculty does not appear to be what’s happening in Wisconsin.
Your second contention about basket-weaving seems flawed at best. First, I think you have definitional problems. Do you think psychology or economics are part of basket-weaving? How about history or political science? Literature? Painting? Theater? Education? Special education? Please be specific.
Second, beyond a lack of definitional clarity, I can’t discern any logic behind your assertion and no evidence I can think of. If a right wing governor’s hand-chosen board takes away tenure and then is selectively eliminating faculty, you appear to be claiming that the right wing faculty members’ jobs are at greater risk. How do you arrive at that conclusion?
ucbalumnus, there are not enough academic jobs to absorb all PhDs, but the research–at least a few years ago–showed that PhDs had more lifetime earnings than MAs, etc. Relevant to this discussion, increased life time earnings were an outcome for even “basket weavers.”
Despite a really lovely dissertation, one of my doctoral students never made an academic search. Instead she returned home for a job writing grant proposals for a major city. She made significantly more than she would have as a professor. In fact she said that faculty were exploited, working so hard for so little money.
shawbridge
no what I am saying is that at colleges across the united states with very very few exceptions non leftist professors need protection not specifically in wisconsin state schools. the leftist have a one up advantage before tenure can ever be achieved they are the gate keepers and they keep people who do not conform to their leftist orthodoxy out in the first place.
we all have a good idea as to what basket weaving majors are. state schools across this country should re-calibrate themselves. adding majors so everyone can attend is not what a state college mission should be. I know that is a hard sell but since money is not growing on trees , the state school systems should (and slowly but surely will) recognize the core mission of state schools is graduate the next generation or doctors, pharmacists, engineers, etc… state schools should not have degrees which somebody gets a very questionable “degree”, ends up in debt and has no job option but working at the corner coffee shop.
maybe not a popular opinion but it is a conversation that needs to be had.