The End of Tenure?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/books/review/Shea-t.html

by robg • 16 years ago

31 15 16 years ago

protomyth2• 16 years ago

Maybe they should end it in High Schools first. Also, a lot of colleges use the athletic program to pay for things. They are basically pro-sports with an attached school.

w1ntermute• 16 years ago

> Maybe they should end it in High Schools first.

That'll be very difficult to do because of the teachers' unions. Since they have a lot of political clout and the government controls most high schools (whereas private institutions are much more common at the tertiary level), it would probably easier to start with colleges.

protomyth2• 16 years ago

Yeah, your right, it would be easier to start with colleges, but every time I see a "broken college" article, I really wish they'd fix the input system first.

yequalsx2• 16 years ago

Sports programs do not pay for things at colleges. For all but a few universities the sports programs are subsidized by student fees, academic funds, and the endowment. Even at so called profitable sports universities they don't factor in the cost of stadiums and upkeep.

crcarlson• 16 years ago

One traditional way of dealing with this issue is to have a mandatory retirement age. Pre-tenure and usually pre-full professors usually do a good job of hustling for money and growing the university. And after attaining full titles the inertia of their work carries them for a while. Then some go on to continue being research (money) making machines and others start to milk it. Mandatory retirement makes room for more ambitious younger professors to bring in more work.

Running a research lab at a university is a lot like running a startup. I believe the professors should get to enjoy the fruits of being successful early in their career later on after being tenured. Otherwise there would be no incentive for these guys to make the personal sacrifices required to do great work above and beyond what an 8-5er might do.

It seems like a half way decent financial model and an intelligent management of investments should be able to continue to make a system like this successful. The current focus on tenure as the problem is more of a reaction to poor financial planning by the endowment managers IMO.

In sports the ultimate prevention against doping (if someone wanted to prevent such a thing) would be to test frozen samples every year for say 20 years with progressively more modern technology and threaten to retroactively remove trophies or awards of those discovered to be clever cheaters. I wonder if there is a similar analog for financial institution managers where one would place their compensation in reserve and only dole it out based upon proper risk management behavior (as well as returns) as proven out by future events.

bokonist• 16 years ago

Mandatory retirement is banned by the 1986 Age Discrimination Act. Perhaps universities could try and get around it by offering newly "tenured" professors a thirty year contract, rather than "tenure". But that might be inviting a law suit.

_delirium• 16 years ago

> Otherwise there would be no incentive for these guys to make the personal sacrifices required to do great work above and beyond what an 8-5er might do.

My guess is that universities would also find themselves having to replace that incentive with monetary incentives, at least in areas where industry options exist. Universities currently get away with paying below industry rates partly because of the lure of research freedom: once you're tenured, you get complete freedom to define your research agenda (well, universities still have a lot of levers they can use to put pressure, but it's at least relatively large freedom). But if you're never going to get to that point, and have to continually justify your research in light of current grant opportunities, what's hot versus out of favor in various fields, how much your output was this year, etc., you don't necessarily have more freedom than you'd have at an industrial research lab. So I think universities would find it harder to attract researchers unless they started paying salaries on par with industry research positions, which may not make abolishing tenure a net money saver.

VengefulCynic• 16 years ago

In the end, to my mind, the thing that pisses people off the most is the consistency with which tuition increases outpace inflation. (http://www.finaid.org/savings/tuition-inflation.phtml) After that, all issues like out-of-control costs, expensive research centers and sports facilities just raise the question, "Are these things paying for themselves or are they just translating into costs that need to be passed onto students in the form of tuition?"

Just look at the comparison to a 2-year college and do your own analysis. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/the-skyrocketin...

yequalsx2• 16 years ago

As you pointed out the great increase in tuition is mostly from private colleges. In public schools the increase comes from declining state support. When I went to school tuition paid 1/3 of the cost of my education. Today it is common for tuition to only cover 1/2 of the cost of education. Tuition is the way to make up the for the loss of state support.

Tenure is not why colleges cost so much. Most teachers are not tenured and tenure is becoming less and less prevalent. The debate about tenure and its merits has nothing to do with the cost of college.

EDIT: In the last paragraph I'm complaining about the article and not the post I'm responding to.

joeyo• 16 years ago

I find it troubling that the article doesn't even mention a single time the reason why professors have tenure in the first place: academic freedom. It's difficult to have scholarly discourse on unpopular or unprofitable topics if you have to fear for your job.

merraksh• 16 years ago

One of the most important balances you are advised to learn as a tenure-track and a tenured professor is that between research and teaching. The college measures your performance, and hence decides if you get tenured, based, among others, on how much research (publications) and on your teaching evaluations.

At least officially, for a tenure track professor (mine is a Math dept.) both research and teaching are equally important, but while you can limit the time spent on teaching (preparing notes, office hours etc.) research and service take all the rest.

Spin off the med schools and research institutes, they say. University presidents “should be musing about education, not angling for another center on antiterrorist technologies.”

Isn't the purpose of a scholar that of creating knowledge and disseminating it? I don't think a professor that does only teaching can create knowledge, at least not as much as the one that does both --- with the right balance, obviously.

oogoog• 16 years ago

Tenure is weird, but its only a part of the reason university prices are so high.

First, getting a great education in a luxurious environment from world famous researchers is just going to be expensive. Unsurprisingly, not everyone is going to be able to afford that. Most people will have to find another way.

Second, government subsidies and regulation must raise the cost of education for the entire market -- private schools too. Ironically this hurts poor people the most.

Daishiman• 16 years ago

A lot of university systems in other places of the world do not have tenure. At least where I study, positions last two years and are renewed in contests where candidates are evaluated on academic, educational, and professional qualifications, and an "order of merit" is created, whereby the first in the order gets the position. There's a mandatory retirement age at 65, after which a few exceptional professors might still teach under special temporary assignments.

It's not perfect in any way, but at least there's a set of fairly objective criteria, and the candidates are judges by people outside of the institution (usually esteemed professors from foreign universities), and it does put some pressure into academics for keeping up with their research and teaching. The downside is that some very senior professor's merits are already so great that it's almost impossible that they lose in a contest, which is in a way similar to tenure or great seniority in other public sectors.

nanairo• 16 years ago

Maybe it's different in the USA, but having studied in the UK I find the jab at the olympic class sports facilities a bit populistic to say the least.

The University is a place with a LOT of young people, so already putting a sport facility there is a good idea (the ones here are always very much used). Second at least where I have been, they are open to local residents too, who can therefore benefit from good facilities.

Finally I am a bit discouraged when one day I hear we need to do something to incentive sports and lower obesity, and the next they shoot on the sports facilities of unis. To me it seems a lot like sour grape: "I don't have it so you shouldn't either".

Edit: Oh, forgot to point out that there is such strong competition between unis, that good sports facility are a very easy and relatively cheap way of getting students to apply, and hence to get money for the rest of the uni.

julius_geezer• 16 years ago

I wonder whether HN, the NY Times, the Economist, etc.haven't any unproductive fascination with Higher Ed stories. I find it a much more interesting fascination than (say) the NY Times's fascination with parochial NY (and usually) Manhattan fads, but not necessarily of wider interest.

The End of Tenure?

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