You describe the tenure process and work schedule for a professor at a top 100 research school, which is probably all you are familiar with and which obviously clouds your perceptions of "normal." In reality, there are something like 3000 colleges and universities and most professors' normal teaching load is 4x4 if not more. There are no TAs and classes can be anywhere from 20 to 100 students, which means one person has to handle a lot of grading. The notion that you only have to prep once and then recycle it forever might be true for tenured professors at R1 schools who give the same lecture you can find on YouTube, but again, in the real world of higher ed where 99% of faculty work, we are expected to actually teach students through varied pedagogies, including simulations, projects, and numerous other approaches that take a lot of time. Our service expectations are much greater too. Does all of this justify tenure? As a politics professor at a regional public university who is actually teaching hundreds of students each semester, I sure as hell want the protection of tenure in case some woke administrator or overly sensitive sophomore gets offended by something I say. This is why we have tenure, not to protect R1 faculty from their next big Peer Reviewed Article that 30 people will read and one will cite.
I believe that Caplan's point is that tenured professors at even schools outside of the top 100 are not outright *required* to teach through the various time-consuming pedagogies that you describe, nor are they actually required to zealously take on many service requirements. (Indeed, Caplan himself noted several ways by which tenured professors successfully weasel their way out of service requirements.) Will some - perhaps even most - such tenured professors take on such tasks anyway? I have no doubt that they do. Nevertheless the protection of tenure is so formidable that, frankly, little if anything can be done to those tenured professors who indeed choose to recycle the same teaching notes over and over again and/or who do the absolute bare minimum necessary to check the box regarding their service. Like Caplan said, the only thing that the school can be do to such disengaged tenured professors is perhaps deny such tenured professors promotion to the rank of full professor - which represents only a rather minor salary increase anyway.
And besides, I would pose the following question to you and everybody else here: To follow your logic, if tenure is indeed necessary to protect faculty from - as you put it - the "overly wok administrator or overly sensitive sophomore" - then why should only *tenured* faculty receive such protection? Why is it perfectly fine for the overly woke administrator and overly sensitive sophomore to threaten the junior (recently hired) and therefore *untenured* and unprotected faculty with the loss of their jobs? Shouldn't they too be protected?
Indeed, I might argue that it is precisely the junior faculty who need tenure protection the *most*. After all, they're just starting their careers and therefore haven't had the benefit of experience to develop their political savviness. They are therefore more likely to inadvertently do or say something to offend somebody. Surely we all made uncouth and thoughtless comments when we were younger. I know I did. Who hasn't? Yet by your logic, a junior professor hired right out of grad school and who are not far removed from being kids themselves should be subject to the mercies of the overly sensitive administrator or the overly sensitive sophomore.
Professor Spina, I would love to hear why you should *currently* enjoy the protection of tenure against that overly woke administrator or that overly sensitive sophomore but your younger pre-tenured self should not have enjoyed any such protection.
You want protection? Me too. In my job. But I dont have it, and no one else does.
What make your job so special, your 'work' so special, that it needs protection against sensitive sophomores, and more than I need protection against some sensative client or collegae. It aint special what you do.
A world in which fewer people are fired arbitrarily is in fact a better world in my view. And professor is a job based on speech in a way that an office worker who suddenly stood up and made a harangue on his various opinions would not be. But as the article occasionally mentions, it is all moot anyway since tenure is dying.
Interesting take. But it wasn't always this way with faculty being afraid of offending students. It may be that tenure now serves this purpose but it hasn't always been so.
The case for tenure is a little bit stronger than you make it out to be.
1. It's true that no other industry uses something like tenure to incentivize over-the-hill employees from blocking the careers of up-and-comers. But tenure defenders argue that that in other industries, there exists managers whose jobs are not threatened by the up-and-comers and who are able to evaluate the quality of the new hires' work. And the claim is that this is different in academia -- the only people capable of evaluating the work are those whose jobs are in jeopardy.
2. Another argument for tenure starts with the observation that almost all of the valuable research is done early in researchers' career. Therefore it is much more important to incentivize hard work early on than it is to get any effort at all out of workers later in their career. Tenure accomplishes this -- a big prize that can only be won through lots of hard work early on. This applies more to Top 20 institutions than to middling ones where the required research for tenure isn't that impressive.
I'm not sure if I believe either of these, but Bryan should be attacking the strongest version of the arguments for tenure.
Isn't part of the reason great work isn't done later in one's career because they are no longer incentivized to (they have tenure)? That said, I don't totally buy it that the possibility of tenure incentivizes valuable research. More likely it incentivizes various bad practices to achieve the publications needed for tenure, which is orthogonal to good research.
I sympathize with your general point about tenure, but your estimate of how little time is spent on teaching by the typical tenured professor is badly exagerated. Do you literally spend zero minutes all semster reviewing your class material? Do you never write new exam questions or meet with students during office hours? My rough estimate is that your teaching time estimate is off by a factor of 3 per course. Even so, tenure is a pretty sweet deal.
Agreed, it's crazy to assume that a typical tenured professor walks in cold for every lecture, never meets with students, never grades exams, never makes new exam questions or assignments, etc. I agree that tenure is a sweet deal, but it's obvious that his assessment is rigged and it hurts his credibility.
I'm in engineering and our accreditation requires assessment and "continuous improvement" of student learning outcomes. Even for assignments or exams on which an outcome is not assessed, I'm always trying to figure out what students aren't understanding in one year and make notes so I can improve my teaching the next year.
Yes! This is exactly my thinking. When I discover an author obviously exhagerating about something I'm familiar with, I'm forced to discount heavily what they say about other things that I'm unfamiliar with.
It's great that you are always trying to improve your teaching!
But I believe Caplan's point is that the protection of tenure means that, frankly, you don't *need* to improve your teaching. If you choose not constantly improve your teaching and your teaching ratings suffers as a consequence, frankly, as a tenured professor, you still can't lose your tenure. At worst, you might be denied promotion (e.g. to the rank of Full Professor). But that's not that large of a salary bump.
I believe Caplan's point is that a tenured professor cannot be fired solely because they fail to do those tasks that you mention. Do many tenured professors still do it? Sure. But they're not outright *required* to do it. Not constantly curating your teaching and therefore suffering from abysmal teaching ratings is not by itself grounds for the revocation of tenure. If a tenured professor chooses to recycle the same exam questions over and over again, never review their teaching materials, and provide only desultory office hours (perhaps just over Zoom), well, nothing can stop them.
Your points do not present a case for tenure - maybe you work 40 hours a week ... tenure means not being fired basically. Whether you work 5 or 50 hours a week is not relevant ... why should you have a guaranteed job?
Part of this is unique to English/humanities professors. When I look at tenured professors in STEM fields they often continue to run huge labs and churn out lots of work.
Regarding the issue of tenure making for bad incentives that depends hugely on a number of assumptions. How do you value the production of papers in an existing paradigm relative to the costs of being blind to an alternative approach or heretical view? Are academics primarily motivated by monetary compensation or social status in their field? Is it even politically possible to pay a market wage at state schools for talent w/o this security..
Yes, ofc, professors don't offer any real teaching value or resource. But, as you've convincingly argued, the vast majority of education is about signalling and to signal high status you often need to engage in some kind of costly signalling. **A system where that costly signalling produces positive externalities in terms of research and human knowledge is a huge win**. If we give it up we won't lose the costly signals but it will just all go into having fancy dorms, greats sports etc etc
The issues of publication here are not so unique to the humanities as you believe. STEM professors churn out lots of publications through their labs (when they have them, not all do by a long shot), but the quality of those publications is extremely questionable. Indeed, it is beginning to be questioned quite severely as we find that many do not replicate at all, and fraud is distressingly common. It isn't a problem of pointless papers, or "After study we have determined that, yes, the sky is still blue", but papers that are false and mislead our knowledge for years all while being cited and built upon by others.
You say all that as though it is a good thing, instead of suggesting that the entire process is a money sink. It would be better if most of those researchers were not funded, by anyone but certainly by government money.
The bigger issue is that people are willing to fund universities because they believe the universities are 1: educating the young and 2: performing valuable research. In fact, they do neither with the vast majority of that funding.
It's a question of alternatives. The only question that matters is if a change can make things better. Obviously it would be great if we had a better system that more efficiently encouraged knowledge generation but that's a very hard problem. The system we have now lead to huge increases in human std of living so until we have a better more efficient system let's not throw it out.
Some activities are just pretty hard to meaningfully incentivize. The best the smart ppl at many funding agencies have been able to come up w/ for grant funding is now: maybe we should give up on even trying to evaluate quality ahead of time and just try handing most of them out randomly amoung the plausible applicants.
You are neglecting the very important option of "Stop spending a huge amount of money on something that doesn't do what it is supposed to do." Even spending less would be an improvement.
The notion that the current system is responsible for the huge increases in standard of living is... well it is a hell of an assertion, on that I do not think would hold up at all upon reflection.
Do you mean just stop sending people to colleges? But there would still be the same incentives to single quality as a potential employee and it would result in similar waste...just probably with less positive externalities. The need to signal quality drives the institutions to spend money on costly signals of their value and we'd see the same thing if we replaced college with private accreditation companies.
Do you mean the gov should just stop funding all university based research. But even if it's pretty ineffecient it's still a very positive ROI (and better than trying to pay corps of basic research).
Also, I want to suggest that academics play an important role in society as a force for stability and a mechanism for formulating an elite consensus. Humans are weird creatures who wouldn't respect academics to play such a high status role if they weren't awarded markers of high status (tenure substitutes for massive pay).
In other words yes, we may be paying them to sit around and sound erudite but that has value.
Sure, but two issues: First, most professors could have been paid very well in the private sector so you need to give commensurate compensation. I doubt many public and many private universities would be willing to pay google style salaries to their CS profs etc so they instead compensate them in job security.
Also, we do want many of them to do research etc. Now if the bar is super easy to clear for continued employment it doesn't offer much -- if any -- benefit. Indeed, it likely floods journals with really crappy papers spit out to meet pro-forma requirements.
Ok, what if we use more robust evaluation. But now you have the problem tenure was designed to fix. Everyone stays to narrow safe research that never has a chance of discovering new paradigms and certainly doesn't challenge sacred cows.
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Realistically, there are better rules that differ from department to department but once you give up the notion of a shared tenure system no one would trust that reasonable rules would be implemented.
To be clear, Caplan is not an English/humanities professor. Rather, he is a social science (and specifically an economics) professor. While some economics professors do indeed run huge labs, most do not.
I feel this post didn't fully address the pro-tenure argument of "guaranteed job security gives researchers the freedom to say and investigate whatever they choose". As exemplified by the fact you just blew a whistle and will (presumably) face no career consequences. Compare that with my field (I work for a private consulting company), where I have criticisms of the industry that if shared publicly could lose me my job and mark me as untouchable to my company's competitors.
I agree that job security removes incentives, but perhaps that is an unavoidable tradeoff with honesty? Plus doesn't the grueling road to tenure (a road that I certainly could not handle) remove anyone who has any intention of just "phoning it in" for the rest of their career?
I don't think the grueling road removes all or most of those who would later phone it in. And some decide along the way. As he noted, there are tons of tenured faculty who do no research and barely teach.
Without seeing any stats (though I would be interested to have a look) I would agree it doesn't remove "all" but my intuition is it probably removes "most". I'm also really curious how this plays out generationally. My graduate supervisor outright admitted that he would not have made it to being a prof if he was starting out today. Could it be today's new profs are less likely to be coast-after-getting-tenure-types (genuinely just wondering out loud)?
I've heard profs say that yet they came from the Ivy league, they just had fewer pubs, in part because people weren't playing the quantity over quality angle so much yet. They had connections, and today many still get their positions that way. You're right--it's an empirical question, but I suspect there are still many who get tt positions at unis in the top 100 who will coast or otherwise not be very productive after tenure. Many aren't that good before tenure! They just have good credentials and no one has the heart to fire them. But to your point, I think it could be that academia increasingly selects for productivity vs other things, and maybe those folks are more likely to stay hyper productive. But they could also burn out right after tenure...
Does anyone have data on the career trajectory of "productivity" (e.g., publications, citations, grants, research expenditures, PhD students graduated) of faculty across Untenured, Tenured Assoc Prof, and Tenured Prof? Even a snapshot for a given year would be useful. The truth is that many Tenured facutly work harder and more more productive post-tenure; they have often build labs/groups that requires them to continue chasing funding and publications to keep their staff/students employed.
The largest proportion of American faculty are neither tenured nor tenure track.
They are either contract lecturers (hired to teach for a certain number of years; no tenure protections) or, more likely, adjuncts: temps hired to teach individual classes.
The awful status of adjuncts is well known, if scarcely acknowledged, within higher ed: lousy pay, zero benefits, no admin support (office, staff). They are the backbone of US colleges and universities and lack the academic freedom protections you rightly ascribe to the tenured.
At this point if people are still signing up for grad school in areas where they have no tt job prospects, it's on them. That cat has been out of the bag for a while now.
On the one hand, plenty of folks have warned would-be PhDs against grad study, citing the odds.
On the other, enough people feel they can beat those odds. And they have some reason, having been successful at the .edu game, as the other Bryan describes.
Meanwhile, most grand schools keep maintaining classes which are too large.
Agree. I thought I could beat the odds. And I did but barely. I was bitter about that for a while, blaming whomever I could blame but myself. In hindsight, I know I would not have listened to anyone.
I don't at all like that there is pressure to recruit PhDs and MAs to fill classes, to make our department look "healthy", etc. But I feel ok if I know I've been honest and haven't been trying too hard to woo anyone. In my experience, people are generally rational actors when it comes to such choices. If they had better options, they'd pursue them.
But I believe that Caplan made it clear that his post is not talking about contract/adjunct lecturers. He's talking *specifically* about tenure-track faculty. If you're not tenure-track faculty then Caplan's post clearly does not apply; nor does Caplan ever claim that it does.
Indeed, if I were to channel Caplan, my guess would be that those who can obtain only contract/adjunct lectureships should just leave academia entirely and embark upon another career. And yes, that means that people in certain fields (e.g. the humanities) shouldn't embark upon a PhD program with the belief that they will ever obtain a tenure-track position in the first place.
Yes, Bryan's post is aimed at tenure-track faculty. What I was doing was reminding people that that population is just one among the professoriate, and that the adjunct/lecturer/grad student group helps make Caplan's dream come true.
Bryan, you are taking the picture of the 1% among profs and acting as if it's the universal. In fact, what you've described here is entirely false for anyone not at an R1. A 4/4 load with no TA is much more normal.
Yet even so, the crux of Caplan's point still stands: Once a professor - even at a school outside of the R1 - obtains tenure, they can essentially coast for the rest of their lives. Sure, maybe they'll be stuck with the 4/4 teaching schedule with no TA support that you describe. But then all they have to do is then prep once, recycle the same teaching notes over and over again, and use grading schemes with fast rubrics (e.g. multiple choice, T/F, fill in the blank). Heck, nowadays, profs can just use AI (with proper prompt engineering) to grade subjective topics.
To be sure, I have no doubt that plenty of tenured professors do indeed conscientiously and continually curate and improve their teaching materials and otherwise invest a great deal of time in their teaching. But Caplan's central point is that they don't *have* to do that.
I'm just guessing, but I'm pretty sure I know more of these profs (at non-R1s) than you do, and I don't know anyone who acts like that. I'm sure there are though, so my next point is, so what? The constitutional safeguards against self-incrimination or requiring search warrants make it easier for criminals to get away with crimes, but these are nevertheless a good idea, because they protect innocent people's rights. Similarly, if you can show me nine profs who are deadwood in the manner you suggest, who benefit from tenure unjustly, it would still be a good idea to have it, to protect academic freedom for the other 99%. Also, any prof who opposes the idea of tenure is free to not seek or accept it.
As I explicitly stated before - and I will therefore quote myself: "I have no doubt that plenty of tenured professors do indeed conscientiously and continually curate and improve their teaching materials and otherwise invest a great deal of time in their teaching".
Nevertheless, Caplan's central point stands that tenured professors don't *need* to do any such thing. Rather, that's their choice. And if they choose not to do that, well, that by itself is not grounds for the revocation of their tenure. *That* is the crux of Caplan's post.
With all due respect, your analogy of constitutional rights is flawed because by their very nature such rights are deliberately made available to *everyone in society*. Even the most despised person in society is nevertheless accorded constitutional rights. In stark contrast, the protections of academic freedom accorded by tenure are most certainly to available to everybody in academia, but rather are (obviously) available only to that subset of professors who are actually granted tenure. What about all of the *junior untenured* professors? Shouldn't it be important for them to also have academic freedom? Why should only professors who are actually granted tenure - which (as Caplan indicated) is largely a popularity contest - be given academic freedom?
Indeed, given that I see that you are a tenured professor yourself (yeah, I Googled you) , I would love to hear your opinion of why you should enjoy academic freedom *only now* in your career after you obtained tenure, but your younger pre-tenured self should not have been given academic freedom. If academic freedom is truly so important, then everybody in academia should have it, no?
The point of a probationary period is to weed out just exactly the kind of terrible profs Caplan is complaining about. Untenured profs tend to enjoy some of the benefits of academic freedom prior to tenure, since most schools have cultural norms about academic freedom, a general expectation. A junior prof getting in trouble for a publication than engendered controversy would be a bad look for any university. The point of tenure is to make that general expectation more robust. So yes, I agree with you, all academics need academic freedom to function, but you can't just hire someone and make them a permanent employee on day 1. The probationary period is used to demonstrate that this person is someone who can do the work they've been hired to do. The relationship becomes permanent after a probationary period. This is why, certain reality TV shows notwithstanding, we don't marry people immediately but date for a while, get engaged, etc. Academic hiring attempts to find the right "match" but doesn't always do so. Hence the probationary period pre-tenure. Is your objection to the existence of tenure, or to the probationary period before one gets it?
To follow your dating analogy, we do indeed date somebody, go through an engagement period with them, etc. to see if they are terrible before we decide to marry them.
But then - and here is where your analogy goes awry - if post-marriage we discover that they are terrible after all, *we then divorce them*. Indeed, as we all know, about 50% of all marriages end in divorce.
In contrast, what percentage of tenured professors have their tenure revoked?
Indeed, it seems to me that barring truly unusual circumstances (e.g. you're caught harassing somebody, you're caught stealing from the school, the entire department closes), it is practically impossible from a legal standpoint for a tenured professor to have their tenure revoked. In contrast, ever since the rise of no-fault divorce, people can and do lose their marriages for no reason other than that the spouse no longer wants to be married to them. (Heck, imagine if the tenure system worked like the marriage system whereby people routinely divorce their spouses because they just happened to meet a younger, more attractive person.)
Furthermore, as Caplan pointed out, the output of some tenured professors is indeed, frankly, terrible. Their teaching ratings are consistently poor, as plenty of unlucky students have discovered to their dismay. They produce little if any research, as evidenced by their CV's and Google scholar records. By all accounts, their universities should have 'divorced' them. But they can't. *That* is the problem that Caplan is pointing out.
(Oh by the way, why can't you just hire somebody and make them a permanent employee on day 1 anyway? Isn't that what they do in countries such as Japan whereby many companies to this very day still commonly hire fresh university graduates for lifetime employment? But I digress)
It was an analogy to part of the process, not the whole of the process. I don't object to the concept of divorce. That was meant as an analogy to the probationary period, not the institution itself. But if you can get fired for writing something controversial, it has a chilling effect on research and teaching, forces conformity and obedience, and other negatives which impede the professor's ability to function.
Plenty of profs produce research that maybe Bryan doesn't care for, but that doesn't mean there are thousands of profs producing garbage or nothing. Anyway, by that metric, many of those people would say Bryan produces poor research. I would disagree but that's the point: Bryan says unpopular stuff all the time, but the univ can't say "we don't like your conclusions, you're fired." As to them getting bad student evals, I couldn't care less: there's a mountain of research showing that those (a) correlate with easy grades and (b) are incredibly biased on 6 different dimensions. So when people say "tenure is bad because it protects bad teachers," my first thought it to wonder what the definition of "bad" is here. I know lots of profs who get dinged in student evals for doing things I think are praiseworthy. As to profs who are actually bad at communicating - that's another point of the probationary period. It gives senior faculty a chance to mentor the younger profs and help them become more effective educators (or, worst case scenario, get rid of them rather than tenuring them.)
These same arguments would apply to college football coaches. Although their contract is not for life, the relative payouts are so huge that they arguably could be. For example, Jimbo Fisher gets a guaranteed $75 million over 10 year whether he wins national championships or loses so many games they remove him and does no coaching. His only incentive for winning is prestige. To what extent is that relevant to tenured college professors as a motivator?
Many profs work their asses off, post tenure, in pursuit of prestige (I wish I could say it was in pursuit of truth or scientific knowledge but that would be naive). I am not sure about football coaches. Is there evidence that many slack off once they have the contract in hand? With profs, there's no publicity or public shaming if one slacks...which goes back to Bryan's point. Most profs labor (or fail to) in obscurity and relative anonymity.
"If the result is that I lose my dream job for life, so be it." No, you're safe: They have given it to you, they can't now take it away. Even if tenure is abolished, you'll be grandfathered in.
But I worry that the system won't work any better without tenure than it does with tenure. Even in the for-profit business world, it is hard to monitor individual performance. In the nonprofit world of higher education, the incentives are so weak the task is very unlikely to be done at all well. As you say, nonprofits function badly.
I forwarded this to my daughter who is in the process of completing her dissertation, but she's in social science so it's not too hard. And she's a woman so that helps. After completing my two Masters (MS, MBA while working and raising a family - I am a quant time master) and feeling the groove, I asked my (now ex) wife in what field she though I should pursue my PhD. Came the answer "What do you think your next wife would like?" Back to the mines went I.....
“Some will call me a hypocrite for taking part in this system, but that’s part and parcel of being a whistleblower. If I wasn’t a tenured professor, who would take my critique seriously?“
You have made your point. Now quit your job and stop living on government handouts. At least stop claiming you are a libertarian while you are engaging in this hypocrisy.
Bryan, there is another reason virtually everyone gets tenure at the lower ranked institutions, beyond nepotism (which I am skeptical about--I mean, it's not clear we like our colleagues more than we like status that comes with having colleagues who are highly productive/high impact). It is risky to deny tenure as there may not be the option to replace that person with another better one. Harder to get approval for new hires these days and some institutions no longer track "lines". For example, in my dept a colleague retired a couple of years ago and in the olden days, we'd be guaranteed approval for a new hire to replace that person. Not anymore. We have to argue for the hire much like we would for any position. And if the college doesn't see much $$value$$ in the position, then it's a no go.
And with this comment I figured out that I'll probably get tenure, as long as I'm not so bad that others would want to risk not being able to replace me with someone else. Yay!
You describe the tenure process and work schedule for a professor at a top 100 research school, which is probably all you are familiar with and which obviously clouds your perceptions of "normal." In reality, there are something like 3000 colleges and universities and most professors' normal teaching load is 4x4 if not more. There are no TAs and classes can be anywhere from 20 to 100 students, which means one person has to handle a lot of grading. The notion that you only have to prep once and then recycle it forever might be true for tenured professors at R1 schools who give the same lecture you can find on YouTube, but again, in the real world of higher ed where 99% of faculty work, we are expected to actually teach students through varied pedagogies, including simulations, projects, and numerous other approaches that take a lot of time. Our service expectations are much greater too. Does all of this justify tenure? As a politics professor at a regional public university who is actually teaching hundreds of students each semester, I sure as hell want the protection of tenure in case some woke administrator or overly sensitive sophomore gets offended by something I say. This is why we have tenure, not to protect R1 faculty from their next big Peer Reviewed Article that 30 people will read and one will cite.
I believe that Caplan's point is that tenured professors at even schools outside of the top 100 are not outright *required* to teach through the various time-consuming pedagogies that you describe, nor are they actually required to zealously take on many service requirements. (Indeed, Caplan himself noted several ways by which tenured professors successfully weasel their way out of service requirements.) Will some - perhaps even most - such tenured professors take on such tasks anyway? I have no doubt that they do. Nevertheless the protection of tenure is so formidable that, frankly, little if anything can be done to those tenured professors who indeed choose to recycle the same teaching notes over and over again and/or who do the absolute bare minimum necessary to check the box regarding their service. Like Caplan said, the only thing that the school can be do to such disengaged tenured professors is perhaps deny such tenured professors promotion to the rank of full professor - which represents only a rather minor salary increase anyway.
And besides, I would pose the following question to you and everybody else here: To follow your logic, if tenure is indeed necessary to protect faculty from - as you put it - the "overly wok administrator or overly sensitive sophomore" - then why should only *tenured* faculty receive such protection? Why is it perfectly fine for the overly woke administrator and overly sensitive sophomore to threaten the junior (recently hired) and therefore *untenured* and unprotected faculty with the loss of their jobs? Shouldn't they too be protected?
Indeed, I might argue that it is precisely the junior faculty who need tenure protection the *most*. After all, they're just starting their careers and therefore haven't had the benefit of experience to develop their political savviness. They are therefore more likely to inadvertently do or say something to offend somebody. Surely we all made uncouth and thoughtless comments when we were younger. I know I did. Who hasn't? Yet by your logic, a junior professor hired right out of grad school and who are not far removed from being kids themselves should be subject to the mercies of the overly sensitive administrator or the overly sensitive sophomore.
Professor Spina, I would love to hear why you should *currently* enjoy the protection of tenure against that overly woke administrator or that overly sensitive sophomore but your younger pre-tenured self should not have enjoyed any such protection.
You want protection? Me too. In my job. But I dont have it, and no one else does.
What make your job so special, your 'work' so special, that it needs protection against sensitive sophomores, and more than I need protection against some sensative client or collegae. It aint special what you do.
A world in which fewer people are fired arbitrarily is in fact a better world in my view. And professor is a job based on speech in a way that an office worker who suddenly stood up and made a harangue on his various opinions would not be. But as the article occasionally mentions, it is all moot anyway since tenure is dying.
Interesting take. But it wasn't always this way with faculty being afraid of offending students. It may be that tenure now serves this purpose but it hasn't always been so.
The case for tenure is a little bit stronger than you make it out to be.
1. It's true that no other industry uses something like tenure to incentivize over-the-hill employees from blocking the careers of up-and-comers. But tenure defenders argue that that in other industries, there exists managers whose jobs are not threatened by the up-and-comers and who are able to evaluate the quality of the new hires' work. And the claim is that this is different in academia -- the only people capable of evaluating the work are those whose jobs are in jeopardy.
2. Another argument for tenure starts with the observation that almost all of the valuable research is done early in researchers' career. Therefore it is much more important to incentivize hard work early on than it is to get any effort at all out of workers later in their career. Tenure accomplishes this -- a big prize that can only be won through lots of hard work early on. This applies more to Top 20 institutions than to middling ones where the required research for tenure isn't that impressive.
I'm not sure if I believe either of these, but Bryan should be attacking the strongest version of the arguments for tenure.
Mayeb most good work is done before tenure because after it you dont have to do any work.
Every other job requires good work on day 1 AND 5000. Why is teaching any different?
Isn't part of the reason great work isn't done later in one's career because they are no longer incentivized to (they have tenure)? That said, I don't totally buy it that the possibility of tenure incentivizes valuable research. More likely it incentivizes various bad practices to achieve the publications needed for tenure, which is orthogonal to good research.
I sympathize with your general point about tenure, but your estimate of how little time is spent on teaching by the typical tenured professor is badly exagerated. Do you literally spend zero minutes all semster reviewing your class material? Do you never write new exam questions or meet with students during office hours? My rough estimate is that your teaching time estimate is off by a factor of 3 per course. Even so, tenure is a pretty sweet deal.
Agreed, it's crazy to assume that a typical tenured professor walks in cold for every lecture, never meets with students, never grades exams, never makes new exam questions or assignments, etc. I agree that tenure is a sweet deal, but it's obvious that his assessment is rigged and it hurts his credibility.
I'm in engineering and our accreditation requires assessment and "continuous improvement" of student learning outcomes. Even for assignments or exams on which an outcome is not assessed, I'm always trying to figure out what students aren't understanding in one year and make notes so I can improve my teaching the next year.
Yes! This is exactly my thinking. When I discover an author obviously exhagerating about something I'm familiar with, I'm forced to discount heavily what they say about other things that I'm unfamiliar with.
It's great that you are always trying to improve your teaching!
But I believe Caplan's point is that the protection of tenure means that, frankly, you don't *need* to improve your teaching. If you choose not constantly improve your teaching and your teaching ratings suffers as a consequence, frankly, as a tenured professor, you still can't lose your tenure. At worst, you might be denied promotion (e.g. to the rank of Full Professor). But that's not that large of a salary bump.
I believe Caplan's point is that a tenured professor cannot be fired solely because they fail to do those tasks that you mention. Do many tenured professors still do it? Sure. But they're not outright *required* to do it. Not constantly curating your teaching and therefore suffering from abysmal teaching ratings is not by itself grounds for the revocation of tenure. If a tenured professor chooses to recycle the same exam questions over and over again, never review their teaching materials, and provide only desultory office hours (perhaps just over Zoom), well, nothing can stop them.
Your points do not present a case for tenure - maybe you work 40 hours a week ... tenure means not being fired basically. Whether you work 5 or 50 hours a week is not relevant ... why should you have a guaranteed job?
Part of this is unique to English/humanities professors. When I look at tenured professors in STEM fields they often continue to run huge labs and churn out lots of work.
Regarding the issue of tenure making for bad incentives that depends hugely on a number of assumptions. How do you value the production of papers in an existing paradigm relative to the costs of being blind to an alternative approach or heretical view? Are academics primarily motivated by monetary compensation or social status in their field? Is it even politically possible to pay a market wage at state schools for talent w/o this security..
Yes, ofc, professors don't offer any real teaching value or resource. But, as you've convincingly argued, the vast majority of education is about signalling and to signal high status you often need to engage in some kind of costly signalling. **A system where that costly signalling produces positive externalities in terms of research and human knowledge is a huge win**. If we give it up we won't lose the costly signals but it will just all go into having fancy dorms, greats sports etc etc
The issues of publication here are not so unique to the humanities as you believe. STEM professors churn out lots of publications through their labs (when they have them, not all do by a long shot), but the quality of those publications is extremely questionable. Indeed, it is beginning to be questioned quite severely as we find that many do not replicate at all, and fraud is distressingly common. It isn't a problem of pointless papers, or "After study we have determined that, yes, the sky is still blue", but papers that are false and mislead our knowledge for years all while being cited and built upon by others.
It depends on the area, but those publications are enough to bring in grants etc etc so they'd equally fool a body reviewing employment.
Indeed, the less we think it's possible to evaluate the quality of the work the less benefit you are able to derive by incentivizes.
You say all that as though it is a good thing, instead of suggesting that the entire process is a money sink. It would be better if most of those researchers were not funded, by anyone but certainly by government money.
The bigger issue is that people are willing to fund universities because they believe the universities are 1: educating the young and 2: performing valuable research. In fact, they do neither with the vast majority of that funding.
It's a question of alternatives. The only question that matters is if a change can make things better. Obviously it would be great if we had a better system that more efficiently encouraged knowledge generation but that's a very hard problem. The system we have now lead to huge increases in human std of living so until we have a better more efficient system let's not throw it out.
Some activities are just pretty hard to meaningfully incentivize. The best the smart ppl at many funding agencies have been able to come up w/ for grant funding is now: maybe we should give up on even trying to evaluate quality ahead of time and just try handing most of them out randomly amoung the plausible applicants.
You are neglecting the very important option of "Stop spending a huge amount of money on something that doesn't do what it is supposed to do." Even spending less would be an improvement.
The notion that the current system is responsible for the huge increases in standard of living is... well it is a hell of an assertion, on that I do not think would hold up at all upon reflection.
Do you mean just stop sending people to colleges? But there would still be the same incentives to single quality as a potential employee and it would result in similar waste...just probably with less positive externalities. The need to signal quality drives the institutions to spend money on costly signals of their value and we'd see the same thing if we replaced college with private accreditation companies.
Do you mean the gov should just stop funding all university based research. But even if it's pretty ineffecient it's still a very positive ROI (and better than trying to pay corps of basic research).
Also, I want to suggest that academics play an important role in society as a force for stability and a mechanism for formulating an elite consensus. Humans are weird creatures who wouldn't respect academics to play such a high status role if they weren't awarded markers of high status (tenure substitutes for massive pay).
In other words yes, we may be paying them to sit around and sound erudite but that has value.
Could we not use them for that purpose, while still being able to fire them for underperformance? (and presumably not for having unpopular views)?
Sure, but two issues: First, most professors could have been paid very well in the private sector so you need to give commensurate compensation. I doubt many public and many private universities would be willing to pay google style salaries to their CS profs etc so they instead compensate them in job security.
Also, we do want many of them to do research etc. Now if the bar is super easy to clear for continued employment it doesn't offer much -- if any -- benefit. Indeed, it likely floods journals with really crappy papers spit out to meet pro-forma requirements.
Ok, what if we use more robust evaluation. But now you have the problem tenure was designed to fix. Everyone stays to narrow safe research that never has a chance of discovering new paradigms and certainly doesn't challenge sacred cows.
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Realistically, there are better rules that differ from department to department but once you give up the notion of a shared tenure system no one would trust that reasonable rules would be implemented.
To be clear, Caplan is not an English/humanities professor. Rather, he is a social science (and specifically an economics) professor. While some economics professors do indeed run huge labs, most do not.
Yes, I was referencing the phenomenon in the article not suggesting Caplain himself was a humanities professor but I see how that was unclear.
I feel this post didn't fully address the pro-tenure argument of "guaranteed job security gives researchers the freedom to say and investigate whatever they choose". As exemplified by the fact you just blew a whistle and will (presumably) face no career consequences. Compare that with my field (I work for a private consulting company), where I have criticisms of the industry that if shared publicly could lose me my job and mark me as untouchable to my company's competitors.
I agree that job security removes incentives, but perhaps that is an unavoidable tradeoff with honesty? Plus doesn't the grueling road to tenure (a road that I certainly could not handle) remove anyone who has any intention of just "phoning it in" for the rest of their career?
I don't think the grueling road removes all or most of those who would later phone it in. And some decide along the way. As he noted, there are tons of tenured faculty who do no research and barely teach.
Without seeing any stats (though I would be interested to have a look) I would agree it doesn't remove "all" but my intuition is it probably removes "most". I'm also really curious how this plays out generationally. My graduate supervisor outright admitted that he would not have made it to being a prof if he was starting out today. Could it be today's new profs are less likely to be coast-after-getting-tenure-types (genuinely just wondering out loud)?
I've heard profs say that yet they came from the Ivy league, they just had fewer pubs, in part because people weren't playing the quantity over quality angle so much yet. They had connections, and today many still get their positions that way. You're right--it's an empirical question, but I suspect there are still many who get tt positions at unis in the top 100 who will coast or otherwise not be very productive after tenure. Many aren't that good before tenure! They just have good credentials and no one has the heart to fire them. But to your point, I think it could be that academia increasingly selects for productivity vs other things, and maybe those folks are more likely to stay hyper productive. But they could also burn out right after tenure...
Does anyone have data on the career trajectory of "productivity" (e.g., publications, citations, grants, research expenditures, PhD students graduated) of faculty across Untenured, Tenured Assoc Prof, and Tenured Prof? Even a snapshot for a given year would be useful. The truth is that many Tenured facutly work harder and more more productive post-tenure; they have often build labs/groups that requires them to continue chasing funding and publications to keep their staff/students employed.
The largest proportion of American faculty are neither tenured nor tenure track.
They are either contract lecturers (hired to teach for a certain number of years; no tenure protections) or, more likely, adjuncts: temps hired to teach individual classes.
The awful status of adjuncts is well known, if scarcely acknowledged, within higher ed: lousy pay, zero benefits, no admin support (office, staff). They are the backbone of US colleges and universities and lack the academic freedom protections you rightly ascribe to the tenured.
You don't mention graduate students. Many depts have grad students teach classes. But if these folks had better options they'd go after them.
Quite true. Lots of grad students, which is one explanation for the adjunct explosion.
And this is also where you see some rising unionization.
At this point if people are still signing up for grad school in areas where they have no tt job prospects, it's on them. That cat has been out of the bag for a while now.
We've been talking about this since the 1990s.
On the one hand, plenty of folks have warned would-be PhDs against grad study, citing the odds.
On the other, enough people feel they can beat those odds. And they have some reason, having been successful at the .edu game, as the other Bryan describes.
Meanwhile, most grand schools keep maintaining classes which are too large.
Agree. I thought I could beat the odds. And I did but barely. I was bitter about that for a while, blaming whomever I could blame but myself. In hindsight, I know I would not have listened to anyone.
I don't at all like that there is pressure to recruit PhDs and MAs to fill classes, to make our department look "healthy", etc. But I feel ok if I know I've been honest and haven't been trying too hard to woo anyone. In my experience, people are generally rational actors when it comes to such choices. If they had better options, they'd pursue them.
But I believe that Caplan made it clear that his post is not talking about contract/adjunct lecturers. He's talking *specifically* about tenure-track faculty. If you're not tenure-track faculty then Caplan's post clearly does not apply; nor does Caplan ever claim that it does.
Indeed, if I were to channel Caplan, my guess would be that those who can obtain only contract/adjunct lectureships should just leave academia entirely and embark upon another career. And yes, that means that people in certain fields (e.g. the humanities) shouldn't embark upon a PhD program with the belief that they will ever obtain a tenure-track position in the first place.
Yes, Bryan's post is aimed at tenure-track faculty. What I was doing was reminding people that that population is just one among the professoriate, and that the adjunct/lecturer/grad student group helps make Caplan's dream come true.
Bryan, you are taking the picture of the 1% among profs and acting as if it's the universal. In fact, what you've described here is entirely false for anyone not at an R1. A 4/4 load with no TA is much more normal.
Yet even so, the crux of Caplan's point still stands: Once a professor - even at a school outside of the R1 - obtains tenure, they can essentially coast for the rest of their lives. Sure, maybe they'll be stuck with the 4/4 teaching schedule with no TA support that you describe. But then all they have to do is then prep once, recycle the same teaching notes over and over again, and use grading schemes with fast rubrics (e.g. multiple choice, T/F, fill in the blank). Heck, nowadays, profs can just use AI (with proper prompt engineering) to grade subjective topics.
To be sure, I have no doubt that plenty of tenured professors do indeed conscientiously and continually curate and improve their teaching materials and otherwise invest a great deal of time in their teaching. But Caplan's central point is that they don't *have* to do that.
I'm just guessing, but I'm pretty sure I know more of these profs (at non-R1s) than you do, and I don't know anyone who acts like that. I'm sure there are though, so my next point is, so what? The constitutional safeguards against self-incrimination or requiring search warrants make it easier for criminals to get away with crimes, but these are nevertheless a good idea, because they protect innocent people's rights. Similarly, if you can show me nine profs who are deadwood in the manner you suggest, who benefit from tenure unjustly, it would still be a good idea to have it, to protect academic freedom for the other 99%. Also, any prof who opposes the idea of tenure is free to not seek or accept it.
As I explicitly stated before - and I will therefore quote myself: "I have no doubt that plenty of tenured professors do indeed conscientiously and continually curate and improve their teaching materials and otherwise invest a great deal of time in their teaching".
Nevertheless, Caplan's central point stands that tenured professors don't *need* to do any such thing. Rather, that's their choice. And if they choose not to do that, well, that by itself is not grounds for the revocation of their tenure. *That* is the crux of Caplan's post.
With all due respect, your analogy of constitutional rights is flawed because by their very nature such rights are deliberately made available to *everyone in society*. Even the most despised person in society is nevertheless accorded constitutional rights. In stark contrast, the protections of academic freedom accorded by tenure are most certainly to available to everybody in academia, but rather are (obviously) available only to that subset of professors who are actually granted tenure. What about all of the *junior untenured* professors? Shouldn't it be important for them to also have academic freedom? Why should only professors who are actually granted tenure - which (as Caplan indicated) is largely a popularity contest - be given academic freedom?
Indeed, given that I see that you are a tenured professor yourself (yeah, I Googled you) , I would love to hear your opinion of why you should enjoy academic freedom *only now* in your career after you obtained tenure, but your younger pre-tenured self should not have been given academic freedom. If academic freedom is truly so important, then everybody in academia should have it, no?
The point of a probationary period is to weed out just exactly the kind of terrible profs Caplan is complaining about. Untenured profs tend to enjoy some of the benefits of academic freedom prior to tenure, since most schools have cultural norms about academic freedom, a general expectation. A junior prof getting in trouble for a publication than engendered controversy would be a bad look for any university. The point of tenure is to make that general expectation more robust. So yes, I agree with you, all academics need academic freedom to function, but you can't just hire someone and make them a permanent employee on day 1. The probationary period is used to demonstrate that this person is someone who can do the work they've been hired to do. The relationship becomes permanent after a probationary period. This is why, certain reality TV shows notwithstanding, we don't marry people immediately but date for a while, get engaged, etc. Academic hiring attempts to find the right "match" but doesn't always do so. Hence the probationary period pre-tenure. Is your objection to the existence of tenure, or to the probationary period before one gets it?
To follow your dating analogy, we do indeed date somebody, go through an engagement period with them, etc. to see if they are terrible before we decide to marry them.
But then - and here is where your analogy goes awry - if post-marriage we discover that they are terrible after all, *we then divorce them*. Indeed, as we all know, about 50% of all marriages end in divorce.
In contrast, what percentage of tenured professors have their tenure revoked?
Indeed, it seems to me that barring truly unusual circumstances (e.g. you're caught harassing somebody, you're caught stealing from the school, the entire department closes), it is practically impossible from a legal standpoint for a tenured professor to have their tenure revoked. In contrast, ever since the rise of no-fault divorce, people can and do lose their marriages for no reason other than that the spouse no longer wants to be married to them. (Heck, imagine if the tenure system worked like the marriage system whereby people routinely divorce their spouses because they just happened to meet a younger, more attractive person.)
Furthermore, as Caplan pointed out, the output of some tenured professors is indeed, frankly, terrible. Their teaching ratings are consistently poor, as plenty of unlucky students have discovered to their dismay. They produce little if any research, as evidenced by their CV's and Google scholar records. By all accounts, their universities should have 'divorced' them. But they can't. *That* is the problem that Caplan is pointing out.
(Oh by the way, why can't you just hire somebody and make them a permanent employee on day 1 anyway? Isn't that what they do in countries such as Japan whereby many companies to this very day still commonly hire fresh university graduates for lifetime employment? But I digress)
It was an analogy to part of the process, not the whole of the process. I don't object to the concept of divorce. That was meant as an analogy to the probationary period, not the institution itself. But if you can get fired for writing something controversial, it has a chilling effect on research and teaching, forces conformity and obedience, and other negatives which impede the professor's ability to function.
Plenty of profs produce research that maybe Bryan doesn't care for, but that doesn't mean there are thousands of profs producing garbage or nothing. Anyway, by that metric, many of those people would say Bryan produces poor research. I would disagree but that's the point: Bryan says unpopular stuff all the time, but the univ can't say "we don't like your conclusions, you're fired." As to them getting bad student evals, I couldn't care less: there's a mountain of research showing that those (a) correlate with easy grades and (b) are incredibly biased on 6 different dimensions. So when people say "tenure is bad because it protects bad teachers," my first thought it to wonder what the definition of "bad" is here. I know lots of profs who get dinged in student evals for doing things I think are praiseworthy. As to profs who are actually bad at communicating - that's another point of the probationary period. It gives senior faculty a chance to mentor the younger profs and help them become more effective educators (or, worst case scenario, get rid of them rather than tenuring them.)
These same arguments would apply to college football coaches. Although their contract is not for life, the relative payouts are so huge that they arguably could be. For example, Jimbo Fisher gets a guaranteed $75 million over 10 year whether he wins national championships or loses so many games they remove him and does no coaching. His only incentive for winning is prestige. To what extent is that relevant to tenured college professors as a motivator?
Many profs work their asses off, post tenure, in pursuit of prestige (I wish I could say it was in pursuit of truth or scientific knowledge but that would be naive). I am not sure about football coaches. Is there evidence that many slack off once they have the contract in hand? With profs, there's no publicity or public shaming if one slacks...which goes back to Bryan's point. Most profs labor (or fail to) in obscurity and relative anonymity.
"If the result is that I lose my dream job for life, so be it." No, you're safe: They have given it to you, they can't now take it away. Even if tenure is abolished, you'll be grandfathered in.
But I worry that the system won't work any better without tenure than it does with tenure. Even in the for-profit business world, it is hard to monitor individual performance. In the nonprofit world of higher education, the incentives are so weak the task is very unlikely to be done at all well. As you say, nonprofits function badly.
There goes *your* next salary raise.
I forwarded this to my daughter who is in the process of completing her dissertation, but she's in social science so it's not too hard. And she's a woman so that helps. After completing my two Masters (MS, MBA while working and raising a family - I am a quant time master) and feeling the groove, I asked my (now ex) wife in what field she though I should pursue my PhD. Came the answer "What do you think your next wife would like?" Back to the mines went I.....
Just for the record, the Voltaire quote is him satirizing Leibniz's "Best of all possible worlds" theory.
“Some will call me a hypocrite for taking part in this system, but that’s part and parcel of being a whistleblower. If I wasn’t a tenured professor, who would take my critique seriously?“
You have made your point. Now quit your job and stop living on government handouts. At least stop claiming you are a libertarian while you are engaging in this hypocrisy.
Reminds me of a natural history quote by Richard Dawkins:
… the larval sea squirt which, when the time comes, settles down to a sedentary life and eats its brain, like an associate professor getting tenure.
Bryan, there is another reason virtually everyone gets tenure at the lower ranked institutions, beyond nepotism (which I am skeptical about--I mean, it's not clear we like our colleagues more than we like status that comes with having colleagues who are highly productive/high impact). It is risky to deny tenure as there may not be the option to replace that person with another better one. Harder to get approval for new hires these days and some institutions no longer track "lines". For example, in my dept a colleague retired a couple of years ago and in the olden days, we'd be guaranteed approval for a new hire to replace that person. Not anymore. We have to argue for the hire much like we would for any position. And if the college doesn't see much $$value$$ in the position, then it's a no go.
And with this comment I figured out that I'll probably get tenure, as long as I'm not so bad that others would want to risk not being able to replace me with someone else. Yay!