Is tenure worth saving?

The economy is depressed, money is tight, and universities are feeling the pinch. One radical proposal for trimming budgets is to eliminate tenure-track positions, shifting faculty to part-time and full-time non-tenure-track positions. The move away from tenure has been slowly brewing for decades. While core tenure-system positions comprised approximately 55% of all faculty in 1970s, by 2003 that number had dropped to 41% and further still to 31% in 2007. Dan Clawson Image: University of Massa

Written byJef Akst

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Dan Clawson
Image: University of Massachusetts, Amherst

linkurl:Dan Clawson,;http://www.umass.edu/sociol/faculty_staff/clawsn.html tenured professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who described concerns about abolishing tenure in linkurl:an opinion article;http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/324/5931/1147 published online in Science today (May 29), has some strong views on the subject. He detailed his argument in a conversation with The Scientist. The Scientist: What was your motivation for writing this opinion piece? Dan Clawson: We did a study at our university and we found that in 2005 we had 250 fewer tenure-track faculty than we had had in 1990, with the same number of students. It was the number one concern of the faculty. Our university was being transformed before our very eyes in ways that most of us found destructive and believed were hurting the quality of education and the character of research. TS: How has tenure changed over the last 30 years? DC: In some sense, the need for tenure is every bit as much there as it always was, but what's changed is the larger economic climate and the economic pressures on universities and colleges. There has been a move away from tenure track faculty in order to give administrators greater ability to hold down costs. If you can replace one tenure-track faculty member who's teaching four courses a year, or possibly even less, and is being paid $100,000 a year -- that is $25,000 per course -- if you can replace that person with somebody who's paid $5,000 per course, you as the university can save a lot of money. TS: Other than the monetary benefits to the university, what are the arguments for decreasing the number of tenure-track positions? DC: The other arguments are a whole set of things about providing management with greater flexibility. If you hire somebody with tenure to teach Russian at a time when Russian seems to be the most important language for people to learn, and then Russia is no longer a world power, you still have somebody with tenure in the Russian department. If you have that person instead as an adjunct or part-time instructor or a full-time non-tenure-track instructor on a two-year contract, when Russian becomes a less important language, you can replace them with somebody who teaches Arabic or Chinese. Tenure inhibits the strategic reallocation of resources from the point of view of an administrator, and it creates inflexibilities in the university. TS: How do you think this shift will affect the future of higher education? DC: I think that in the long run, there are two possibilities. One possibility is that we will move to marginalize tenure and create a two-tier system where we have a limited number of people who have the elite tenure-track positions and a much larger number of positions who teach in ways that are extended high school but are called college. The other possibility is that we either restore the tenure system or we have a revolt of some kind that wins better job security and conditions for non-tenure-track faculty so that even though they don't have tenure they have some of the protections and guarantees that approximate it. TS: Is there anything you want to add about this move away from tenure-track positions? DC: I think that this [reflects] two different visions of a university. If a university is a business with a product and it should be driven by student demand, then there's a good argument that this business should be like other business [with] highly paid administrators and a vulnerable, contingent workforce. But if, on the other hand, the vision is that a university should be a center of knowledge where students are educated -- and that's not the same as trained -- where they develop their creativity and their ability to think through issues on their own, and if that university should be governed in significant part by tenure-system faculty with a long-term commitment to the institution and to knowledge, that's a different sort of university. And that's the sort of university that I believe most students are seeking, most of the public wants, most faculty want, but it's not the university that the people who control universities are seeking to create.
**__Related stories:__***linkurl:Does tenure need to change?;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/53499/
[September 2007]*linkurl:Still hungry for tenure...;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/52850/
[16th February 2007]*linkurl:No tenure, no food...;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/40635/
[10th January 2007] Editor's note (May 29): This article has been updated from a previous version to include related articles.

Meet the Author

Jef Akst

Jef (an unusual nickname for Jennifer) got her master’s degree from Indiana University in April 2009 studying the mating behavior of seahorses. After four years of diving off the Gulf Coast of Tampa and performing behavioral experiments at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, she left research to pursue a career in science writing. As The Scientist's managing editor, Jef edited features and oversaw the production of the TS Digest and quarterly print magazine. In 2022, her feature on uterus transplantation earned first place in the trade category of the Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. She is a member of the National Association of Science Writers.

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