I understand you point, but if you get rid of tenure, you put every professor at the mercy of college administrators–who either failed in the classroon and took refuge behind a desk, or who are ‘passive agressives’ who never had the ability to get up in front of 30 to 40 or more young adults and…..profess.

Janos Hunyadi on September 18, 2008 at 5:08 PM

I’m not advocating for (or against) tenure, but I don’t see how eliminating tenure necessarily means that faculty would be at the “mercy of college administrators.” Faculty could see be reviewed by academics, just as they are each year when they submit their activity reports on their teaching, scholarly research, and service work to their department heads.

I’ve been on both sides of higher ed – academic and administrative – and my husband is an administrative VP at an elite college in California. (I’ll chalk up your snide comment about college administrators to you having a bad day.) Based on our experiences, it seems that the key difference on the faculty side is that academics are not trained in HR practices. No one teaches faculty how to hire and fire, conduct evaluations, develop workplans, goals, and metrics. Administrative acumen is not respected or encouraged in academic departments. The biggest abuses in HR practices that I’ve ever seen were in faculty search committees and departmental meetings.

We entrust the future of our country to people who don’t have to do their job.

Deanna on September 18, 2008 at 4:44 PM

I know it seems like this from the outside, but it’s not true — at least, not in all disciplines.

Faculty at research institutions in the sciences and engineering are essentially small business people who need administrative skills to run and fund their research programs. Their ability to manage a lab provides employment for technicians and students — and the overhead from their research grants keeps the lights on in the humanities departments where Ward Churchills and his ilk do so much damage. If they don’t do their jobs, they won’t have funding to run their labs or, in many cases, pay their own salaries. Tenured or not, a faculty member (in science) without grants has no respect and a large teaching load.

I think some of these problems will be addressed as the costs of higher ed escalate and the stakes become higher and higher. Universities, even “state schools,” require private support to build new buildings, hire the best faculty, and recruit top students. To generate this support, they engage with an increasingly sophisticated group of donors (alumni, private foundations, corporations, etc) who expect to see accountability for how their money is spent. The boards of trustees who advise (as well as hire and fire) university presidents are populated by successful business people, not academics. Over time, these folks are influencing colleges and universities to become more transparent and accountable in their practices.

Y-not on September 18, 2008 at 5:48 PM

I’m sorry you have had a bad experience with administrators. In my experience as a research track faculty member and a tenure track faculty member, and based on the shared experiences of dozen of academic colleagues working in both non-tenured and tenure-track/tenured positions, decisions about academic appointments, teaching loads, committee work, research space, salaries, etc were made by department chairs and deans, ie: “administrators” who rose through the academic ranks. The administrators whose work impacted on mine were grants administrators, development officers, and IT professionals — whose jobs were to facilitate my research. None of them had permanent contracts.

Since turning in my grants, shutting down my lab, and leaving the academic side for the administrative side, I have been on yearly, at-will contracts.

Obviously your experiences were different than mine.

Have a nice day.

Y-not on September 18, 2008 at 7:19 PM