I am against tenure on principal. This establishment, like most things academic in America, needs to be overhauled or removed entirely. The problem lies in the fact that once a professor has scraped, crawled, and bootlicked their way into a tenured position, they have no incentive whatsoever to continue to learn and hone their abilities as instructors of our nation’s future. Why bother trying to keep up with all the trends in their field? They get paid the same regardless.
As a result of this backwards system, we have a body of tenured professors that have no incentive to remain current in their respective fields, no incentive to be effective teachers, and no incentive to do anything, really, other than the bare minimum token effort required to prevent them from being fired, which, as it turns out, really isn’t all that much.
What’s more, this establishment is difficult to remove from a college or institution because the moment the administration makes a move in that direction, cries of hypocrisy will echo through the halls of academia as professors point fingers at the administration and say “You’ve been on tenure for 15 years. For 15 years you’ve reaped the benefits of tenure, only to turn around and deny it to the next generation of professors!? What kind of cruel joke is this?”
Thus, I think we need a broad, sweeping elimination of tenure across all universities. At least this way, given the average age of tenured professors, most of the protesting groups will die of heart attacks upon hearing the news.
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:50 am
I agree with the fact that all to often tenure removes incentives for increased learning and striving to be a good professor (as tenure acts as such incentive).
But I hesitate to jump onto your bandwagon as you fail to mention the primary reason for tenure: academic freedom.
The idea being that tenure allows a professor to learn what they want and teach things without fear of being forced out for teaching what offends others or what others disagree with.
Rather than simply removing tenure, which could have large unitended consequences for academic freedom and the market place of ideas, we should attempt to figure out how to maintain incentives for progress.