Tenure and Other Concerns About The Academy
Reading this post on Steven Levitt's blog got me thinking about the issue of tenure (thanks for the link, Zack). The main argument Levitt makes is that tenure does not increase overall productivity in academia because it is too much of an incentive early in the careers of academics and not enough of one later on. On the other hand, the reason we have tenure is that research can be risky and the benefits can be great if the research is successful. Furthermore, at stake is academic freedom: no political climate should be able to stop academics from expressing their thoughts. Both of these points are argued in the comments of the aforementioned post.
Mind you what you are about to read are the perspectives of an inexperienced grad student who has been in contact with academia only a few years, so read on with a grain of salt.
I think the tenure system is a bit broken. Academics don't get too much academic freedom that they wouldn't otherwise have. They don't pursue risky research early in their careers in order to obtain results that lead to the golden dream that is tenure and can become rather unproductive afterward. Of course this doesn't apply to every academic out there, but I can certainly think of at least a few cases. So, it is likely that a university gets stuck with an unproductive employee who can not be fired. While I understand where the idea of tenure comes from, it seems to me that it needs some tweaking.
Why do we think that the same person who is good at doing research should be good at teaching and at administering an academic department? Why do we think that this person should have infinite job security almost irrespective of his performance? How about those not being the same person? The only people that need to have some kind of risk-insurance in a department are those who do research.
I think that there need to be different contracts for different kinds of positions within an academic department. That is, hire people whose main responsibility is either to teach, research or administrate -- not all three. Then the processes for evaluating performance can then be tailored to each kind of contract.
For those who are hired as teachers, their performance is evaluated once every few years based on student class reviews, competence in the subjects they are required to teach and so forth. For those hired as researchers the performance evaluation can be tailored to the research they will be pursuing. "Tenure time" could be handled in ways similar to those used to allocate research funds: via proposals and committees. That is, a committee decides how much time of infinite job-security a researcher gets. During that time the researcher needs to produce results and a her next proposal and then the cycle repeats. This is where the people administrating the department come in. They are the ones in charge of hiring people, evaluating the performance of the department and adjusting accordingly. Perhaps there could even be mechanisms set up to switch roles within a department.
The first problem with some arrangement of this sort I can foresee is that there seem to be very few incentives to become a mere administrator or a teacher. All in all, most of us are in the game for the glory of doing research (maybe not?...), not for the red tape or those pesky undergrads asking questions about basic subjects during office hours! However, hopefully financial and other kinds of incentives could be used to make up the difference.
Another important caveat is that tenure offers a convenient facet when it comes to hiring-committees. They can hire the best possible candidate without fear of hiring their replacement. If there is a mechanism for switching from an administrative contract to a research one, why would an administrator planning on trying to become a researcher hire the competition? I have no good answer to this one, other than perhaps there should not be mechanisms for switching between administrative and research positions. This does make the administrative positions seem very unappealing...
Yet another caveat: how is the performance of the administrators evaluated? Maybe restructuring academic departments in this fashion has implications that require a broader restructuring of the university bureaucracy.
Yet another important caveat is the one about making the transition from the current system to whatever new system. I imagine a university changing their tenure structure to have less risk-insurance would have a harder time hiring people. On the other hand, it seems that the market of newly graduated PhDs and postdocs has enough of a labor surplus that universities could get away with it.
What do you think?
Mind you what you are about to read are the perspectives of an inexperienced grad student who has been in contact with academia only a few years, so read on with a grain of salt.
I think the tenure system is a bit broken. Academics don't get too much academic freedom that they wouldn't otherwise have. They don't pursue risky research early in their careers in order to obtain results that lead to the golden dream that is tenure and can become rather unproductive afterward. Of course this doesn't apply to every academic out there, but I can certainly think of at least a few cases. So, it is likely that a university gets stuck with an unproductive employee who can not be fired. While I understand where the idea of tenure comes from, it seems to me that it needs some tweaking.
Why do we think that the same person who is good at doing research should be good at teaching and at administering an academic department? Why do we think that this person should have infinite job security almost irrespective of his performance? How about those not being the same person? The only people that need to have some kind of risk-insurance in a department are those who do research.
I think that there need to be different contracts for different kinds of positions within an academic department. That is, hire people whose main responsibility is either to teach, research or administrate -- not all three. Then the processes for evaluating performance can then be tailored to each kind of contract.
For those who are hired as teachers, their performance is evaluated once every few years based on student class reviews, competence in the subjects they are required to teach and so forth. For those hired as researchers the performance evaluation can be tailored to the research they will be pursuing. "Tenure time" could be handled in ways similar to those used to allocate research funds: via proposals and committees. That is, a committee decides how much time of infinite job-security a researcher gets. During that time the researcher needs to produce results and a her next proposal and then the cycle repeats. This is where the people administrating the department come in. They are the ones in charge of hiring people, evaluating the performance of the department and adjusting accordingly. Perhaps there could even be mechanisms set up to switch roles within a department.
The first problem with some arrangement of this sort I can foresee is that there seem to be very few incentives to become a mere administrator or a teacher. All in all, most of us are in the game for the glory of doing research (maybe not?...), not for the red tape or those pesky undergrads asking questions about basic subjects during office hours! However, hopefully financial and other kinds of incentives could be used to make up the difference.
Another important caveat is that tenure offers a convenient facet when it comes to hiring-committees. They can hire the best possible candidate without fear of hiring their replacement. If there is a mechanism for switching from an administrative contract to a research one, why would an administrator planning on trying to become a researcher hire the competition? I have no good answer to this one, other than perhaps there should not be mechanisms for switching between administrative and research positions. This does make the administrative positions seem very unappealing...
Yet another caveat: how is the performance of the administrators evaluated? Maybe restructuring academic departments in this fashion has implications that require a broader restructuring of the university bureaucracy.
Yet another important caveat is the one about making the transition from the current system to whatever new system. I imagine a university changing their tenure structure to have less risk-insurance would have a harder time hiring people. On the other hand, it seems that the market of newly graduated PhDs and postdocs has enough of a labor surplus that universities could get away with it.
What do you think?
posted by rz at 8:13 PM
1 comments
