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Source link: http://archive.mises.org/4717/tenures-tenure/

Tenure’s Tenure

February 21, 2006 by

“Dad Dean” considers university tenure systems at insidehighered.com.

Tenure certainly meets the needs for security and predictability, but it does so by granting impunity and saddling a college with immovable costs for the life of the employee. (It used to expire at 70, which struck me as more than fair, but now it expires at death.) As any academic manager can tell you, once people have tenure, they’re almost completely unaccountable for their actions. Give large numbers of people absolute immunity for decades on end, sheltered from economic reality, stuck with the same peers for 30 years, and some very weird behaviors come to the fore.

(For a while, my family lived in Ann Arbor. One of our favorite games when we went downtown was pointing to badly disheveled men and asking “homeless or faculty?” Sometimes the only way to tell was to see if the shiny aluminum thing they carried was solid or foil. Even then, you couldn’t really be sure.)

[...]

Colleges have responded to increased cost pressures and a huge and enduring labor surplus by raising the bar for tenure for the lucky few on the tenure track. To my mind, this pretty much guarantees increased burnout. People who’ve lived monastically for 15 years and finally get tenure often effectively retire on the spot. They start paying back the other parts of their lives, which makes individual sense, but no institutional sense.

There’s an obvious alternative out there. Every administrator I know, when pressed, admits that the alternative is better. A surprising number of tenured faculty, when pressed, admit the same.

Long-term renewable contracts.

Read the full article here.

{ 1 comment }

Tim Swanson February 21, 2006 at 7:01 pm

Some gratuitous self-promotion, from Will the University Survive:

Despite the sizable endowments, grants and discretionary donations that many research universities have, the return on investment from licensing internal innovations is next to nil. This coupled with increased annuities wrought by tenure systems has potentially delivered a crippling blow to an entrenched order.
The tenure-system was originally created to secure academic freedom for professors — offering flexibility and openness to speak and research freely without fear of repercussion. (See the Hoppe debate.) However from a financial perspective Stephen Kerr notes that, “raising an employee’s salary creates an annuity for his or her organizational lifetime. Furthermore, since future increases are normally calculated as a percentage of salary, erroneously increasing someone’s pay will tend to become geometrically expensive over time.”[9] In other words, a firm should reward productivity, not tradition or longevity. Therefore performance-based contracts can be used in place of a tenure system, an idea now-embraced by numerous college presidents as well.
Many colleges, particularly those that are State-managed, must change their business models with the times. This is not some pie-in-the-sky ultimatum; according to a recent survey of college presidents by The Chronicle of Higher Education, many “are more preoccupied with financial issues than educational ones.” One plausible solution to these monetary quagmires has an irksome kick to it, “53 percent of the respondents said they believed that tenure for faculty members should be abolished in favor of long-term contracts, but those who had been professors with tenure supported it more than those who had not.”

Be sure to also check out http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2003/12/more_on_obsolet.html

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