Thoughts on Academic Tenure

by

Joseph F. Baugher

 

Last revised May 4, 2008

The academic tenure system defines the employment of faculty in most higher-level educational institutions in the United States.  Tenure commonly refers to academic employment systems in which faculty members in universities and colleges are granted the right not to be fired from their jobs without cause, after they go through an initial probationary period during which they prove themselves worthy.   In some districts, primary and secondary school teachers have tenure as well.

The concept of tenure was officially codified under the auspices of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in a statement issued by them in 1940[i].  This statement has been endorsed by the Association of American Colleges and Universities and by dozens of other academic and professional organizations.  Most colleges and universities have wording somewhere in their by-laws or regulations saying that they abide by the principles listed in the AAUP statement.  University administrations that violate the principles of tenure described in the 1940 statement can be placed on AAUP’s censure list.  Censure is basically only a shaming process—it doesn’t have any legal standing, but the resulting bad publicity can make it difficult for censured administrations to recruit new faculty members.

Tenure systems, under which job security is guaranteed during good behavior, are rather rare in American society, and are generally restricted to the federal career civil service, the federal judiciary, and to more senior academics, although the senior partners in a law firm do have a level of job protection that is somewhat analogous to academic tenure.  Employees in most American corporations or private businesses are said to be “at-will”, which means that either the employer or the employee can terminate the relationship at any time with no legal liability.  This means that at-will corporate employees can be fired or laid off at a moment’s notice for almost any reason--except for certain federally-mandated categories such as race, gender, age, national origin, or religion--or even for no reason at all[ii].  Consequently, there is little or no job security in corporate America, and there is absolutely no protection against arbitrary dismissal--an employee can be ordered to clean out their desk and leave at any time with no reason being given. 

However, tenured faculty members are given a great deal of protection against arbitrary dismissals and they can only be terminated for valid cause.  In order to fire a tenured professor, the college or university must be able to show a valid reason for the termination, one which will stand up in court if a lawsuit is filed.  A lot of people think that tenure offers absolute job security, but this is not entirely accurate.  A tenured professor can still be terminated, but it has to be for a valid reason, and there must be a recognized disciplinary procedure in place with due process guarantees and an opportunity for the accused to present a defense.

Tenure systems in academe are usually justified by the claim that they are necessary to provide academic freedom.   Academic freedom is thought by its proponents to be critically important to the mission of a college or university: the discovery of new knowledge, the study and criticism of intellectual or cultural traditions, and the teaching and education of students so that they may become creative and productive citizens in a democracy.  Free inquiry and free speech within the academic community are thought to be necessary to achieve these goals.  The principle of academic freedom means that no political, intellectual, or religious orthodoxy can be imposed on faculty or students by administrators, by legislators, or by outside political or religious authorities.  This means that faculty must be free to do research about any subject they choose and must be free to discuss the results of their research in the classroom as well as in public forums outside the university.  This freedom must include the right to do research and publish information about controversial matters, including those that might irritate and upset academic administrators, powerful political and religious authorities, media demagogues, wealthy donors, or trustees. 

Perhaps the most effective guarantor of academic freedom is the general principle of faculty tenure, which holds that instructors having tenure are not vulnerable to being dismissed from their jobs without cause, especially not for openly dissenting with educational or political authorities or with  popular opinion.  Although most academic institutions say in their rules and regulations that academic freedom applies equally to all their faculty members, it is probably fair to say that the only truly effective way to preserve academic freedom for the faculty is to provide them with the job protection that tenure offers.  Without tenure, an abusive or reactionary university administration could fire their faculty members for just about any reason, including the holding or expressing of unpopular or unconventional views in their teaching and research.  It is a rare person who can express unpopular or controversial political or religious views if doing so means running the risk of losing one’s job.  During periods of  high national tension or during wartime, instructors or researchers who talk about or study certain controversial subjects can be subjected to a groundswell of public outrage calling for their dismissal, and the presence of tenure is a welcome protection against these pressures. 

AAUP rules do allow for some exceptions to academic freedom—courses should stick to the relevant material and should not wander off into extraneous and irrelevant matters. Academic freedom doesn’t mean that you should be able, for example, to use your mathematics class as a platform to rail against the war in Iraq.  The students in your class are a captive audience and shouldn’t be forced to hear your views on controversial subjects unless they are actually relevant to the course.  If there are several sections of the same course, it is quite reasonable and appropriate to insist that there be some degree of uniformity between the sections, that the faculty teach from a common syllabus and use the same textbook.   

There are some private institutions that do restrict academic freedom on the basis of religious creed.  The primary examples are schools and colleges which are set up and run by a particular church or religion.  These schools sometimes hire only faculty who are members of the faith and who are willing to declare allegiance to it.   Faculty who express dissenting view to the faith, either in the classroom or in public, can be terminated.  However, such schools have the obligation to be explicit in their by-laws and regulations about the scope and nature of these restrictions.

Tenure is also a valuable aid in preserving and protecting the professionalism and independence of the faculty.  In most higher education institutions, faculty members are regarded as being something more than just employees--they are also regarded as independent and self-sufficient professionals who have a substantial amount of autonomy in determining how they perform their jobs.  Faculty members are trusted by the administration to do their jobs competently and professionally, in an atmosphere of minimal supervision free from bosses and supervisors constantly looking over their shoulders.  Faculty members are entitled to teach their courses or perform their research the way they think is most appropriate, not the way the department head, the school administration, or outside individuals think they should.  Faculty members should have the freedom to choose their textbooks, to select their course materials, and to organize their course syllabi and order of delivery the way they think is most appropriate.  Faculty should be able to choose the research topics that they are most interested in, not those that the administration wants them to follow.  Students should have freedom of inquiry and should have access to the full range of available information and should be able to develop and practice critical thinking skills in a classroom environment free from intimidation, harassment, and censorship.  Faculty members should be able to assign student grades based solely on achievement and mastery of the material, free from political influence and free from business or financial constraints or threats of lawsuits. Faculty members should be able to resist the latest educational fads that come down from the administration, and not be forced to incorporate them into their classes where not appropriate.  The long-term job security that tenure offers is probably the most effective tool available to preserve the professional integrity of the faculty—if you can be fired at a moment’s notice for no reason, you are not an independent professional, you are just hired help.

Tenure also protects faculty from arbitrary or capricious behavior on the part of school administrators, trustees, major donors, or alumni.  The principle of shared governance is an important feature in most traditional colleges and universities, with both the faculty and the administration playing collaborative roles in the management of the institution.  Employees in typical corporations are generally at the bottom of a rather rigid chain of command reminiscent of the military—policies are set by higher-level management and the employees are expected to do as they are told by their bosses and usually have little or no say in managing or running their organizations.  However, the faculty in colleges and universities have significant power in determining how their institutions are run.  The faculty members in academic institutions have the primary responsibility for setting academic standards and in establishing academic rules and regulations, they play the dominant role in defining the academic currriculum, and they are given the primary authority in deciding academic personnel matters, particularly in selecting and hiring new faculty members.  Many academic institutions have a faculty senate that plays an important part in institutional management, and the faculty plays an important role in setting academic policies, in establishing new programs and new degrees, the hiring of new faculty, administrators, and employees, setting grading policies, by making changes in the curriculum, etc. 

In the view of many, it is only the existence of tenure that makes it possible for the faculty to participate effectively in shared governance.  College and university administrations have quite a bit of power, and the presence of tenure makes it a lot safer for the faculty to resist management intimidation, harassment, retaliation, or interference in their perogatives and to be able to express dissent from administration policies--it is unlikely that any faculty member would attempt to fight an ill-advised administration policy if it meant running the risk of being fired.   In an environment in which there is constant pressure to keep student enrollments high in order to bring in more money, there is a temptation for many administrations to pressure their faculty to lower academic standards, to give more A’s and to fail fewer numbers of students—and without tenure there is little chance for the faculty to to be able to resist such pressures to “dumb down” the curriculum.

Tenure also prevents faculty members from being fired simply for personality conflicts or disputes with administrators or trustees.  The academic ideal is that of tolerance by both the administration and the faculty for differences of opinion, methods, styles, and personalities.  There is a strong tradition in academe of  toleration if not encouragement of eccentric personality traits, and the existence of tenure prevents the administration from firing an otherwise productive and capable faculty member simply because of some personality quirks. 

Another reason that tenure exists is that in the realm of academic and intellectual pursuits, it is thought that faculty members are able to produce higher quality intellectual and pedagogical output when they have job security than when they do not.  The job security and autonomy of a tenured position gives faculty members the freedom to pursue their own topics of interest, not those which the administration would like them to follow.  Since faculty members are presumably more passionate about the topics they are most interested in, they should be able to produce better results.  Without some level of job security, faculty will be preoccupied in the classroom and laboratory with survival issues, and they will probably spend inordinate amounts of time in trying to figure out what intellecual pursuits the administration wants them to follow in order to keep their jobs, and in doing so produce a lower quality of output. 

In addition, the possibility of achieving lifetime tenure is a powerful means of attracting some very bright people who would otherwise be able to obtain much higher salaries in the industrial or commercial world—some really smart people might be willing to trade a high-paying but insecure corporate job for one which doesn’t pay as well but which offers lifetime job security.

Without the job protection that tenure offers, senior professors in a college or university might be reluctant to hire junior faculty members who are bright and capable, people who might actually be smarter than they are and might turn out to be superior teachers and might be able to produce a better research output.  People often say that they don’t object to hiring people smarter than they are, but most of the time they don’t really mean it, especially if these brighter people might be a threat to their job security.  This is because a budget-conscious administration might recognize this and replace their senior faculty with newer faculty members who would work for a lot less.  Such fears might result in only lower-quality faculty members ever being hired, presumably those who would be less threatening to the senior faculty, resulting in steadily-declining educational and research standards.   The existence of tenure for the senior faculty is a welcome protection against these pressures, ensuring that they can’t be fired and replaced by cheaper junior faculty.  Without tenure, incumbents might never be willing to hire people who turn out to better than themselves.

Finally, the job security that tenure offers gives university researchers the opportunity to follow their curiousity whereever it may lead and however long it might take.  Untenured faculty members must adopt a short-term research strategy, one which promises a quick return in terms of publications and grants, since they are faced with a tenure decision coming up in only a couple of years.  Many of the great intellectual and scientific advances of the past originated out of basic research that had no guarantee of an eventual payoff.   If tenure is replaced by a system having less job security, for example by a system involving a series of renewable contracts, the result would be an inevitable pressure for faculty to follow a short term approach in their research, whereas truly ground-breaking academic research needs to focus on the long term.

If a tenured professor accepts a job at another academic institution, they are usually offered tenure at their new position (as “senior hires”).  Otherwise, tenured faculty would rarely leave their schools to join different universities.  These days, a tenured faculty member would be a fool to accept another academic job without it. 

Tenure is an “up-or-out” process, which means that faculty members denied tenure at the end of the probationary period lose their jobs and are forced to seek other employment.  A candidate who is denied tenure is sometimes considered to have been fired or dismissed, but unlike dismissals or layoffs in a corporate environment in which the unfortunate employee is walked out the door that very day, employment is usually guaranteed for up to a year after tenure is denied, so that the rejected candidate has enough time to conduct an extended search for a new job.  This is what happened to me when I was denied tenure at the Illinois Institute of Technology—it took me almost a year to find another job and it wasn’t in academe—it was an industrial research and development job at the Teletype Corporation.  If the rejected faculty member wants to continue in academe, the AAUP rules require that the institution that hires them must be willing to appoint them to a tenured position, or at least be willing to guarantee that tenure will be granted within a reasonable amount of time. The faculty member who accepts such a position needs to take special care to make sure that any promise of tenure being awarded in the future is made in writing, since as the old saw goes, a verbal promise isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, and the people who made the promise may not be there when it comes time to honor it.  Also, some prestigious universities and departments in the USA are so elitist that they almost never award tenure to anyone and being denied it is not really considered a blot on your record.  Very often, a faculty member who was denied tenure at, for example, Harvard University, is able to quickly pick up another job with tenure at a lower-tier university.

 

Tenure can only be revoked for valid cause--normally a professor has to do something really wrong or really stupid to lose tenure.  Most universities have disciplinary procedures already in place for handling such cases—typically a quasi-judicicial proceeding is provided, surrounded by due-process protections and an opportunity for the accused to provide a defense.   Such cases are quite rare--in the US, according to the Wall Street Journal (Jan 10, 2005), it is estimated that only 50 to 75 tenured professors (out of about 280,000) lose their tenure each year.  Revocation of tenure is usually a lengthy, costly, and tedious procedure, very often resulting in a lawsuit.  Grounds for dismissal typically include doing something illegal like embezzling research funds, stealing school property, or conviction of a felony or any offense involving “moral turpitude”.  The grounds for tenure revocation can also include things such as professional incompetence, gross academic malfeasance such as plagiarism or the faking of research results, falsification of records or credentials, neglect of duty, unprofessional or confrontational conduct toward colleagues, sleeping with a student,  sexual harassment of another faculty member, or other conduct which falls below minimum standards of professional integrity.  A tenured faculty member can also be dismissed if they develop a physical or mental disability, one so serious that even with reasonable accommodations the faculty member is no longer able to perform the essential duties of their position.

 

In recent years, there have been cases of tenured faculty members being let go because of "financial exigency", in which a university or college gets itself into a serious financial bind, one that is so bad that its future survival is threatened.  Tenured faculty members can also be dismissed if their academic department or program is closed down because of a lack of students or the loss of grant support, even if the survival of the entire school is not at risk.   There are AAUP rules that deal with such cases, guidelines that are designed to protect against misuse or abuse of the process by administrations.  If the institution declares a financial exigency, it must be an actual financial crisis that threatens the future survival of the university, and not merely a minor or temporary budget problem.  The closure of a department or program must be done for valid academic or financial reasons and not contrived simply to get rid of a targeted faculty member--for example the administration can't close your department, fire all the faculty members, then bring them all back except for you.   The dismissal of tenured faculty should be considered only as a drastic last step that is taken only after all other reasonable alternatives have been exhausted.  Prior to the actual termination of tenured faculty, other less-drastic things such as early retirements, voluntary leaves of absence, transfers, reduction of nonacademic expenses, or the sale of assets should be tried.

 

Contrary to popular understanding, tenure is not really a lifetime job guarantee, although in practice this is actually often effectively the case. Formally, all that tenure means is that a college or university cannot fire a tenured professor without cause –it is simply a requirement for due process in any punitive or disciplinary actions that are brought forth against tenured faculty.  Faculty members still remain accountable even after achieving tenure.  Tenured faculty at most colleges and universities undergo annual reviews of their research, teaching, and service for such things as salary raises and in some cases merit pay increases.  This gives quite a bit of power to the administration--if they really want to get rid of an obnoxious or non-performing tenured faculty member, all they have to do is deny them a salary increase, increase their teaching load to astronomical levels, give them a long list of menial administrative assignments, and otherwise make life difficult until he/she gives up and quits.  Tenured faculty who do not publish, who teach badly, or who ignore their service duties can find that their salaries remain static in an inflationary economy, which means that their real salaries steadily decline year after year, until their standard of living has eroded so badly that there is a great incentive to seek employment elsewhere.

Although things are changing, it is still true that the attainment of tenure is the Holy Grail in academe, and it is easy to understand why tenure is such a hurdle for young faculty members to surmount[iii].  Imagine for a moment that you are a young faculty member coming up for tenure this year.  Look at the issue from the perspective of  your college or university administration.  How much is it going to cost your college or university to award you tenure?  Let’s say for simplicity that you will make $60,000 per year after being promoted and that you will serve the university for 30 years after tenure is granted.  Assume in addition that you obtain reasonable salary raises over the years that are at least as good as cost of living increases and perhaps even a little better. Adding in the cost of benefits, retirement plans, and the overhead associated with your job, this means that your institution must agree to pony up almost 4 million dollars over your career.   If  promoting you turns out to be a mistake, your college or university is out a lot of money.   If you instantly turn into deadwood or start driving students away by the boatload with your bad teaching, the administration will have made a bad $4 million dollar bet on you, since they are stuck with you for the rest of your life.   On the other hand, if the university denies you tenure and a couple of years later you win a Nobel Prize, your university will look really bad and will become the butt of a lot of jokes.  Everyone will roll their eyes and joke about stupid your university was and about how much they screwed-up big-time when they kicked you to the curb.  However, memories are short and people will soon forget about your university’s embarassing little mistake and after a couple of years have passed noone will even remember that you ever worked for a school which had fired you.  Although it is certainly true that it will cost something to hire your replacement if you are denied tenure, it is increasingly likely that the replacement will be either a part-timer or a non-tenure track person who will work for quite a bit less. Given the crushing financial penalty that could result if they give tenure to the wrong person, it is small wonder that universities choose to err on the no side, not on the yes side when they make their tenure decisions.

Faculty Rankings

Most colleges and universities have a faculty ranking system that is almost as rigid as that of the military, and faculty members can be as rank-conscious as military officers.. 

A new entry-level faculty member is usually hired at a beginning rank of assistant professor, which is typically without tenure.  Assistant professors are usually hired under annual or multiyear contracts, which are subject to regular renewals based on adequate performance.  Faculty members who are assistant professors are said to be on the tenure track, which means that they are eligible for tenure if and when it is granted.  Assistant professors on the tenure-track are also said to be in probationary positions, since they are under constant administration scruitiny and will be awarded tenure only if they perform well.   The contracts of assistant professors are subject to periodic renewals, and during the probationary period, almost all colleges can choose not to renew faculty contracts without any reason or cause.

An assistant professorship usually requires a PhD or other doctorate, although in some fields only a masters degree is required.   In the current academic job market, tenure-track faculty positions are increasingly difficult to find, because of a large surplus of qualified applicants recently coming out of the graduate schools and a shortage of available positions.  In some areas, especially in the natural sciences, it is rare to grant assistant professor positions to newly-minted PhDs, and nearly all assistant professors will have spent a couple of years serving as postdoctoral fellows at universities or government labs.  Many PhD holders don’t find tenure-track jobs until they are are in their mid-thirties.

After a probationary period, which can be as short as 3 years but which according to AAUP rules cannot exceed 7 years, the assistant professor’s research, publication, service, and teaching record is extensively reviewed and a decision is made whether or not to promote the faculty member to a tenure rank.  This limitation on the length of the probationary period was introduced by the AAUP to prevent university administrations from endlessly stringing along their faculty from year to year with vague promises of tenure being granted “sometime in the future”, but it has the disadvantage of forcing an “up-or-out” decision fairly early in a faculty member’s career. 

The standards for tenure have tightened considerably in recent years—accomplishments that would have easily brought tenure years ago are today deemed completely inadequate.  Except for the most vague and general of statements, the requirements for tenure at a given academic institution are almost never written down anywhere or explicitly spelled out in any detail, so the assistant professor rarely knows what he/she is supposed to be doing in order to achieve success.  Even when there are a few definitive tenure requirements that the administration has written down somewhere, there is usually an additional set of unwritten requirements also in existence that the aspiring tenure candidate does not know about but is nevertheless expected to meet if they are to have any chance of success.  This means that the candidate often feels trapped in a sort of nightmarish Alice-in-Wonderland scenario reminiscent of the infamous Queen of Hearts croquet match, one where the hoops one is expected to go through keep jumping around, and where the rules are kept hidden and keep changing as the game is played.  Since the candidate often really doesn’t know what the rules are, they have to play a guessing game and rely on rumors or gossip about what is required.  Very often, the candidate will seek out the advice of more senior faculty who have successfully negotiated the tortuous path to tenure and who presumably know what is required.  However, the pursuit of tenure can often be an elusive dream, a random shot at a moving target.

There are generally three major areas in which faculty are judged—research, teaching, and service.  The relative importance of each of these will vary from institution to institution, and it is often difficult for an aspiring assistant professor to get a straight answer from those in power about the relative importance of each one of these three areas at their particular school.

At large universities and technical institutes that grant PhD and other advanced degrees, research is definitely the most important faculty area.  Many of the very largest universities, both public and private, have as one of their primary objectives the creation of new knowledge.  Such schools are said to be  “research-intensive”.   At these schools, the research mission is so intense and so important that it often overshadows the education and teaching mission.  Those universities with the highest research budgets and the most intense research activity are sometimes known as “R1” universities, which is a classification that the Carnegie Foundation at one time assigned to what they now call “very high research activity” universities.  Examples of such R1 schools are Princeton, MIT, Harvard, CalTech, Brown, and the University of Chicago.  

At research universities, a faculty member must demonstrate a high degree of research productivity in order to achieve tenure.  Research productivity is usually evaluated on the basis of the number and quality of scholarly publications in peer-reviewed journals, and often includes a requirement for one or more full-length books or monographs on scholarly subjects.  Academic administrators at research universities often issue pious statements to their faculty saying that research and teaching count equally towards tenure, but such statements are almost always entirely false—at such schools it is the quality of your research, not your teaching, which will determine whether or not you get tenure.  It is truly “publish or perish” in these institutions, and the quality of your teaching is usually only of secondary importance if it is considered at all, although you certainly don’t want to be so bad in the classroom that you drive students away en mass or are the source of a blizzard of student complaints.

The academic publishing game can be an intense and time-consuming process.  The process begins when an author writes a scholarly paper and submits it to a particular journal in their field.  The journal editor then sends copies of the paper out to anonymous experts (known as referees) in the author’s field of expertise, seeking their opinion on whether the methodology is correct, whether any data presented is reliable, and whether the paper is worthy of publication.  The referees then review the paper and send back their opinions, and the editor uses these reports to decide whether to accept or reject the paper.  Sometimes the paper is accepted as submitted, but more often than not the referees suggest that changes or revisions need to be made before the paper can be printed, and there can be a lengthy back-and-forth between the author, the journal editor, and the referees before the paper is finally accepted for publication.  Sometimes the paper is rejected because the referees have concluded that there is something seriously and fundamentally wrong with the paper--perhaps the methodology is fatally flawed, or the results are not sufficiently novel or sufficiently interesting to be worthy of publication.  This process is known as peer review, and is considered as being critical to maintaining the integrity and quality of the scholarly journal in particular and the scholarly discipline in general.

Since everyone else in the academic world is doing exactly the same thing, an aspiring tenure candidate needs to publish lots and lots of papers, since, like inflated currency, each one becomes worth less and less as more and more of them are put out.  But not all scholarly papers are of equal value.  The impact of any one of the candidate’s papers on the field can often be judged by doing “citation analysis”, in which the number of times that other authors quote the work is counted.  A scholarly paper which is quoted in the literature so often that it is considered to be a “classic” is worth a lot more to a tenure candidate than a paper that is cited only rarely or not at all.  The types of journals in which the candidate publishes are also examined—articles published in high-impact journals in the field are worth a lot more than an equal number of articles published in lower-ranking journals.  Some academic institutions actually assign numerical rankings to scholarly journals, with a higher score being given to an article published in the most prestigious journal than to one published in a lower-status journal.  The relative prestige of scholarly journals can be a highly subjective matter, and is often based largely on their rejection rate--journals which are so snooty that they reject most of the papers submitted to them are considered as being far more prestigious than those which accept just about anything that is submitted.  This means that faculty members striving to get tenure will often take extreme measures to get their papers published in such high-status journals, sometimes continuing to argue with referees and editors for months and months after their papers could already have been published in a lower-ranking journal.  

Tenure reviewers often look for evidence of continuity in research—a series of closely connected papers is worth a lot more than a bunch of disjointed papers on completely unrelated subjects.  They want to see solid evidence that the candidate has a promise of becoming an internationally recognized expert in a particular discipline.

During tenure review, the opinions of outside experts in the applicant’s field of study are also solicited.  Ideally, all of these experts should be tenured faculty or high-status researchers that are located at institutions that are considered equal or better than the one at which the tenure applicant is currently teaching.  These reviewers will be asked to give written opinions about the past quality and future promise of the candidate’s research—if a couple of Nobel Prize winners are willing to put in writing that they think you walk on water, this can be an important plus.

More and more research, especially in medicine and the hard sciences, involves a collaborative effort among two or more investigators.  In high-energy experimental physics, it is not uncommon to see papers having the names of 50 or more authors on them, often from several different institutions and sometimes from several different countries.  Collaboration with others on research projects can be a valuable and rewarding experience, but an aspiring assistant professor has to be very cautious about collaborative projects when it comes to tenure considerations.  Very often, it is rather risky for an assistant professor to get involved in collaborative projects with other faculty members, since at tenure time such joint research projects do not count nearly as much as individual research.  A scholarly paper with just your name on it is worth a lot more than a paper in which your name is buried within a long list of co-authors.  If you do get involved in writing collaborative papers, you want to try and have your name appear either first or last in the list of authors, not somewhere in between, which might imply to tenure reviewers that you are only a relatively minor or insignificant contributor to the research. 

Mentorship by a more senior faculty member can be a valuable aid along the path to tenure for an assistant professor.  Most departments have some sort of mentoring process in place, since all but the most evil of academic institutions really wish to keep the assistant professors that they hire—after all, they have invested too much money in these new assistant professors to simply throw them away after six years and then have to start all over again with someone else.  Ideally, an effective mentor will tell the young assistant professor what really has to be done to get tenure at that particular school—they will reveal all the unwritten rules, the names of the committees that any person hoping to get tenure definitely needs to serve on, the names of the people that one definitely does not want to offend, the details about all of the political ins and outs in the department and in the university as a whole, the types of research topics that the department favors, the minimum number of scholarly papers that one needs to write, and the dollar amount of external grant support money that one needs to bring in.

 However, the junior faculty member has to be careful that they don’t rely too much on their mentor.  The tenure candidate definitely needs to be particularly cautious about collaborating with their mentor on research projects, because they need to make sure that they firmly establish their own independent reputation in the field.  They need to make sure that they publish an adequate number of papers without their mentor’s name on them or the names of other senior faculty members, whether inside or outside the university.  Also, the junior professor needs to make sure that they firmly establish their own scholarly research base—they need to obtain their own grant support and must not ride along on their mentor’s grant or use their mentor’s research facilities.  Otherwise, the tenure committee is likely to perceive the candidate to be only a junior or subordinate partner in the relationship, which is certain to be the kiss of death.  

These days, scholarly research (especially in experimental science and in medicine) is extremely expensive and requires lots of money.  This money helps to pay for the support of graduate students, the salaries of a couple of postdoctoral research associates, the summer salaries of the faculty members themselves, plus publication, travel, computer, and equipment costs.  This money is most often obtained from outside funding sources such as federal agencies, private foundations, or corporate sponsors.  This means that faculty members at research institutions must write research grant proposals so that their research projects can be funded--just like a candidate running for political office, a large fraction of a professor’s time must be spent in fundraising. A research proposal is a formal document that consists of an outline of what the research is supposed to accomplish, along with a detailed budget describing how the money granted is to be spent (equipment, salaries, computer time, etc).  The grant proposal is then submitted to the funding agency, where it is carefully reviewed, in collaboration with outside experts in the field known as peer reviewers.  The lead person on the proposal is known as the principal investigator, and is the one who has the responsibility for completing the project, directing the research, and reporting directly to the funding agency.  These days, it is extremely difficult for faculty members to obtain grant support because of a shortage of available funds and a vast oversupply of worthy applications---only a few proposals ever get funded, and most are rejected.   When an aspiring assistant professor chooses a research specialty at the beginning of their career, they will often be forced to choose an area that has a reasonably good chance of attracting grant support, rather than pursuing their true passion. 

Although few university administrators will ever actually admit it, an assistant professor’s ability to attract grant support is often the single most important factor in determining whether or not tenure is granted.  The primary reason why this is true is the payment of overhead by the grant funding agencies.  The philosophy behind the payment of overhead in a research grant is to reimburse the university for the indirect costs of performing the research.  Since no one seems to be able to determine exactly what these costs are, overhead is usually calculated as a certain percentage of the salaries, wages, and benefits that are called for in the grant proposal.  In many ways, the payment of overhead has become an indirect means of providing universities with a subsidy, and universities have come to depend on overhead from grant money as an important source of income.  It is largely because of the payment of overhead that faculty members who can attract grant support are worth a lot more to their institutions than those who cannot--an assistant professor who is able to offset 200 percent of his salary in the form of overhead from his research grant is far more likely to receive tenure than one who has secured no grant support.   Individuals who cannot “bring in money” can easily be dispensed with.

 “Grantsmanship”—namely, the ability to ferret out sources where grant money might be available, along with the talent to be able to write winning proposals that get funded—is an important skill that every aspiring assistant professor needs to acquire.   In fact, the pursuit of grant support money is now so important that publication in peer-reviewed journals is effectively only of secondary importance, a long list of publications being seen primarily as a means by which grant support can be obtained, rather than the other way around. 

Since grant money is hard to obtain, you probably need to submit lots of grant proposals, since this will increase your chances of success.  If your grant application is rejected, you shouldn’t simply take no for an answer and should appeal the decision and ask the agency for a report on what the reviewers said about your proposal so that you could revise and improve it accordingly and then submit it again.  But you need to be cautious and selective about the grant applications that you do submit.  Some senior faculty will tell you that you get significant credit for each grant application that you submit, but this is usually not true--it is really only success that counts.  After a while, if you have too many unsuccessful grant applications, this will count against you. 

College and university administrators, who often have the final say in tenure decisions, usually know very little about the professional abilities and talents of individual tenure candidates, but they do know which of them has been able to secure grant support and which of them have not.  Consequently, the ability of an assistant professor to bring in grant support money is often seen by university administrations as an ipso-facto indication of research and scholarly excellence.  Even if an aspiring assistant professor manages to obtain grant support by collaborating with other investigators in the writing of a joint proposal, this often does not help him or her very much in obtaining tenure—you have to be the principal investigator on the grant or it does not count.

In institutions such as two-year community colleges or four-year undergraduate institutions (sometimes known as selective liberal arts colleges, or SLACs[iv]) the primary mission is education and teaching, with the research mission being considerably less important.  In such schools, the quality of one’s teaching is the primary criterion for the granting of tenure—glowing student course evaluations and a fistful of teaching awards are generally necessary.  You want to be seen by your students as well as by other faculty members as a super teacher, one whose classes are so popular that they quickly fill up with eager young minds eager to gain knowledge from a brilliant instructor such as you.  You should pay particular attention to student course evaluations because administrators often take then very seriously as an indication of the success of their courses and in particular the skills and abilities of their instructors—you want your course evaluations to be rave reviews that literally gush about how brilliant a teacher you are.  Too many lukewarm course evaluations, or even just a couple of bad reviews, could be fatal to your chances for promotion to tenure.

You need to take special care to make sure that nothing negative ever happens in your classroom—after all, students are paying customers and if you drive too many of them away the bottom line of the school will be adversely affected.  It is especially important that you don’t have students complaining about you to the dean or to the department chairman, since any sort of negative report will almost certainly work against you at tenure time.  Even just a few student complaints about bad teaching, unfair grading, or excessive demands could be fatal to your chances.  If you are unlucky enough to encounter a classroom full of lazy and sullen undergraduates, you dare not flunk them all, lest you bring down the wrath of the administration upon your head.  Nevertheless, if you are perceived as being too easy a grader, some of the senior faculty members may hold this against you during tenure deliberations.  It’s a narrow path that you have to walk—choosing between not being too easy a grader on one hand, and not being so strict and so demanding that you generate a long list of student complaints on the other.

In some teaching-intensive institutions such as two-year community colleges, a pursuit of research interests can actually be a negative, since publishing scholarly works can often be seen by the administration as a distraction from more important teaching and educational duties.  In these teaching institutions, there is usually no provision for any sort of research program or facility, and the teaching and service loads are probably so high that there will be little or no spare time left over for such work.  For example, it would be a major mistake for an applicant for a faculty position at a community college to spend a lot of time talking about their research or scholarly interests during the job interview, since all the community college is really interested in is the candidate’s ability to teach elementary, introductory subjects in front of a classroom of students.

However, some of the more prestigious SLACs are now beginning to stress scholarly research in addition to high-quality teaching, so the publish-or-perish mania is beginning to come to these schools as well.  These colleges are beginning to feel competitive pressures in attracting capable students—they are scrambling against each other for name recognition and status.  In particular, they want to be rated high in rankings such as the US News and World Report annual review of the relative excellence of American colleges and universities.  In pursuit of name recognition and status, these undergraduate institutions seek to hire faculty members who are graduates from well-known and prestigious research universities and who have solid scholarly reputations, particularly those who have lots of publications and perhaps even a few books or monographs to their credit.  Such faculty members can bring name recognition to their school simply by virtue of their scholarly reputations, which will help to attract still more students to the school.  The fact that XYZ College has internationally-famous scholar Dr. Soandso on their faculty looks pretty good on their advertising brochure.  This sort of strategy is possible because the current academic job market is so tight that new PhDs from R1 universities who ordinarily wouldn’t even consider working for a school that stresses teaching over research are nevertheless grateful to get any sort of tenure track job at all.  Consequently, the research and publication requirements for faculty at major liberal arts colleges have been steadily ratcheted up.   Being excellent in the classroom is no longer enough for faculty members in these major liberal arts colleges to achieve advancement and promotion.  They must now also publish scholarly papers, write books, and chase after grant support money in order to achieve tenure.  The tenure chase at four-year undergraduate liberal-arts schools is becoming almost as stressful as it is at major PhD-granting research universities.  It can be argued that research and publishing should enrich and improve teaching rather than compete with it, but it is also true that as research demands steadily increase, they will cause teaching, advising, and service to suffer and lose importance.

Also included in the tenure criteria is the level and quality of service to the academic institution in the form of committee assignments.  These committee assignments are an important part of shared governance.  Examples are faculty committees that deal with issues such as curriculum development, the approval of new courses, student discipline, the quality of student life, student success, the hiring of new administrators, even academic freedom and tenure. 

However, an aspiring assistant professor has to be extremely careful here--a lot of school administrators mouth platitudes saying that service counts a great deal toward tenure, but only very rarely is this actually true.  Naïve and inexperienced assistant professors often knock themselves out serving on large numbers of committees, only to find that such service does them very little good when they come up for tenure--their research, publication, teaching, and grant record is just about all that will really be looked at by the tenure committees. In addition, not all committee work is of equal value--service on some committees is deemed important and significant, whereas service on others is dismissed as trivial and menial, often by criteria that are hidden or invisible to assistant professors striving to get tenure.  It is certainly true that high-visibility committee assignments are worth a lot more than those in which the committee member is unseen or invisible, but it is often difficult to determine ahead of time which ones these will be.  So it is often difficult for a tenure candidate to decide what committees that they should strive to be on and which ones that they should try to avoid.  Assistant professors striving for tenure often need to develop the ability to say no and resist excessive administrative demands for committee service—they may be flattered by a request from the dean or the department chairman to serve on committees X, Y, and Z, but they need to remember that such service probably won’t count for very much at tenure time, especially if it takes away valuable time from more crucial research and teaching duties. 

Participation in faculty governance and service on institutional committees are often seen by junior faculty as unwelcome distractions, taking away valuable time and energy from the teaching and research which are perceived as being far more important in achieving tenure.  Service on committees can sometimes bring out the worst in people, turning them into petty tyrants or inspiring rivalries and competition over even trivial and inconsequential matters, setting people with axes to grind or secret agendas against each other.  There is often no way that junior faculty members striving to achieve tenure can win in such an environment.  It is unfortunately true that junior faculty members can all too easily make enemies among the senior faculty that are members of these committees, which could hurt them when they come up for tenure. 

A lot of academic committee work can be a frustrating and demoralizing exercise in futility.  Sometimes committee work is little more than a kabuki dance—committees trying to pursue goals that are essentially unreachable, committees that meet simply for the sake of meeting, or committees that do good and valuable work only to have it rendered all for naught because of a sudden withdrawal of funding or because of changes in an administrator’s whim.  Sometimes committees have only the illusion of shared governance without the reality—they have no real power to make any actual decisions and are there only for show, such power effectively remaining in the hands of the administration.  Sometimes committees are formed solely to deal with the latest educational fads that come down from the administration—the whole assessment movement being a current example—and when the fad’s energy is spent or when the administration changes its mind and moves on to other things, the committee’s work is often for naught.

Another factor is that in many colleges and universities non-tenured faculty are not permitted to participate in any meaningful way in institutional governance. This can be because non-tenured faculty members are considered by the administration as being lower forms of life that are unworthy of the responsibility of shared governance, or perhaps because it is deemed too dangerous for faculty members without tenure to serve on faculty committees and get involved in controversial academic politics.  In such schools, the awarding of tenure is seen as the gateway for a faculty member to be allowed to participate in the shared governance of the institution.  

Finally, many colleges and universities have the rather vague category of “collegiality” as an unwritten tenure requirement, which essentially means that you should be a good academic citizen and work and play well with others.  Even if you are a potential Nobel Prize winner or are a super teacher with a whole wall full of teaching awards and plaques, you probably don’t want to be seen as a pain in the posterior by your colleagues in the department, someone who is so difficult to work with that they go out of their way to avoid having to deal with you at all or to be viewed as someone that easily gets involved in personal arguments and disputes with others.  You also don’t want to be seen as someone who shirks their duties or fails to show up at meetings, or someone who can’t be depended upon to get routine tasks done.  It is especially important that you don’t make any enemies among the senior faculty during your probationary period, because even one vote against you at tenure time can often doom your chances.  The university can be a seething mass of petty jealousies and easily hurt feelings, and you have to be very careful about what you say and do at all steps during the probationary period.  Senior faculty members can hold grudges for a very long time—even the most innocent remark or act from many years ago could be mentioned as a reason to deny you tenure. 

Nowadays, the tenure criteria are so demanding that even the least bit of negative information in an applicant’s portfolio can doom the candidate’s chances.  You have to be practically perfect in all three major areas—research, teaching, and service—if you are going to have any chance of success.

In most colleges and universities, when a candidate for tenure appears, the tenured members of the applicant’s department make the tenure decision.  This is because the other department members are presumably experts in the particular discipline and know the candidate's strengths and weaknesses the best.  However, in most cases, the departmental recommendation on tenure is subject to approval or disapproval by the Administration.  College and university administrations are so powerful that nowadays the departmental input on the tenure decision is effectively meaningless and is only for show.  The real decision power on tenure is in the hands of the administration (usually the office of the Dean or the Provost) and is often made on the basis of financial considerations, i.e., how many students there are in the department, how many tenured faculty members there are already, and on how much research grant support money the faculty member is bringing in, rather than on the quality of teaching or research.

If the decision is positive, the faculty member is given tenure and is promoted to the rank of associate professor.  The granting of tenure effectively guarantees you a lifetime job at your school for as long as you want it.   The achievement of tenure is a major step forward in your professional career, and you have succeeded in accomplishing something that is quite difficult to do.  You rightfully  feel a sense of pride and accomplishment, and there is now every chance that you will able to make a lifetime career out of your chosen profession.  A great weight has lifted from your psyche--your long and expensive investment of time and energy in the education and training that you went through for your profession has finally paid off.  Since you no longer have to worry about job security, you can now afford to take a longer and broader view in your research and your teaching.  You can start working on those daring and far-reaching research projects that you have always wanted to pursue but dared not attempt for fear that they might not pay off quickly enough so that you could get tenure.  In the classroom, you no longer have to worry nearly as much about student evaluations and can now insist on high academic standards without fear of losing your job.  Suddenly you find that you have become a lot less paranoid and you no longer fear that the entire universe is in conspiracy against you—you are no longer at the mercy of hidden and impersonal malevolent forces, and what people think about you or say about you behind your back no longer matters nearly as much. You are no longer vulnerable to capricious administrators, budget-cutting deans, tyrannical department heads, spiteful colleagues, or vengeful students.   You feel a sudden increase in your personal self-esteem and confidence—your colleagues and your institution have made a commitment to you, and you now have a voice in how your institution is managed and run.  You have achieved full citizenship in the academic world. 

The chances for promotion to associate professor vary greatly, depending on the institution or the discipline—it can be as high as 70 percent in non-PhD granting schools or as small as 10 percent in the natural science departments of top research universities such as Princeton or MIT.  Some institutions and departments report that they select their junior faculty members so cautiously and mentor them so carefully that almost all of them get promoted to tenure rank.  However, other institutions are completely ruthless and deny tenure to most of their assistant professors.  The chances for promotion to tenure at some of the more elitist academic institutions are essentially zero—they almost never promote from within and when the administration wants to hire someone to a tenured position, they bring in some superstar from the outside.  In some rare cases, an associate professor will be hired without tenure, but the position is almost always in the tenure-track with an explicit understanding that the person will very soon qualify for tenure. 

The denial of tenure can be a crushing and demoralizing personal defeat—you must seek another job in an depressed market.  The reaction to tenure denial can be similar to the grief at the death of a loved one or to the stress and anger of a messy divorce.  From your perspective, the whole tenure process was sort of like some nightmarish and grotesque TV reality show.  You have been voted off the island—you have failed to hit the ever-moving and changing target that is tenure.  You are now a lame duck, and must spend much of your spare time looking for your next job.  Tenure denial can lead to complete displacement—you are forced not only to seek new employment but perhaps also to uproot your family as well.  After many months of searching, you may very well find that the academic job market is so tight that another teaching job is impossible to obtain and that you will have to consider a career change, in spite of the many years that you spent in training and preparation. 

 

During the months following tenure denial you will have a lot of opportunity to reflect on your faults and why you didn’t make the cut.   Obviously there must be something seriously wrong with you, but you don’t know what it is.  Because of strict rules of confidentiality, you are unable to read or hear the comments of those who voted for or against you, and you really have no clue as to who or what did you in.  Was the number of your publications not high enough?   Was your research in the “wrong” area, one that was currently out of favor with your department?  Did you publish only in low-ranking journals?  Was too much of your research a collaborative rather than an individual effort?  Were you perceived as someone who was in a subordinate or dependent relationship with some of the more senior members of the department, rather than as an independent and self-reliant scholar?  Did you not achieve a high enough rating in the citation indexes?  Did you spend too much time on teaching and not enough time on research?   Did you fail to bring in enough grant support money?  Was your record of university service deemed inadequate--did you serve only on those committees that were unimportant or insignificant, and failed to serve on those committees deemed “important” by some unseen and unknown criterion?  Were you done in by a couple of student complaints or by something bad said about you on a student evaluation form?  Did the student comments about you on RateMyProfessors.com work against you?  Did you inadvertently offend a powerful senior faculty member?  Was the dean or the provost angry with you?  Did you not socialize enough with the right people, or socialize too much with the wrong people?   Suddenly your colleages in the department start treating you like the walking dead, someone who is dying from a mysterious and disgusting fatal disease.  When they see you in the hallway, they will try to avoid your gaze, look down at their feet, and scurry by in the hope that they won’t have to talk to you.  The untenured will shun you altogether, lest they catch the same disease that afflicts you.  The tenured faculty will often regard your failure with an air of callous indifference and will sometimes make crude and sadistic jokes about your plight, having many years ago become jaded and cynical about the whole process. 

But let’s say that you made it to tenure.  What comes next?  Once an associate professor has achieved a sufficient level of eminence in their field, they can be promoted to full professor, sometimes listed as just professor.  Promotion to a full professorship is not automatic, and many associate professors are never promoted to this rank.   However, the promotion to full professor is not an up-or-out process, and an associate professor can remain at that rank indefinitely without being fired or forced out.

Generally, in order to attain the rank of full professor at a major research university, you need to have achieved a position of eminence in your field of expertise, perhaps having acquired a national or even international reputation.   You have written dozens of publications in top-ranking peer-reviewed scholarly journals and perhaps have written a couple of books or monographs which have achieved national recognition.  You undoubtedly have a coterie of graduate students working under your supervision, who worship the ground that you walk on, and who are constantly generating new publications for which you are the senior author.  You are probably  the principal investigator on several research grants provided by outside funding agencies that are providing your institution with tons of money in terms of overhead support.  You are constantly sought after by the editors of prestigious journals in your field to act as a referee of papers submitted for publication.  You are perhaps even the editor of several key scholarly journals in your field.  Also, you probably have assumed a leadership role in professional organizations within your field.    Whenever something newsworthy in your field occurs, the TV news anchors beat a path to your door to get your take on the matter.  You are constantly hopping from one scholarly conference to the next, always being sought after to give invited papers.  The dean and college president are constantly seeking your advice and consent for virtually every important decision.  Maybe even the Nobel Prize committees are beginning to take notice of you.

The position of full professor is well paid, with the average annual salary at PhD-granting universites being well over $100,000.  If you are a tenured full professor in a R1 university, you have achieved a status that is about as close to absolute freedom and independence as you can legally get in American society.  As a full professor, you are the independent and absolute master of your fate--each and every day when you come to school, you are the one that decides what you will be working on, not someone else.  You have no boss, noone can tell you what to do, and you do not report to anyone.  Yes, you must still show up and teach your classes, you must still attend all of those dull and boring committee meetings, and you really don’t want to get the administration so angry with you that you get no salary raises. But you can usually choose which classes you do teach—if you like, you can avoid all those stressful and tedious introductory classes and can restrict yourself to teaching only those fun advanced subjects that are within your field of  research expertise.  Since you have now reached the pinnacle of your career and no longer have to worry about promotion or job security, you have complete freedom to choose which research topics you want to tackle and can start working on those far-reaching and risky long-term projects that you always have wanted to pursue.  You are limited only by your imagination. 

So you can usually tell whether a faculty member has tenure by their rank, although the term Professor may be used as a polite term of address for any college or university teacher, regardless of actual rank.

Off the Tenure Track

In recent years, there has been a major change in how most American colleges and universities operate.  An increasing percentage of faculty members are in employment arrangements under which they are said to be working “off the tenure track”.   Non-tenure-track (abbreviated henceforth as NTT) faculty are given that name because no matter how long they serve or how well they perform, they will never be awarded tenure.  They are typically hired on annual contracts, which can be renewed or not at the whim of the administration.  Since their contracts are subject to regular renewals, they are sometimes called contingent faculty.  More and more administrations are coming to rely on NTT faculty as a way to staff classes without having to make any long-term commitments. 

 

Since the 1970s, the proportion of faculty working off the tenure track has steadily grown.  In some departments, NTT faculty actually outnumber the traditional tenured and tenure track faculty. The National Center For Education Statistics reported that in the year 2005, 38.6 percent of the full-time faculty members at degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States were working off the tenure track.  This was up about 4 percent from 2003.  The proportion of professors eligible for tenure has actually shrunk faster than the proportion of those who already enjoy tenure.  It seems that on those rare occasions when a new faculty member is actually hired, it more often than not turns out that the new hire is in a contingent position that is ineligible for tenure.  When a tenured professor retires, quits or dies—or when an assistant professor is denied tenure--all too often the position is not replaced or if it is, the new position is ineligible for tenure.  Sometimes, one or more temporary, part-time faculty fills the position. 

 

There is one big reason why NTT faculty are becoming more numerous on campus—money.  More and more colleges and universities are facing a severe financial crunch, with reduced growth in government funding and support, shrinking endowments, rising costs of performing scholarly research, uncontrolled increases in the costs of medical benefits and pensions, as well as the need to spend increasing amounts of money on computers and other related technologies, all causing a rapid inflation in the price of student tuition.  Administrative costs have also skyrocketed in recent years because of requirements  for careful record keeping, the need to handle student financial aid, the need to demonstrate accountability to accrediting agencies, as well as the need to show compliance with myriads of government-imposed rules and regulations.  These financial problems only promise to get worse in the future, especially if student enrollments start to decline.  Consequently, college and university administrators have been forced to think and act like typical corporate business executives, focusing narrowly on short-term bottom-line fiscal issues and on the next quarter’s financial balance sheet. 

 

This short-term focus means in particular that college and university administrators are reluctant to offer any of their faculty the long-term financial commitment that the granting of tenure would require.  Most administrators bitterly resent the rigidity, expense, and inflexibility of the tenure system—since tenured faculty have almost absolute job security, the administration can’t eliminate their jobs if times get tough or money gets scarce.  A recurrent administrator’s dream is to wake up one glorious morning to find that the tenure system has been miraculously abolished overnight.  Administrators would strongly prefer never to offer tenure to anyone—if they could, they would probably even like to get rid of the tenured faculty that they already have, or at least not replace them when they retire, quit, or die.  Furthermore, administrators would like to avoid ever hiring anyone into a position where tenure is even a possibility in the future.  Instead, they prefer to hire contingent faculty who are ineligible for tenure and who work under short-term contracts, since such faculty can easily be let go simply by not renewing their contracts if times get tough, if students began to disappear, or if funding begins to dry up.   College administrations say that the increased rate of hiring of contingent faculty gives them greater flexibility to meet needs as student enrollment fluctuates, as demand for particular specialties waxes or wanes, or as grant support is gained or lost. But the real reason is to save money.

 

NTT faculty are typically given titles such as visiting professor, research professor, acting instructor, acting professor, teaching professor, extension professor, consulting professor, clinical professor, lecturer, senior lecturer, instructor, or reader.  They are generally hired with annual contracts that can be renewed or not as economic conditions dictate.  Although dismissal of an NTT faculty member during their contract period requires an adequate cause, once the contract has expired, the administration can decide not to renew it for any reason whatsoever, or even for no reason at all.  So there is little if any long-term job security for NTT faculty.  Even though they often have the same qualifications, degrees, and level of experience as the conventional tenure-track faculty, full time contingent faculty are often treated by their institutions as little more than hired help--there is usually little or no academic freedom for contingent faculty and no security against dismissal on the basis of controversial teaching or research.  Sometimes, NTT faculty are treated as second-class academic citizens and are excluded by their tenure-track colleagues from the main currents of departmental academic life and from departmental or university governance, and they often feel a sense of isolation and lack of interaction with their senior departmental colleagues.

 

Another justification for the increased rate of hiring of NTT faculty is the desire for specialization.  The ideal for a tenure track faculty member in a research university has long been that of the teacher-scholar, one who is expected to conduct ground-breaking research while at the same time carrying out a full teaching load.  In contrast, NTT faculty are not expected to excel at both of these roles and are typically hired either to teach or to do research, but usually not to do both.  Consequently, there are two major categories of NTT full time faculty—research faculty and teaching faculty.

 

Full-time NTT faculty that are hired primarily to do research usually work in collaboration with other faculty members in the department, and they have major responsibilities for externally-funded and sponsored programs of research.   They are not expected to do much teaching or university service.  Sometimes these research faculty are fully independent and autonomous investigators working on their own research projects and are thus indistinguishable from the regular tenure track faculty, with the exception that they aren’t expected to do any teaching.  Other research faculty are little more than contract employees who are working on someone else’s research project and are in a subordinate position to the principal investigator on the grant, who is usually a senior faculty member with tenure.  It is very rare that research faculty actually do any teaching, but they do supervise undergraduate and graduate students who participate in their research programs.  Their salaries derive largely or exclusively from grants and contracts—if the grant dries up or is not renewed, their job usually disappears as well.  Such appointments can usually be renewed indefinitely, subject only to the continued availability of funds.  In many ways, research faculty are quite similar to postdoctoral research fellows right out of graduate school who work for a couple of years on a senior faculty member’s research program before they get enough experience and rack up enough publications so that they can try to land a tenure-track job somewhere. 

 

NTT teaching faculty are exactly the opposite—their primary job is to teach classes, not to do research or publish papers.  The vast majority of NTT faculty fall into this category.  They are usually hired to teach introductory or intermediate courses to undergraduates—courses that most tenured or tenure-track faculty, caught up in the publish-or-perish world, don’t really want to handle since such courses typically have lots of students and involve a lot of grading and preparation time.   Since these teaching faculty are not expected to carry out a research program or to participate in university service, their course loads are often significantly higher than those of their tenure-track colleagues—sometimes loads can be as high as four or five undergraduate courses per semester or quarter.  Many institutions use NTT faculty members to fill in for senior faculty on sabbatical leave or to substitute for those who have been awarded release time from teaching to pursue research interests.  NTT faculty dominate the undergraduate curriculum in many institutions—in such schools many undergraduates never see a tenure track faculty member at all, at least in most of their introductory courses.

 

Colleges and universities with medical schools often have NTT clinical faculty on staff, who are hired primarily to perform patient care and to provide instruction to students in a clinical setting.  They are generally not expected to do any research or service, although some actually do. 

 

Since NTT teaching faculty members usually do little or no research, their lists of scholarly publications are generally far less impressive than those of their tenure-track colleagues.  For this reason, they are often looked down upon by the regular tenured and tenure-track faculty as being inferior scholars, definitely lower down on the academic food chain.  Since they are hired primarily to teach, non tenure-track full time faculty have little institutional support for professional development, no access to money for attending conferences or presenting papers, no support for professional association memberships, no possibility of sabbatical leave, and no possibility of any partial relief from teaching duties to pursue research interests. 

 

The treatment of NTT faculty varies widely from institution to institution—all the way from really lousy at some to fairly good at others.  Full time NTT faculty are usually paid as much as 20 percent less than their tenure-track colleagues, but at a few research universities NTT faculty are actually paid higher salaries than those on the tenure track.  NTT faculty often do not have access to the regular salary increases, merit raises, and bonuses that are available to the tenure-track faculty, but some universities do have a promotion and salary advancement system in place that covers their NTT faculty.  NTT faculty usually do have access to some benefits, although often not nearly as many as are available to tenure-track and tenured faculty.  Many institutions state in their by-laws that they offer their NTT faculty members the same level of  protections regarding academic freedom as they do for their tenure-track faculty.  NTT faculty often have some level of participation in institutional governance, the level of which varies from one institution to another—all the way from absolutely none at some to full participitation at others.  . 

 

The real disadvantage of being a NTT faculty member is of course the lack of any long-term job security.  Some academic institutions do offer their contract faculty a guarantee of continued future employment after a certain number of years of satisfactory service at the institution, usually six years.  At the end of the sixth year, if the faculty member is offered another contract renewal, this means that the faculty member has a reasonable expectation of a long-term job at the institution if they continue to perform satisfactorily.  This is known as the “six year rule”, and the renewal of a teacher’s contract after six years on the job is effectively a de facto granting of tenure.  The notion of de facto tenure was originally designed to protect contingent faculty from abuse and exploitation—the idea was to force university administration to give long-term job security to contingent faculty who had given a certain number of years of good service.  This de facto tenure process is quite different from the system under which the regular tenure-track faculty are granted tenure, since there is no formal tenure review process and tenure is conferred solely by virtue of the faculty member’s reappointment for another term.  

 

However,  college and university administrations strongly prefer a system under which they are free to hire faculty on sequential one-year contracts, one where they can easily let faculty go when they are no longer needed.  Since in the current job market there are literally hundreds of applicants for each full-time teaching position, it is very easy to find a replacement for a contingent faculty member whose contract is not renewed.  Consequently, at schools where the “six-year rule” applies, it is often very difficult for contingent faculty to get a reappointment to that critical seventh-year term, thus denying them de facto tenure and forcing them back out on the street to face an utterly miserable job market.  College and university administrations are sometimes not up front about this aspect of the six-year rule, and a lot of NTT faculty are not really aware that there is a high probability that they will be fired after six years of  service, no matter how well they perform.

 

Some full-time NTT faculty view themselves as simply being in a temporary holding pattern, waiting patiently for the day when a tenure-track job opens up at their institution or at some other school.  However, others have abandoned any hope of ever getting a tenure-track position and have been at the game so long that their job has become a permanent lifetime career.  Some full-timers report that they have been working on a contract basis at their institutions for more than 20 years.  Although some contract employees are happy at being able to avoid the tenure track, others express feelings of bitterness and exploitation.

 

Adjunct Hell

Another separate and completely different category of NTT faculty is that of part-time temporary faculty, sometimes known as adjuncts.  Full-time and part-time NTT faculty are sometimes lumped together, but this is usually a mistake, since each subgroup has a quite separate and distinct set of issues, concerns, and problems.  Part-time adjunct faculty are hired on short-term single-quarter or single-semester contracts, and are generally paid on a per-course basis.    The increased presence of part time adjuncts on campus is a growing scandal in academe—part-timers have little or no job security, they usually have no access to benefits, and they are often subject to demeaning and exploitative working conditions.  A report from the National Center for Educational Statistics showed that of all the faculty members working at colleges that award federal financial aid in the fall of 2005, 46.3 percent of them were in part-time positions.  The percentage is probably even higher now.

Historically, adjunct faculty have been professional people with full-time day jobs hired by local colleges and universities to teach specialized courses in their area of expertise, courses which the regular faculty were not competent to handle.  For example, a mechanical engineer would be hired to teach a course in engineering draftmanship at a local college, a lawyer would teach a course on copyright law at an art school, or a business executive would teach a course on management at the nearby community college.  Sometimes, recently-retired professionals who wanted to keep their minds active and remain current would agree to teach courses related to their profession in their spare time.  The number of adjuncts was always fairly small, with most departments having only one or two of these part-timers. 

However, things are quite different now.  The numbers of part-timers have rapidly expanded in recent years, and many departments now have more adjuncts than they have full-time faculty members.  Again, the primary reason for this trend is money--adjuncts are a lot cheaper than full-time faculty, and they provide extra flexibility to university administrations, since they act as additional teaching resourses that can be quickly called up or dispensed with as necessary.  Part-timers are a ready pool of expendable workers who can easily be eliminated when no longer needed simply by not renewing their contracts.  In the current academic job market there is a vast oversupply of freshly-minted PhDs vainly trying to secure a tenure-track position, and there are so few such positions available that the chances of landing one are often not much better than the odds of winning the PowerBall lottery.  Many new PhDs are forced to accept adjunct or part-time positions simply in order to pay their bills.  It is not unusual for part-timers to teach courses at two or even three different institutions at the same time, since just one adjunct position probably isn’t enough to pay all the bills, especially without benefits.  These multiple-position adjuncts are often called “freeway flyers”, since they sometimes spend more time in commuting back and forth than they actually spend in the classroom. 

Many adjuncts are subject to economic exploitation and demeaning working conditions.  They are definitely second-class citizens within the university community--an educational underclass, an academic proletariat.  Most adjuncts earn only about half of what full-time or tenure-track faculty make to teach the same number of courses, and it is usually the case that the pay rate for adjuncts is the same no matter what their level of experience.  Since they are part-time employees, adjuncts usually do not have access to employer-provided benefits such as health care insurance, life insurance, or retirement plans--yet another powerful reason why budget-conscious administrations prefer to hire them rather than full-time faculty.  Adjunct faculty members usually don’t have an office, a telephone, or even a mailbox, and they often don’t have access to university services such as computers, e-mail, or photocopying machines.  They are typically ineligible for research or travel funds, and there is usually no administration support for the professional development of adjuncts.  Adjuncts rarely, if ever, receive salary raises to reward them for their experience and professional development. Even though their primary job is to teach, adjuncts are often ineligible for university teaching awards.  Adjuncts have little or no academic freedom—things that tenured or tenure-track faculty can usually do with impunity, such as teaching controversial subjects, fighting grade changes, attempting to organize unions, or even writing controversial opinion articles in newspapers, can get an adjunct fired fairly quickly.  Adjuncts are an expendable commodity--they can be replaced as easily as one replaces a burnt-out light bulb. 

When adjuncts are hired, there are no formal searches or search committees, and institutions don’t interview at the major conferences for adjunct positions.  The adjunct market is strictly at the local or even departmental level, and the need for adjuncts is usually decided on a term-by-term basis.   Adjuncts are typically hired at the last minute, often only days or even hours before the classes they are supposed to teach actually begin, leaving them essentially no time for preparation.  At the time of their hiring, aduncts are usually given only the most cursory of interviews, and usually have no chance to meet the faculty with which they will be working.  Sometimes, during the interviewing process the human resources people at the hiring institution will “tease” potential adjuncts with vague hints about possible future salary increases, perhaps benefits someday becoming available, or even the possibility of their position eventually being made permanent or full-time.  But these promises are never made in writing, and it invariably happens that they are bogus and the money and the position never appear.

The number of courses taught by a part-time adjunct faculty member can vary from just one to a full-time load or even an overload.  Because of fluctuating student enrollments and uncertain funding, there is no guarantee that classes will be available for part-timers from one academic term to another.  When money is tight or when enrollment is declining, classes can be easily yanked away from adjuncts and transferred to full-time professors, and courses with low enrollment can easily be cancelled.  Consequently, a part-time faculty member’s schedule can be quite unpredictable from one term to another, and this uncertainty in employment can lead to a sense of anxiety and frustration.   Since the availiablity of courses is uncertain from one academic term to another, there can be an intense and sometimes nasty competition between adjuncts for these courses.  Adjuncts sometimes resort to dirty tricks or unethical behavior to get a “leg up” on their competitors for course assignments for the next term.  Since there is usually an oversupply of adjuncts and a shortage of available courses, the adjunct game can encourage this sort of hyper-competitive behavior, and can pit part-timers against one another, creating an environment in which ever-vulnerable adjuncts have to be suspicious and distrustful of each other as well as of the administrations that exploit them.

 

Currently, academic management has become increasingly corporatized, with more and more attention being paid by administrators to the bottom line.  In such an academic environment, students are increasingly regarded as paying customers--it is important not to displease the customers so that enrollments remain high and tuition money keeps coming in.  Consequently, student course evaluations have become more and more important to university administrators in determining the success or failure of their courses and in particular in judging the quality and competence of their instructors.  Adjuncts know that they are particularly vulnerable when it comes to student evaluations--just a few poor evaluations or even a couple of student complaints to the dean can result in their contracts not being renewed.  So in order to avoid bad evaluations, many adjuncts are tempted to take the easy way out by inflating grades, giving easy assignments and simple exams, teaching to the lowest common denominator, and by not challenging their students too much.   It is a frequent adjunct dilemma--be an easy grader and get good reviews or stick to high standards and risk getting fired.

 

Unlike full-time faculty members, adjuncts usually do not participate at any level in the administrative governance of their college or university,  they don’t sit on committees or boards and they have no voice in curriculum planning.  This can be either because adjuncts are regarded as lower-status part-time employees that are deliberately excluded from institutional governance or else because they are so busy manipulating multiple gigs that they just don’t have the time or energy to get involved in committee work.  As a result, adjuncts often have little or no emotional or intellectual investment in the university or college at which they teach, which can lead to a sense of isolation and alienation.   Since adjuncts can be fired (or, rather, “not renewed”) for making only the slightest waves, it is usually a mistake for them to try and get involved in controversial academic politics or contentious issues such as creating new degree programs, making curriculum changes, or introducing new courses—these issues will just eat up your time, you will invariably offend at least some of the full-time faculty, you will probably antagonize the dean or the department head, and people will wonder about your motives and will think that you are acting above your station.  As an ever-vulnerable adjunct, the last thing you need is for faculty members or administrators to be suspicious of you.

 

There is often little if any sense of collegiality between adjuncts and the full-time faculty.  It often seems that very few full-timers are interested in getting to know any of  the adjuncts, and it is sometimes the case that adjuncts are looked down upon by the full-time faculty as inferiors.  The prevailing attitude among full-timers seems to be that adjuncts are little more than failed academics, second-rate scholars who have been found wanting in the publish-or-perish game—after all, if an adjunct were any good they would have obviously gotten a full-time position somewhere.   Consequently, many full-time faculty regard their adjunct colleagues with an air of condescension and thinly-disguised contempt.  Although many adjuncts bring important real-world experience to their institution, they seldom have the opportunity to share this experience with the full-time faculty, and it all too often seems to happen that the full-time faculty are not really interested in what the adjuncts have to say.  The nature of their employment (many have a full-time job off-campus, or are like me, retired) means that adjuncts are on campus so rarely that they are unable to form social or professional relationships with the full-time faculty—adjuncts tend to be invisible on campus, just like the janitors who clean the washrooms, the maintenance people who repair the photocopiers, or the groundskeepers who mow the lawns. 

 

Although many adjuncts report a high degree of satisfaction in their relationships with their students, because of their lack of regular presence on campus, and also because they lack offices and telephones, adjuncts are often unable to meet with their students out of class to answer questions or to advise them adequately.  There is often such a rapid turnover of adjuncts that students don’t get to know any of their instructors long enough to have them write letters of recommendation.  This can lead to their students feeling shortchanged in comparison to those of full-time faculty members. A recent national survey indicated that one half of part-time faculty do not hold office hours or meet with students outside the classroom.   But it is difficult to hold office hours when you don’t have an office.

A lot of adjuncts labor under the expectation that if they do a good job, obtain glowing student course evaluations, and perform extra work above and beyond their regular duties, they might be able to attract enough favorable attention from the administration so that their jobs are eventually converted to a full-time or tenure track position.  However, such hopes are usually in vain.  It is very rare that part-time positions are converted to full-time, and even if they are, the adjunct faculty already on staff seldom receives any priority consideration.  Typically, when a non-tenure-track position is converted to the tenure track, or if a new full-time position is created, the department advertises nationally, usually resulting in a flood of hundreds of CVs from super-qualified applicants.   At research institutions, adjuncts have little opportunity to publish in peer-reviewed journals--so their lists of publications will generally be much less impressive than those of recent PhDs.  The teaching experience of adjunct faculty members may actually work against them—it is often true that the longer an adjunct works as a temporary instructor the farther behind they will fall in the publish-or-perish game.   If an applicant for a full-time job has been an adjunct for too long, the search committees will look askance at their CV and will start wondering what is wrong with them.  Tragically, in academe, once you are branded as a part-timer, you are likely to stay one, and all too often you will find that you are in a dead-end rather than an entry-level job.

Proprietary Schools--Where Tenure Doesn’t Exist

A few colleges and universities have never had a tenure system at all, and some others—most notably at financially-squeezed schools--have been able to eliminate tenure at their institutions, albeit after a protracted legal battle.  In these schools, tenure is replaced by a sequence of employment contracts, renewable indefinitely at the administration’s discretion.

The growing ranks of proprietary/for-profit schools (such as the Education Management Corporation, the DeVry Institute,  ITT Education Services, or the University of Phoenix) usually do not have a tenure system at all, and all of their faculty members (both full-time and part-time) are in contingent positions, hired on short-term yearly or even quarterly contracts.  

 

Unlike traditional non-profit educational institutions, proprietary schools are run like typical profit-making corporations—they have boards of directors, they have company officers, they issue stock offerings and they have listings on the Wall Street stock exchange.  There is constant pressure on management to keep the stock price high and to keep the financial analysts happy.  This requires that profits be maximized and that shareholder value be increased through aggressive cost cutting and vigorous marketing strategies.  Some of these schools, which were once owned locally, are being absorbed into large nationwide chains with central headquarters.