Arguments Against Faculty Tenure

“Deadwood” and Institutional Flexibility

In last week’s post we provided an overview of faculty tenure at universities, what it is and isn’t, how it is earned, and how it can be lost. Tenure is under a great deal of pressure, as demonstrated by the declining number of faculty who hold it, from the increasingly stringent post-tenure reviews becoming more common, and from elected officials looking to eliminate/diminish it. Perhaps surprisingly, even university presidents seem to have soured on tenure! In a recent Inside Higher Education survey, two-thirds of university presidents replied that they thought tenure was more trouble than it was worth. Well, then!

In this post we take on the arguments against tenure to see which have merit and which do not.

Do Faculty Quit Working After Tenure?

Perhaps the strongest conceptual argument against tenure is the possibility that post-tenure faculty work and produce less. This notion seems to be a motivating factor for stringent post-tenure review processes in states like Florida. On its face, the argument seems plausible. Who wouldn’t back off a bit from a job where effort cannot be monitored effectively and where protections against firing insulate you from the consequences of taking it easier?

Yet, there is little evidence in the research literature to support this hypothesis, though faculty may change the type of work they do, e.g. emphasizing quality over quantity. This tracks with our experience with our colleagues. Yes, a small number of faculty become unproductive, or “deadwood” in academic parlance, after earning tenure. But others become much more productive, freed from the ticking clock of an impending tenure review and able to go deeper into difficult research topics – topics that were too risky to explore given their focus on tangible results while in the probationary period.

The lack of evidence for systematic productivity decline is even more surprising given the changing work expectations of a tenured faculty member. Well-run departments insulate junior faculty from significant service obligations. But somebody has got to run the place, and the (long!) list of service and leadership obligations that post-tenure faculty must discharge can significantly reduce time for research and teaching.

To be clear, there are outliers, individuals who take advantage of tenure protections to coast, and others who just get tired and mail it in. We’ll discuss strategies for these outliers in a subsequent post, but the larger point here is that they are *outliers*… and productivity decline post-tenure is not a systemic problem.

Why Doesn’t Post-tenure Productivity Diminish More?

We think there are four reasons.

• One, we all learn by doing, and faculty a decade out from grad school are simply better at teaching and research than new PhDs. For many faculty it takes several years to build momentum in a research program. By the time of the tenure decision, the question of whether a faculty member can be productive is settled. After tenure we start to see faculty building scale (larger labs with more PhD students and post-docs), taking risks, and gaining the national recognition and visibility to lead/partner on bigger and more ambitious grants and projects.

• Two, as we discuss here, there are strong financial and professional motives for continuing to be productive. Raises, summer salary (whether internal or grant funded), additional promotions (to full or chaired/distinguished professor), and the prospect of outside offers can create very large differences in financial compensation for more productive faculty. Faculty who are not meeting basic responsibilities may see their appointments reduced and their compensation actually cut.

• Three, most faculty self-select into the profession because they love to research and teach, and this intrinsic motivation drives them to produce even if they are (somewhat) insulated from termination.

• Fourth, and perhaps most important, nobody dislikes “deadwood” faculty more than other faculty! As a result, tenure review processes focus as much on a forecast of future productivity as on past production. There are a lot of things that go into that forecast, including pipeline performance but also subjective assessments of whether a promotion candidate has the intrinsic motivation to continue doing the work.

Do Tenured Faculty Reduce Budget Flexibility?

This argument also has some surface plausibility. Let’s say we tenure someone at age 35 and they retire (of their own volition) at age 75. That’s a 40-year salary commitment! Accumulate that across hundreds or even thousands of faculty across a large university and it is a massive commitment indeed.

This commitment becomes most problematic when a department accumulates more tenured faculty than are justified by the teaching needs of the department, or when a surplus of tenured faculty in one area reduces the budget flexibility needed to provide resources for fast-growing units. That can happen, especially in departments that were once well-subscribed and now struggle for students.

This is not just a humanities issue…it would not surprise us if the current land-rush into computer science enrollments were to ebb, repeating the boom and bust cycle from 1995-2010. And if the Trump Administration makes good on its intention to severely slash research funding, colleges of Agriculture, Science, Engineering, and Medicine may have more tenured faculty than they know what to do with.

These large shifts in faculty demand notwithstanding, three factors argue strongly against budget flexibility as a major consideration for eliminating tenure.

• First, fewer and fewer of the credit hours delivered in undergraduate programs are delivered by tenured faculty! As we described here, non-tenured faculty have grown rapidly at nearly every university and now comprise nearly 2/3s of all faculty nation-wide. And since it is typical for non-tenured faculty to teach two to three times as much as tenured faculty, they (and graduate students) are delivering the lion’s share of undergraduate credit hours. We’re not so sure that’s a good thing for students, but if a university administration needs to adjust teaching capacity/budget at the margin, that is a vast reservoir of adjustment unimpeded by tenure contracts.

• Second, while there can be short term fluctuations in demand for certain degree areas, most of the changes we see in enrollments reflect slow moving, long run trends. This usually provides leadership with ample time for adjustment in tenure lines, making use of the steady process of attrition and faculty turnover, provided leadership is even a little bit forward looking.

• Three, if push comes to shove, departments can be disbanded, majors discontinued, and tenured faculty laid off. If federal funds used to buy out faculty time dry up, affected faculty can simply teach more.

In short, we think the budget flexibility argument against tenure is wildly overstated, except in cases where smaller colleges really have loaded themselves up with vastly more tenured faculty than they can use. When it comes to the operations of nearly all comprehensive universities today, budget inflexibility stemming from tenure is a red herring.

Do Tenured Faculty Stand in the Way of Needed Change?

This brings us to what we believe is the real source of opposition to tenure: tenured faculty constrain the ability of university leadership to remake the university in the way they please. This constraint is real: it flows from the combination of shared governance, particularly faculty control of the curriculum, and tenure protections which prevent administrators from firing faculty who disagree with their preferred approach.

Unhappiness with recalcitrant faculty abounds among executive leadership. Former Purdue president (and our former boss) Mitch Daniels published an op-ed in the Washington Post pointing to tenure as a barrier to innovation. The former president of Macalester, Brian Rosenberg, wrote a provocatively titled, thoughtful and entertaining book Whatever It Is, I’m Against It, pointing to tenured faculty as standing in the way of any kind of change at the university. Former Berkeley chancellor Nicholas Dirks’ book City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University also strongly criticizes the unwillingness of his faculty to be reasonable in their response to budgetary crises. And now we have a survey saying two-thirds of college presidents seem to agree with this negative sentiment. Ouch.

Look we get it. Shared governance means that tenured faculty can resist change, they can slow and, in some cases, even stop what administrators think is progress. Sometimes that happens with overt votes. Sometimes it happens by slow walking proposals in the hopes that administrators will lose interest (or leave). There were certainly times when we, as university leaders, were really frustrated by faculty who had different ideas than we did.

The question is, what approach to governance would you prefer?

Be More Like Business?

It is often argued that universities need to be more like business: more nimble, more agile. Implied in this notion is that if faculty can’t or won’t be nimble and agile, strong central leadership can and will. If we simply let powerful boards and presidents act like corporate CEOs and drive aggressive change without faculty obstruction, perhaps universities would move rapidly and get better.

Speaking as two economists, let’s be clear about a couple of things.

• First, private business isn’t always agile and disruptive, and the more successful a company has been with past innovation the less likely it is to continue to innovate. The tendency to stick with successful existing lines of business in lieu of forward-looking innovation was famously named the “Innovator’s Dilemma” and extensively documented by Clayton Christensen, the late guru of business disruption. Kodak anyone? Xerox?

• Second, when it does innovate, private business screws up all the time! Christensen and coauthors wrote that repeated studies have found 70-90% of mergers and acquisitions are failures. The vast majority of new product launches fail to gain sizeable new markets. A great deal of corporate investment in innovation generates nothing of market value. For example, in the vital pharmaceutical sector only about 10% of new molecules that are even promising enough to test in clinical trials make it through those trials to be granted regulatory approval.

• Third, perhaps owing to the difficulty of successfully leading large businesses, CEOs don’t stick around long. The median tenure of S&P500 CEOs is 4.8 years, a number that has been steadily declining and is remarkably similar to the average tenure of university presidents (5.9 years). Governing boards frequently make big mistakes in hiring their strong central leaders: one in seven CEOs of large public firms are out of the job within a year.

We’re not saying universities are currently as innovative and nimble as they need to be – they aren’t. (Christensen was also pretty critical of universities. We’ll come back to this in a future post.) And we are not being critical of private business leadership or second-guessing their strategic choices. These are hard jobs! We’re just saying, there is nothing magical about strong CEOs or a private business approach that guarantees success.

Rather, the magic of the market is that successes are rewarded and screwups are punished. Firms that make bad decisions lose their shareholders’ money or go out of business. And at a really high rate! About 20% of business startups close shop in the first year and only half make it five years. In the strong economy of 2022, almost half a million US firms went out of business, leading to over 5 million employees losing their jobs.

There is no reason to think that a more business-like, strong CEO approach to university governance would generate higher success rates than it does when applied to business itself. For every Michael Crowe of Arizona State, there is a Ben Sasse of Florida.

Move Fast and Break Things?

There is, however, a huge difference between universities and business in the consequences of failure. The problem with “move fast and break things” in a university context is that the “things” are students. And for most of them, the time they spend in college has more impact on their career and life outcomes than any other thing they will do in their lives.

And it’s not just the students, there are other important stakeholders. Wild swings in the scope and focus of university activity directly affect non-tenured faculty and staff, the communities that host universities, and the employers who rely on them to supply talent and research.

Alumni have a stake in university choices as well. If Frito-Lay discontinues Flaming Hot Nacho Doritos you might be a little sad but you can switch to classic Nacho Cheese Doritos, or perhaps Fuego Takis instead. No great loss.

But if a university discontinues a degree program, that is a loss felt by all the alumni who received that degree. A degree is not a one-off consumption decision. It is an investment whose value depends not only on what happened while you took the degree, but on the public perception of the value of that degree in the years since graduation. Why else do alumni get so worked up about, e.g. MBA rankings? It’s not just pride in their alma mater. It is a perception that falling rankings affect the ongoing value of their degree and its associated human capital.

People who run universities hear from all these stakeholders all the time. You think faculty are the only ones who resist change?

Improving Shared Governance

None of this is meant to excuse faculty recalcitrance, which is a real thing. But it does suggest that the actual problem lies not with tenure but instead with an imbalance in shared governance.

Shared governance between university leadership and faculty plays out in many different ways across institutions. But at its core is the idea that disciplinary faculty know things about their discipline that leadership does not, and leadership has perspectives on broader issues that faculty do not.

This seems to suggest a pretty clear delineation of roles. Faculty voices should be strongest in matters that require deep disciplinary knowledge: the content of courses and curricula, and yes, what scholarly records demonstrate sufficiently impressive accomplishment that they deserve tenure. Administrative voices should be strongest in matters that concern the allocation of resources across different areas of the university. And, both faculty and administrators benefit when decisions in their realm are informed with information from the other.

Reading Dirks’ and Rosenberg’s accounts, it seems to us that their frustrations arose because faculty had been granted more power over budgetary matters than was warranted.

All this is solvable, and we’ll have more to say about this in a few weeks. But there is no reason to think that abolishing tenure as a first step in giving university leadership unconstrained power over all decisions, academic or otherwise, is a reasonable or necessary part of that solution.

Next Week

In summary, we don’t think these common arguments against tenure hold a lot of water. But what about the arguments in favor of tenure? We tackle that next.

“Finding Equilibrium” is coauthored by Jay Akridge, Professor of Agricultural Economics, Trustee Chair in Teaching and Learning Excellence, and Provost Emeritus at Purdue University and David Hummels, Distinguished Professor of Economics and Dean Emeritus at the Daniels School of Business at Purdue.