Faculty Tenure: A Better Way

Expanding Protections, Responding to Critics

As we have outlined in our four previous posts, tenure is increasingly under attack. By universities looking to cut costs and rebalance toward credit hour delivery and away from research. By state legislatures who have bought into ideas that faculty don’t work post-tenure and use classroom time to “indoctrinate” students. Even by university presidents, who increasingly doubt the value of tenure.

Where does this leave us? Universities, and more especially faculty themselves, have to be more responsive to public critiques of tenure, while ensuring the necessary components of tenure remain and are strengthened. The reason is not only self-protection, but also because tenure and the protections it provides makes for better research, for better instruction for students, and for a better role for strong universities in shaping our society.

In this post we highlight a number of areas where a rethinking is necessary, along with our recommendations for strengthening and protecting the core benefits of tenure and thereby higher education as an institution.

Academic Freedom and Job Security for Who?

Faculty who actually enjoy the protections of tenure are rapidly shrinking as a share of the faculty workforce at most universities, and even faster as a share of overall undergraduate teaching. At many institutions, the lion’s share of credit hours outside of graduate programs are delivered by non-tenured faculty members.

An immediate implication is that, to the extent that tenure is *the* guarantor of academic freedom in the classroom, academic freedom is not guaranteed at all in the vast majority of classes taught to undergraduates. It is only what we might call regulatory forbearance that prevents the state, the university, or its agents (i.e., other faculty, staff, or administrators), from dictating classroom content. Regulatory forbearance means that a person or institution with the authority to intervene in courses or curricula simply chooses not to, but that hands-off choice depends on the faculty member in question remaining in their good graces.

That tenuous state is complicated by an important reality of faculty HR processes within universities. The hiring, evaluation, and promotion of tenured faculty are subject to a great deal of formal university process, along with a very significant investment of time by other faculty, staff and administrators. In contrast, HR decision making around non-tenured faculty is much more ad-hoc and subject to far less scrutiny.

Why? Non-tenure track positions are, alas, not enough of a priority at most research universities. Taking great care in selecting candidates takes time nobody has to invest. It is difficult to assess excellent teaching, and undergraduate teaching itself is perhaps not taken as seriously as it could be by many faculty. And really, what’s the harm? A mistaken lecturer hire can be corrected after a year or two; a mistaken tenure decision stays with you a long time.

A consequence is that we effectively delegate hiring, evaluation and contract renewal decisions for non-tenured faculty to a much smaller set of individuals with far less clear criteria for making these decisions. Suppose a department head simply does not like what or how a lecturer teaches -- what is to stop them from simply not renewing a contract?

How Can We Ensure Academic Freedom in the Classroom?

We think the growing importance of non-tenured faculty points at three key elements that are necessary to ensure academic freedom in the classroom.

1. States and universities should state explicitly that academic freedoms in the classroom are held by all instructors, regardless of tenure status.

2. HR decision-making around the hiring, development, evaluation, compensation, and promotion of non-tenure track faculty should be professionalized and treated with the same seriousness as related functions are for tenured faculty. An important element is getting much more serious about the evaluation of teaching.

3. Both of these suggestions will work more effectively if academic freedom and HR decision-making are paired with longer term contracts for non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty. Perhaps not indefinite, but long enough (a) that other faculty take related HR functions more seriously because the consequences of good/bad decisions stay with you and (b) to insure against situations in which the content of a class, as opposed to the efficacy with which that content is taught, becomes a reason for non-renewal.

Longer term contracts for NTT faculty also work on a related issue. We argued that personal investment in completing a PhD program is sizeable, and that tenure is a mechanism for insuring the risks associated with that investment. Without tenure protections, we fear that fewer and fewer excellent scholars will opt to pursue a PhD, or having earned one, to work in universities.

While the underlying risks facing NTT faculty are not as severe (you can control the quality of your classroom more than you can control whether a truly innovative research agenda pans out), they are still subject to the vagaries of university budgets and that risk can dissuade potentially excellent teachers from pursuing academic life.

Enhancing Productivity Post-Tenure

As we discussed here, there is no evidence that productivity for the average faculty member declines post-tenure. But that is not the same thing as saying that no faculty member sees a decline in their productivity. How do we address this situation?

First, quit wasting their damn time! One of the biggest drags on faculty productivity is participation in endless meetings that didn’t have to happen, and engagement in meaningless committees that exist only because no one has ever reviewed why the committee exists or made the (perhaps hard) call to shut them down.

Related, federal, state and university regulations impose significant time burdens on faculty, including endless “trainings” (FERPA, Title IX, Cybersecurity, Research Ethics, …) and reporting requirements, which are particularly onerous around research grants. The desire to let faculty be free to do their work is constantly at war with administrators’ and regulators’ desire to know what faculty are doing with all that free time!

Second, we rely on faculty to take a whole host of service positions that pull them away from excellent individual contributions to research and teaching. This includes both formal leadership roles and informal or ad-hoc roles doing the hard work of curriculum development or HR functions. These positions are generally not well-compensated if they are compensated at all, and to do them properly involves either unsustainably long work weeks or significantly sacrificing scholarly output. Positions that extend beyond a few years (and it’s really hard to be effective in a leadership role if they don’t) can permanently impair one’s productivity as a scholar.

So there simply has to be some acknowledgement of this diversion of effort, and some recognition in both current and lasting compensation, and some recognition that research productivity and teaching/engagement contributions on the far end may be impaired. (We know. We know. This sounds like us begging our colleagues to take it easy on us as recovering administrators. But we are working hard to return to our prior research and teaching productivity, in addition to doing some novel things like this Substack!)

Put more directly, if faculty know that they will be severely penalized for slacking productivity, the logical response is to refuse all service effort and all leadership positions. Only someone who was already in a research end-state in their mid-late 60s would rationally agree to serve.

Increasing the Incentives to Produce Post-tenure

We argued earlier that a reason productivity doesn’t decline for a typical post-tenure faculty member is that many universities offer significant financial rewards for continuing to work. Annual raises that compound over time. Summer support. Access to better research resources: labs, grad students, post-docs. But not all universities behave this way.

If a university is struggling with post-tenure productivity the first thing it should do is look in the mirror and ask what its compensation and faculty support scheme actually rewards. If you offer no raise pool, or give all your faculty the same raise, you eliminate a great tool to encourage effort. If no one gets summer support, or if everyone gets summer support, you have eliminated an even better tool to encourage effort. Likewise, you do little to incentivize effort if other forms of faculty support such as graduate students, travel funds, staff assistance, etc. are spread like peanut butter across a unit.

And while this will disturb our faculty colleagues…annual raises don’t have to be a one-way ratchet upwards. You can lower salaries. You can pay salary increases as one-time bonuses instead of layering them into a permanently higher base salary. Behavioral economics research highlights the power of loss aversion. People are far more responsive to losing something they already had than to gaining something they never had. If you want more productivity from your post-tenure faculty, you can use the power of loss aversion to good effect.

Post-Tenure Review Issues

A number of states, most notably Florida, but also Georgia and Tennessee and others, have put in place a process of post-tenure review. If you are concerned about faculty productivity after tenure this process has a surface plausibility to it. Why not review faculty? To which we have three answers:

1. Most institutions already engage in systematic post-tenure review through the use of annual evaluations of faculty work that feed into raises and many other resource decisions. If this process is weak tea at an institution, the simplest starting point is to bolster it. Establish criteria for evaluation, require written annual evaluations, and tie variation in compensation to variation in performance. If there isn’t already a culture of serious annual review and varying compensation, senior administrators MUST back department heads to make this happen: the screams will be loud.

2. In-depth post-tenure review is costly. We want to draw a distinction between “Excel Macro” evaluations and the types of comprehensive review that are used at major faculty promotion events. One can very quickly count publications, working papers, research presentations, grants received, courses taught, students mentored, student evaluation scores, and so on. It’s so easy to do it can even be outsourced to an Excel Macro. That makes it ideal for annual evaluations, but it’s noisy and it misses things.

The types of review used at the tenure decision and other major promotion events, and at any kind of review that would threaten to strip faculty of their tenure, should be far more comprehensive. Not just counting, but using higher order skills. Like reading. Soliciting and considering evidence provided in outside letters from experts. Weighing intellectual contributions in research, in teaching, and to all the critical service functions that make an academic department go-round.

We calculated that our university absorbs roughly ten faculty-years in our in-depth annual promotion and tenure processes, which involve reviews of perhaps 4-5% of the total faculty. And that’s not counting the costs we impose on outside experts who write letters of review. Asking a university to review all of its tenured faculty this way on a regular basis is an invitation to completely paralyze the university (see the point above about regulatory time wasting as a key impediment to faculty productivity!)

3. Non-performing faculty are outliers, but they exist. When we've gone through reviews of faculty, whether intensive or “Excel Macro” reviews, the evidence has been clear that almost all of the faculty are doing pretty good work! They are teaching well and students are happy. They are actively producing new research, some of which looks like work-in-progress, some of which has been anointed with grants or accepted publications. Most of the faculty who aren’t producing a lot of individual output in the current year often have a compelling reason, like an extended stretch as a department head or associate dean.

But there are exceptions. People who have hung up their research but still have the light teaching loads and heavy paychecks of a productive researcher. People who are doing a terrible job in the classroom. Worse yet, people whose anti-social antics are making life miserable for all the students, staff, and faculty around them.

The trick then is to design a system that catches the outliers without pointlessly absorbing a massive amount of time and effort to carefully evaluate the vast majority of faculty who are doing good work – and then take action on the outliers.

A Better Post-Tenure Review System

What does a better post-tenure review system look like? We think it’s a three-part process:

1. Real annual activity evaluations, as described above, that drive compensation and resource/support decisions.

2. Periodic “Excel Macro” screenings at, say, three to five-year intervals, depending on the discipline and based on the accumulated output of the annual activity evaluations. Everyone can have a low productivity year, or two. But five in a row? The purpose of these screenings is to accumulate the evidence of annual evaluations and to identify outliers.

3. Deep dives on outliers. This starts with asking why these people are not producing to the university’s expectations. Have they invested a great deal of time and effort in much needed leadership and service functions? Have they suffered serious health concerns of their own or a close family member? Or have they simply quit working? In this last case one can pursue performance improvement plans, salary adjustments, changing the focus of work (e.g. an excellent teacher who has lost their taste for research could have their teaching load increased), and ultimately, termination.

We strongly oppose any system that would pre-judge how many low performers there are (say, by singling out the bottom 10%). We also think any evaluation of a low performing outlier has to be both holistic and aimed, at least initially, at improvement. That necessarily involves difficult and context-specific understanding and remedies, which is why it is completely unsuited for addressing more than a handful of cases in a year.

While this discussion has focused on research and teaching productivity, such a process could also be used to identify and correct anti-social behavior. Academic freedom does not include the freedom to be a belligerent a**hole to your colleagues, or to staff, or to students. Anti-social behavior does not have to rise to the level of outright misconduct to be incredibly harmful and there is no reason that a university has to tolerate someone who abuses the people around them.

Why Implement a Post-Tenure Review Policy?

First, it is the right thing to do. Just because relatively few tenured faculty abuse the privilege doesn’t mean we should provide indefinite cover to those who do. And this is especially true for those who subject others to awful teaching and bad behavior.

Two, NOT addressing such outliers is a drain on morale for all those actually doing work. The ‘one bad apple’ proverb applies too frequently in academic units. By addressing productivity issues and not letting bad behavior slide, you can see attitudes and output move quickly to a new and better level.

Three, if we don’t do it to ourselves, someone else is going to do it to us. The best defense to a state legislature that wants to scrutinize tenure protections is to demonstrate the standard we already hold ourselves to, and the rigor with which we enforce that standard.

Coming Posts

Over the next few posts, we will get into the current – and material - threats to institutional autonomy and self-governance. And we will offer some thoughts on how universities can respond in this incredibly chaotic and uncertain time.

“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.