Proceedings against
Ward Churchill have attracted interest here, and I'm hoping to get some more input from Kossacks about the general issue of tenure for college and university professors.
I'm writing a short piece about it. Let me tell you some of the main points I'm making. If you are interested, you might react to these, or you might bring up different topics.
I'm responding to someone who is arguing against tenure. And I don't want to deny obvious problems with tenure: that there are non-performing and/or incompetent and/or immoral people who are secure in protected positions, and tenure may make it more difficult to get rid of them. (A little more on this later.) If you've got ideas against tenure that I'm not mentioning, I'd love to see them.
You may know/want to know that the American Association of University Professors had two major claims in favor of tenure in a 1940 document, the ideas of which are continuously cited and supported: (1) free speech for research and teaching; (2) economic security to attract quality faculty.
Here are the central points (all still tentative).
1. There are serious pressures from religious/political forces; we've seen research results in government agencies suppressed. Tenure can genuinely protect university faculty from this sort of pressure. And there are others pressures we can add in, including recent student efforts to get supposedly liberal profs censored. In addition, university trustees, who often are political appointees with little idea of how academia works, are increasingly interested in putting in administrations who are completely ignorant of wide stretches of research, which of course they then try to control. Since America's basic research is largely done in universities, this can create huge problems. Basically, trustees can sell out cutting edge research to the academic equivalent of smooth talking used car salesmen.
2. Tenure may be important in creating a community of free enquiry; profs with tenure may support controversial research of more junior faculty, or they may take time to encourage interdisciplinary research among departments. Tenure allows one slack to do that.
Both (1) and (2) also directly affect the quality of information students get in classes and labs.
3. Tenure may also help profs deal with the distinctive features of universities. For example, in industry one's future tends to be affected by one's contribution to the profitability. Not so academia, where the criteria for success are laid out, but are much more subject to interpretation. In addition, one prof may have no particular motive to help another. Thus university politics can get extremely nasty. In addition, profs are supposed to grade and even punish a major class of consumers, students. Economic security tends to give one the autonomy to do that; with threats to autonomy, grade inflation occurs.
Given three, tenure does help to attract quality faculty and it protects to some extent the quality of education they give.
I do think the strongest argument that I know of against tenure has to do with the protection provided to non-performing or even corrupt profs. It's occurred to me as I've thought about it that one problem is that universities do not want faculty to complain about misdeeds of other faculty, who are often the first or second to be aware of it. Of course, I don't have data on this, but lawsuits that result from the accusation are misconduct are extremely expensive and often distressingly public. There are disincentives to whistleblowers everywhere, of course.
Please let me know what you think!