My Tenure's For Sale. How About Yours?

What’s the minimum that you would accept to give up tenure?  Steve Levitt’s asking price is only $15,000, on the rationale that “the value of tenure is inversely related to how good you are. If you are way over the bar, you face almost no risk if tenure is abolished. So the really good people would require very small salary increases to compensate for no tenure, whereas the really bad, unproductive economists would need a much bigger subsidy to remain in a department with tenure gone.”

Although I could probably be induced to give up my tenure in exchange for a higher salary, my reservation wage is significantly higher than $15,000.  In part, of course, that’s because I’m no Steve Levitt.  As noted by Greg Mankiw in this Chronicle of Higher Education article on the topic (subscription or day pass required for access), most faculty would place a higher economic value on job security than Levitt, a respected and prolific scholar, author, and teacher, and former John Bates Clark medal winner.  But there are other reasons as well.  Faculty politics are often fairly irrational.  As such, it’s “the petty things,” rather than being fired for lack of productivity or holding unpopular views, that untenured faculty might reasonably fear most. As Daniel Solove argues, “[p]rofessors may be terminated because others don’t like what they say at faculty meetings or how they vote on hiring and tenure decisions. They may be terminated for petty interschool or interdepartmental politics.”

In theory, tenure is thought to perform a variety of positive functions, including incentivizing faculty to hire the best new faculty.  The extent to which tenure delivers on these promises in practice is much debated.  In the upcoming days, I’ll post on a different aspect of this debate – is tenure really the culprit that prevents law schools from shedding their “deadwood?”  As I’ll elaborate in that post, Incentives and Institutions: Why Stop with the Banks?, I believe that it is not. 

Related Posts:

II.             Incentives And Institutions: Why Stop With The Banks?

III.           When It Comes To Law Faculty, We’re All Post-Modernists.  

IV.           "We All Contribute In Our Own Ways" Is Not A Valid Institutional Goal

Comments

[Alfred]

Kim--thanks for raising these important, indeed central, questions. And really looking forward to how bank regulation provides a font for law schools.

A lot of this relates to how we assess the likelihood that there will be retaliation for taking politically unpopular stances, no? That is, is it true that if you're *really* good (but controversial), you'll have an easy time finding another job? Perhaps, but I'm not sure.

We haven't yet spoken at the faculty lounge about Robert Post's and Matt Finkin's important new book on academic freedom, though I hope someone here (or more than one) will address it. Seems to me that as we focus on the role of tenure in protecting unproductive (or less productive) people, we run the risk of loosing an appreciation for the value of tenure in promoting academic freedom.

[Jacqueline Lipton]

I too am very interested in your further thoughts on this issue, Kim, and really loved the link to the discussion of "deadwood" and other forms of "wood" in legal academia.

[Kim Krawiec]

Thanks Al and Jacqui for the comments. I think it’s clear from Levitt’s essay that he considers protecting unpopular views to be one of the least persuasive arguments in support of tenure, under exactly the rationale you mention, Al: if someone is doing high-quality (understanding the subjectiveness of that term) but controversial academic work, then some other institution will value her for exactly the reason that another lets her go. I think I tend to mostly agree with that, but I’m anxious to hear from others whose fields may be more ideological than my own. The other arguments in support of tenure are to me stronger, and I’ll discuss them more in my next post on this topic. What’s my incentive to hire a person in my field who is better than me this year if next year the faculty might decide to fire me, since they’ve now got someone better in the same field? There could be a “race to the bottom” in terms of faculty quality that is only corrected by turning over hiring to university administrators, who don’t have these same unhealthy incentives, but do have less information about scholarly and teaching quality than faculty members who regularly perform those functions. As most of us know, however, tenure has not seemed to eliminate this sort of “turf protection” across the board.

[Alfred]

Given the amount of talk about "tenure as protection for politically controversial work," we should be able to test this question: do untenured people who are fired for taking controversial stands locate decent employment elsewhere? I'm aware of few examples along these lines for recent times. But there are certainly some well-known cases in the 20th century, which point in the direction that Kim and Levitt suggest. That is, some prominent people who were fired for political reasons went on to decent jobs elsewhere. Vernon Parrington (formerly of University of Oklahoma, later of the University of Washington) was fired for political reasons, yet ended up with a good job. But I'm not sure why the same political reasons that cause a controversial person to be fired wouldn't exist at other institutions, too. And maybe we should be concerned about the good but not fabulous faculty who might be fired for political reasons, too? That is, I don't know as anyone should be fired for political reasons. If faculty aren't doing their job, that should be handled in whatever way's appropriate (internal discipline, up to firing, I'd suppose). But I wouldn't want to say that faculty who're not doing a great job and are saying things that are politically controversial should be expendable. I know this is getting rather far afield at this point.

Anyway, what about more recent cases? I'm not thinking of a lot of cases of late where faculty have been fired for political reasons. So it's a little hard for me to test some of this.

One different recent situation comes to mind--and here it's of a formerly tenured professor at Emory--is Michael Bellisles. He's not quite a test of this, because he resigned after his book Arming America was withdrawn by Knopf and was found to have had some very serious problems. I'm not aware of him being able to find another academic job anywhere--though that may have been by choice. And, as I say, there were scholarly, as well as political, reasons behind the attack on his scholarship. But his other work was well-regarded.

Anyway, glad you're here and looking forward to hearing about the banks....

[Jean Camp]

Levitt's work complies with the dominant paradigm of Market Uber Alles aligns with the concentration of economic power. So his willingness to "give up" tenure for a small amount of money is laughably flaccid. I suspect, if pressed, he would assure you that the reality of the market influences everything BUT economics research. Economics research is the Search For Truth. And he is well=paid not because he serves the interest of capitol over labor or reifies the dominant discourse, but because he is Close To Truth.

No doubt, in real terms, he has given up far more than an expected value of $15k to stay a professor. That he is delusional as well as dishonest should have no bearing on academic debate.