But the price may have to go up as my colleagues get to know
me better . . .
A recent New York Times Room for Debate column, What
if College Tenure Dies?, has prompted some blogosphere discussion of the
issue (yet again), including posts from Tyler
Cowen, Megan
McArdle, and Ilya
Somin. While many of the debaters and bloggers make good
arguments regarding the costs and flaws of the tenure system, many of the tenure
critics seem to assume that tenure is the primary barrier to the pursuit of
excellence in academia and that, in its absence, academic units would be
well-functioning, efficient institutions.
While I can’t speak to other departments, I’ve never been
persuaded that this is the case within law schools. (Law schools may face special challenges on this front as compared
to other academic units, for reasons
summarized some time ago by Brian Leiter).
As I’ve argued here before,
most law schools show little willingness to implement less extreme measures
designed to shame, intimidate, or otherwise induce faculty to perform
consistently with valued institutional goals, so why should we expect them to
take the more drastic measure of firing someone they’ve worked with for many
years, even when legally entitled to do so? Thus, I’ve always questioned
whether giving law schools access to “the big gun” of freedom to fire would
result in substantial changes at most schools. As I stated in that post:
To illustrate, are the hiring and tenure processes at your
school designed as genuine opportunities to attract and retain only those
faculty most likely to uphold high standards of scholarship and teaching
throughout their careers? Does
your school explicitly link salaries to scholarly productivity, quality, or
influence, or are salaries essentially lock-step with seniority? Or does no one know? Are bonuses paid based on any metrics
of teaching quality, such as student evaluations, teaching awards, class
enrollment, peer review of teaching, and the like? What incentives and rewards exist for service? Do you receive anything extra for
chairing committees, attending student or alumni events, mentoring students,
diligently attending workshops, or providing feedback to junior faculty and
other colleagues on scholarship and teaching? To the extent there are one or more faculty generally
recognized as not pulling their weight in any of the relevant categories
(scholarship, teaching, service), does the institution send a clear signal that
they are not living up to expectations?
For example, does he or she continue to receive raises, summer money,
travel funds, an office with a window?
My point here is merely that, even considering the
constraints imposed by the tenure system, law schools have a variety of shaming
mechanisms, punishments, and incentives at their disposal to influence faculty
behavior, most of which are rarely employed in a clear, transparent, and
coherent manner. Of course,
different schools operate differently on this front. Some may actively consider productivity and competence of
various sorts in retention and compensation decisions, but the lines of
decision-making authority and the factors that will be considered are often
unclear. Who decides who gets a
raise, who gets a chair, and who gets extra travel money? The dean? The associate dean?
A committee? What metrics
will the relevant decisionmaker(s) use and what expertise does she bring to
bear on the decision? Is your
associate dean a bankruptcy specialist?
Then what methods will she use to determine what constitutes
high-quality work in the field of, say, legal philosophy? . . .
Would we perform these tasks differently and better were the
shackles of the tenure system not corrupting our faculty rosters? Perhaps. There’s an obvious chicken-and-egg problem here that makes
it difficult to predict the ways, if any, in which law schools in a non-tenure
system would differ from their current incarnation. But I suspect that abolishing tenure is not the panacea for
institutional incompetence that many believe it to be.
This is not necessarily intended as a defense of
tenure. In fact, the most common
argument put forward in favor of tenure -- protecting excellent scholars and
teachers with unpopular views – has always struck me as fairly weak. Were this the only defense of tenure, I
would consider the costs high for what seem amorphous benefits.
But there are other and, to my mind, better, arguments in
favor of tenure. In particular,
tenure is thought to enable faculty hiring by the faculty -- who are in the
better position to judge scholarly and classroom abilities, and whose hiring
and firing decisions otherwise would suffer from perverse incentives -- rather
than by administrators. In the
absence of tenure protection, existing faculty have no motivation to hire the
best quality new faculty (since that increases the chances that existing
faculty will be the fired during the next quality evaluation). See here, here, and here
for more extensive discussions of the costs and benefits of tenure, including a
discussion of these institutional governance features.
My very first post here at the Lounge, My
Tenure’s For Sale, How About Yours?, just over a year ago, was about the
costs and benefits of tenure (happy blogging anniversary to me!) I noted in
that post Steve
Levitt’s offer to sell his tenure for a mere $15,000 in additional salary,
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.
Being no Steve Levitt, I would of course need more than
$15,000. But then, as noted at the
time 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.
In the end, I don’t know whether the benefits of tenure
outweigh its costs (though I certainly enjoy having it). But I also don’t expect the
commonly-invoked complaints against tenure, including unproductive faculty and
lack of intellectual diversity, to magically disappear just because tenure
does.
Related Posts:
My Tenure’s For Sale. How About Yours?
Incentives And Institutions: Why Stop With
The Banks?
When It Comes To Law Faculty, We’re All
Post-Modernists
"We All Contribute In Our Own Ways"
Is Not A Valid Institutional Goal
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