Ken’s Take: One of the reasons that college costs so much is that faculty salaries are the bulk of the costs, many (most) faculty positions are tenured – guaranteed lifetime employment, and many tenured faculty have throttled back or turned off the ignition completely. Colleges have virtually no way to purge the slackers from the payroll – even in tough economic times.
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Excerpted from WSJ, Tenure and Academic Freedom, June June 23, 2009
All over the country, colleges and universities are feeling the financial crunch: Endowments are down, students can’t afford to pay tuition, and some state legislatures are even trimming higher-education budgets.
Unfortunately, thanks to the recent ruling of a judge in Colorado, some college administrators have just lost one way to keep their costs under control.
Under the current system at most colleges, some professors many professors have a job for life – that’s “tenure”. They can technically be fired for gross misbehavior or incompetence. But once they’ve been granted tenure, a university is generally stuck with these teachers. And paying the salaries of tenured professors can add up, especially when a professor may no longer be teaching many classes either because of laziness or lack of student interest in his or her field.
Tenured profs argue thatwithout tenure, they are subject to firing risk if administrator’s or trustee’s dislike for his teaching or research, or for positions taken on public issues. Courts have agreed that “the public interest is advanced more by tenure systems that favor academic freedom over systems that favor flexibility in hiring or firing … by its very nature, tenure promotes a system in which academic freedom is protected.”
But does tenure, as the judge argues, actually protect academic freedom?
To protect academics from arbitrary dismissal, as well as to attract smart people to the profession, schools offered a certain amount of job security.
Some of the courses taught by professors who have sued to protect tenure … are all fields of study (e.g. statistics) that have fairly definitive answers. Faculty members don’t really need the freedom to ask controversial questions in discussing them.
But what about those teachers who are pursuing higher truths? Has tenure really protected their ability to question and research freely? For the most part, no.
The truth is that tenure has served as an instrument of conformity since tenure votes are often glorified popularity contests. Those professors who want tenure and disagree with the prevailing trends in their field — or the political fashions outside of it — know that they must keep their mouths shut for at least the first seven years of their careers.
Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield once famously advised a conservative colleague to wait until he had tenure and only then to “hoist the Jolly Roger.” But few professors are getting around to hoisting the Jolly Roger at all. Either they don’t have a viewpoint that is different from their colleagues, or they’ve decided that if they are going to remain at one place for several decades, they’d rather just get along.
The fact that university professors donated to President Obama’s campaign over John McCain’s by a margin of eight to one is only the tip of the iceberg.
Is tenure to blame for the unanimity of thinking in American universities? It’s hard to tell. But shouldn’t the burden of proof be on the people who want jobs for life?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124571593663539265.html#mod=djemEditorialPage
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The Homa Files 
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