Will There Always Be Tenure?

Over on Leiter Reports, Amy Ferrer, newly appointed as executive director of the American Philosophical Association, has been writing a series of guest posts on the latest prospect for tenure track positions in North America. “According to much of public opinion, and unfortunately according to some in power in universities and our nation’s legislatures, tenured professors are paid too much to work too little, and can’t be removed from duty even if they’re doing a terrible job,” she writes. Currently, ¾ of teaching staff in post-secondary institutions are employed “off the tenure-track” and “The median pay per course, standardized to a three-credit course, was $2,700 in fall 2010 and ranged in the aggregate from a low of $2,235 at two-year colleges to a high of $3,400 at four-year doctoral or research universities,” according to a report from the Coalition of Academic Workers.

These are shocking trends, and it is perhaps natural to blame the poor economic climate and cling to the hope that things will turn around soonish. Of course, there is the right wing resurgence and that doesn’t bode too well. And as we saw, Ms. Ferrer puts some of the blame on public opinion. But surely things can't stay as bad as they have been for the last three years.

Hmm, yes . . . but this neglects one rather obvious fact.

Out in the non-academic economy, there has been a secular decline in long-term security of employment, in permanent employment, and in people working with one employer for their whole careers. Somehow, we have managed to stay firm believers in the myth that the norm in academic employment is the tenured research position and that this will stay true in the long term, whatever budget-driven fluctuations may occur in the meanwhile. But is this true? Can universities resist the trend toward piecework for all except a few administrators and executives? (See Leiter’s comments and links re the salary paid to the disgraced President of Penn State University and others.) And how long will there be an influx of talent to a field that promises only drudge work for almost all of its practitioners?

We must also reflect on how the structure of our own profession has changed over the last three or four decades. In the sixties and seventies, there was (much as there is now) a division of universities into research-intensive, hybrid research/teaching, and purely teaching institutions. Across each of these categories, there was a relatively fixed pay structure. Lateral hiring was relatively unusual, and professors lived the life of middle level civil servants. Career expectations were more or less the same for all but a very few high achievers.

Today, we see a good bit more of what one might call “striving.” There is a good deal more lateral hiring, a good deal more upward mobility, and a good deal more professionalization—some good and intellectually productive, some less good and productive only of scholastic controversy. To some extent, the structure of our profession reflects the trend in the outside-the-academy economy—greater competition, greater stress, greater inequality, fewer people with secure jobs.

Is the trend towards non-tenure-track teaching jobs merely a reflection of a much larger historical trend? What will the consequences be for progress of humanistic knowledge? These are questions that shouldn’t completely be displaced by very urgent worries about how to ease the burden on newly graduating PhDs without permanent employment in a tough job market.