I agree with Max. Get rid of tenure. The problems in acedemia are widespread and systemic. There are too many bufoons like Churchill entrenched in acedemia and tenure is one of their main defenses. The sooner they are removed, the better. Each of these clowns does harm to every student that they adversely affect.

Stephen's right.

Call it transparency. Call it the light of day. Call it whatever.

It's here.

So long as tax money supports universities and colleges and tunure is used to extort that tax money into paying off academic crooks, every tax payer should call for an end to tenure. It's a giant con game at our expense.

I'm not as confident in the new and relatively new media as a cure-all for institutional inertia and corruption.

I would guess that for every Ward Churchill, there are at least 472 profs out there who are equally unworthy, but may be unworthy for less political-hotbutton reasons, and they just glide under the radar.

Granted, the blogosphere can bite in like a wolverine once it gets hold of a story, but there have to be a lot of stories (not just at universities) that don't get any attention at all.

Maybe the mere chance of a Churchill-like exposure could be enough to get an institution to clean up it's act, but I'm not so sure.

I have to disagree with Stephen on this one. Churchill is the extreme example of a system filled with lesser examples that escape the public eye. The blogosphere has complained at length about the incompetence and political games of tenured professors for years, and what do we have to show for it? One moonbat professor whom we haven't even pried off the neck of the system he's draining.

Transparency and outrage aren't enough, especially when transparency and outrage can't improve the system because of the hurdles placed there by the tenure process.

"Tenure" is just a codeword for "union rules" and has little to do with academic freedom (which does not exist if you're a conservative professor) or merit. Just as unions have priced labor in many American industries out of the market and left many a vacant factory gathering dust, the tenure system threatens to trigger a public backlash that could starve out our system of higher education.

Don't try and fire him, assign him to the Shit Squad. Next semester, he has a full agenda teaching advanced Basketweaving and Lolipop Appreciation. With a side order of Freshman Remedial Math...

I am perfectly willing to treat teachers as professionals where they can negotiate their own contracts. Let the market decide what they're worth.

In exchange, no tenure, just like the rest of us.

Time to live in the real world.

Tim P.,

"The problems in acedemia are widespread and systemic . . . Each of these clowns does harm to every student that they adversely affect."

Would that one of "these clowns" had taught you to spell "academia."

Personally, as small c conservative pursuing a career in academia in the social sciences I think tenure should be maintained.

It is bad enough that we have to wait to get tenure before we dare show a "right-wing" stance or tendancy. Without tenure the post-modernists will be able to keep the rest of us off of any faculty that they control.

While we may disagree with what Ward Churchill said, I will personally fight for his right to say it because... well... I'm also likely going to need that sort of protection some day when I pull the equivalent of a Summers.

Tenure protects academic freedom.

Jason, if tenure protected academic freedom, there would not be so little ideological diversity at universities.

The way to get rid of tenure is to pass laws that forbid any state or federal monies if the school gives their employees any form of tenure.

The second reform is to get unions out of our government schools. No reform is possible as long as teachers are FORCED to join these pervert pushing, left-wing organizations.

In defense of tenure, it does serve an important role in the academic community and I think sometimes the research component of academic freedom gets lost in the shouting about the classroom component.

Research, and by extension, publication, is a critical factor in the evaluation of performance of academic professionals. At some schools, research & publication is the only indicator of job performance. The balance of teaching vs. research activities is a valid debate, but every major university demands at least some research output.

Quite simply, publications don't print null findings. If I formulate a hypothesis, conduct an experiment, and find nothing conclusive - no journal in my field will publish my findings.

Working toward tenure, I need published. I know the rules of the game, so I do "safe" research. The research agenda isn't driven by relevance, importance, application, or inventiveness - it's driven by the potential for publication. It's not just me, it's every doctoral student and tenure-track instructor.

Once I have tenure, I can do whatever I want. I can take more chances with my research, because null findings and no publications don't mean I'll lose my job right away. At the right university, I can worry less about research and focus on teaching my students.

I worked in private industry before coming to academia, and I understand the complaint that if an employee produced nothing of value, he/she would be fired. Science doesn't work that way. While a failure hurts the company and it's shareholders, even failures advance the development of knowledge, one of the core goals of the academic profession.

Are there a lot of people that are just phoning it in, hiding behind tenure? Sure. Are there a lot of people pushing an ideological agenda in the classroom at the expense of good teaching while hiding behind "academic freedom"? No argument there.

At the same time, how do we assess job performance without promoting an atmosphere where research is hampered by fear of failure? If publication is an ongoing lifetime benchmark, where will academics dedicated to teaching come from? If we dump research as a performance metric, how do we assess instruction?

Boot is right. Scrap tenure.

MC, I'm not sure I understand. The "publish or perish" mentality is part of the problem with academia and should be done away with. As such it's not a very convincing argument for keeping tenure around. Why should the system waste your time by forcing you to do pointless fluffy research? It shouldn't, of course, so let's fix it. Every other profession in the world seems to function with the "fear of failure" hanging over their heads, so I'm sure academics can handle it too.

But, we need to look at Universities being in the business of acquiring students.

A university with published research gets more airtime, and will therefore more likely attract students. However, so called published research isn't necessarily good for the advancement of knowledge. Failed experiments can often yield more towards such advancement.

If a university wants as much airtime as possible, they'll want results that they can publish.

All that aside, "fluffy research" is an integral part of the university environment and presents amazing opportunities for students, once they enter the job market.

I can agree that there are poor instructors in the classroom at major universities, and I'm convinced I've had some, but given the scenario MC presented, abolishing tenure seems a simple solution to an all too complex problem.

Wow MC, Awesome comment. I learned allot.

Regarding your last comment "If we dump research as a performance metric, how do we assess instruction?"

Test students for the subject matter to be covered in a course before the instruction is given. Then test after the class is completed.

Parents are naive enough to believe the highly paid professors at a university are actually teaching their students. Dumb of them to not know about the other university funding that uses their tax dollars to fund 'research', that actually takes the professors away from what they think they're paying those high tuitions for, the mundane duties of teaching their kids?

Why stop there? Why not eliminate all public-sector unions?

The only time in my life that I can recall a public-sector union being treated in anything other than a totally pandering manner was with RR and the air traffic controllers. In the meantime, those of us in the real world have been through six cycles of layoffs and retrenchments. Who sanctified these guys and made them immune from market forces?

Jim R: That's a great point about the teaching vs. research battle and especially at state-funded institutions, teaching may be getting short shrift.

Unfortunately, the testing scenario you described is played out in similar fashion with unintended consequences in schools where teaching is judged (or claimed) to be important.

Assume that a student is a blank slate, so a pre-test would show nothing. For many courses, this is true - the student really has no relevant subject knowledge coming into the class.

The instructor appears to be doing a great job, since the marks are high for the class, and the teaching evals are usually good, since everyone did well on the midterm. The problem - the material was dumbed-down enough to strike a balance between boring and mentally-crushing, or performance was hyped. Grade inflation.

I guess I meant to say, in the absence of publications, how do we assess INSTRUCTORS (not instruction, like I wrote)?
With instruction - How do we determine what are the standard course objectives? How do we balance the course objectives for majors and non-majors (or do we at all)? How do we deal with deficiencies students bring to the class, independent of the instructor's best efforts?

One more thing...

Make no mistake about this - there is a "market" for academics, and there are "market" forces at work. Ask the guy with the English Ph.D that pours your coffee at Starbucks, or the Poli Sci Ph.D at the checkout counter at Barnes and Noble. For every highly paid professor at Harvard, there's 100 at branch campuses of state universities not really getting paid that much but hoping to move up the food chain.

Private markets are quite simple. There's a feedback loop that boils down to one simple metric - profit/loss. In the public sector, or in higher ed, it's just not that easy. How do you define the success of the State Dept. of Transportation? How do define the success of the Dept. of Justice?

For academics, the performance metric is volume and citations of publications and a vague "buzz" in your field. It's probably the wrong metric - but if not that, then what?

Until fundamental questions about desired outcomes and performance metrics are answered, changing structural things like tenure accomplish very little, if anything.

Keep in mind that state support has dwindled at most major research universities to the point of being inconsequential.

The joke at my university is that we went from being state supported to state assisted, and now we're state located.

When the state provides less than 20 percent of our funding, how beholden should we be?

There are serious issues involved in university governance, including how to balance research, teaching, and other responsibilities of the university and its component faculty, and how to deal with accusations of various kinds of incompetence and malfeasance. Like other academic bloggers, I've been blogging about this. Follow the trackback Fisking Max Boot to my blog; other academic bloggers have written thoughtful posts about tenure. Moreover, what is in the blogosphere is only a fraction of what we do all the time to wrestle with these issues.

The "get rid of tenure" argument, from Boot and others, is very much one of throwing babies out with the bath water. It's not unlike "kill all the lawyer" solutions to justice, or "ban political commentary on blogs" solutions to campaign "reform". Emotionally satisfying, especially to outsiders, but not a serious solution to real problems.

For those who haven't been following closely, part of the problem in the whole Ward Churchill story is that the push to have programs like his is in response to outside pressures from both government and special interest groups.

In response to those pressures, CU, through the machinations of then dean and current Roosevelt Univ. President Charles ("I don't remember the case") Middleton broke their own rules for granting tenure, and failed to use their own rules to look into serious allegations about Churchill after he was hired. AFAIC that is the big problem, and I worry a lot more about what that Churchill himself is or is not. The mechanisms to discipline those of us who have tenure are there. Administrators have to be willing to use them when appropriate.

Two departments at CU stood up to the dean and said they wouldn't hire Churchill; Communications hesitated but went along (as Stephen has pointed out, think about what it means to be questionable in the football player major's discipline). Do the advocates of getting rid of tenure think that the History and Political Science departments would have resisted their dean if there was no tenure?

I agree with your point that close public scrutiny is a good way to gradually shame universities out of tenure, even if they are free to continue it now. However, one argument to speed up the process is that it would allow COMPETITION (yes, that old capitalist watchword!). That is, competition among the most qualified, talented teachers for the most coveted positions. Of course, another problem is that a lot of schools "grade" professors on their output of writing and research more than on the performance of their students. Maybe we should examine that, too.

As Sandy P. said, it's time for the education industry to start living by real world rules.

Educators have the right of free speech, just as we all do. They can write letters to the editor, stand on street corners with signs, write books, do tv and radio, run for office, whatever they wish, and I'll support their right to do so. This does not mean they should be free to do and say anything they wish, hiding behind tenure to avoid responsibility, while being supported by the taxpayers.

Academic freedom is not synonymous with the right of free speech. Educators should have no more job security than any other citizen in any other profession.

We still don't have a handle on how or for what faculty should be evaluated. Do we leave it for the faculty to blow their own horns and accept them on their own say so? Yeah, that's been working out real well.

As a 'nontraditional' student (olde pharte) I expected quite a bit of bang for my buck and groused accordingly if I didn't think I was getting it. I doubt that those half my age are likely to do likewise.

Perhaps we need an active consumer movement to inform students on what they should expect out of their faculty and institution of choice though I fear that this will only impact a small portion of the student body and the ones riding someone else's dime because it's something to do and keeps them away from their parents will be mostly impervious.

Tenure isn't necessarily bulletproof, either. Departments can be 'downsized'. Several faculty at my alma mater had this explained to them after they'd inconvenienced the administration.

Perhaps turning a spotlight on jackasses is the best that can be done at this point.