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Killing Tenure
Legislation in two states seeks to end tenure at public colleges and
universities.
By Colleen Flaherty
January 13, 2017
Lawmakers in two states this week introduced legislation that would
eliminate tenure for public college and university professors. A bill
in Missouri would end tenure for all new faculty hires starting in 2018
and require more student access to information about the job market for
majors. Legislation in Iowa would end tenure even for those who already
have it.
The bills, along with the recent gutting of tenure in Wisconsin and
other events, have some worrying about a trend.
“These are serious attempts to undermine universities and the role of
universities in society,” said Hans-Joerg Tiede, senior program officer
for academic freedom, tenure and shared governance at the American
Association of University Professors. “If they’re not directly
coordinated, there’s a strong current going through all of them.”
No New Tenure in Missouri
“If you’re doing the right thing as a professor and teaching students
to the best of your ability, why do you need tenure?” asked
Representative Rick Brattin, a Missouri Republican who wrote HB 266.
The bill says that “no public institution of higher education in this
state shall award tenure” to anyone hired after 2017. It also would
require colleges and universities to post on their websites or in
course catalogs information about degree programs including “the
current job market for people who have earned the degree” and
employment data for the most recent graduating class.
“What other job in the U.S. has protections like that?” Brattin said of
tenure. “If you looked around, you’d come up short.”
Asked about academic freedom and protection for researchers engaged in
a variety of controversial fields, Brattin said that universities would
be “ludicrous to get rid of” someone working at the “cutting edge” of a
discipline. Yet too often, he said, tenure is used to protect those
professors who have “lost their edge.” He said he wasn’t sure what, if
anything, should replace tenure, such as rolling or long-term contracts.
Brattin cited the case of Melissa Click, a former assistant professor
of communication studies at the University of Missouri at Columbia who
asked for "muscle" to remove a student journalist from a campus protest
in 2015, as an example of how difficult it is to fire professors
accused of acting unprofessionally. Reminded that Click did not have
tenure and was eventually terminated, he said, “Anyone else in any
other sort of setting would have not been at work the next day. But in
the academic world, you can get away with literally anything and
taxpayers are paying their salaries -- not to mention students being
burdened with millions and millions and millions of dollars of debt.”
A spokesperson for the University of Missouri System declined comment
on the bill, citing a custom of not discussing pending legislation. But
professors across fields were quick to criticize Brattin’s tenure
proposal.
Ben Trachtenberg, an associate professor of law at Mizzou and chair of
the campus Faculty Council, said he understood that the Legislature has
an interest in higher education, and that he and other faculty members
would be happy to talk about how its various workings, including
tenure, might be improved. “But this particular bill would not be a
good idea for a couple reasons,” he added. “Tenure is important in its
own right, in that it helps protect academic freedom, helps encourage
cutting-edge research and helps faculty engage in shared governance,
which is important to the long-term success of the institution.”
If that isn’t convincing, Trachtenberg said, ending tenure for new
hires would put the university at a grave competitive disadvantage in
recruiting top faculty candidates. “I think an economist would suggest
that if there are two jobs that pay the same, and one has much more job
security, that’s the one that’s going to be more exciting to
prospective employees." He noted that even anti-tenure economist Steve
Levitt, William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics
at the University of Chicago, has said he’d give up his own tenure --
in exchange for $15,000 extra in salary.
J. Chris Pires, a professor of biological sciences at the Columbia
campus who opposes the bill, also said that even research institutions
with five-year rolling contracts instead of tenure offer appointees
higher pay. “If [Mizzou or any university] wanted to get rid of tenure
but remain competitive to recruit faculty, then they would have to
substantially increase salaries,” he said, doubting that was a
“realistic plan” for most states.
In a letter to Missouri legislators, Mannie Liscum, another professor
of biology, cautioned them against acting as their counterparts in
Wisconsin had. “Doing away with tenure and cutting state support is a
job killer in higher education,” he said. “Killing higher education is
shortsighted for a state, because our innovation declines, our ability
to compete declines and our respect declines.”
Ending Tenure in Iowa
Opposition to Senate File 41 in Iowa, proposed by State Senator Brad
Zaun, a Republican, has been louder still -- even coming from the
state’s Board of Regents.
“We recognize the concern about merit-based evaluations addressed in
the bill, however, the [board] understands the role of tenure,” Board
of Regents President Bruce Rastetter said in a public statement. “We
oppose this bill, and I look forward to meeting with Senator Zaun to
hear his thoughts.”
Zaun did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but his bill
is even more far-reaching in terms of tenure than Brattin’s in
Missouri. It would prohibit at all public institutions of higher
learning the “establishment or continuation” of a tenure system -- so
even those that already have it would lose it. Acceptable grounds for
termination for faculty members include but wouldn’t be limited to just
cause, program discontinuance and financial exigency. All institutions
would adopt written statements “enumerating” employee agreements and
annual performance evaluations, along with minimum standards of good
practice and review and disciplinary procedures.
Under the bill, the dean of a college would have the authority to
“employ faculty as necessary to carry out the academic duties and
responsibilities of the college.”
Joe Gorton, an associate professor of criminology at the University of
Northern Iowa, said he thought arguments in favor of either bill
betrayed a serious ignorance about how academe works.
“This is a terribly dangerous idea,” he said of eliminating tenure.
“Tenure doesn’t prevent termination for just cause, but it prevents the
discipline or termination of a faculty member who teaches or conducts
research in areas that are controversial or politically unpopular.”
Regarding comparisons to other kinds of employees, Gorton said that
academics already endure an unusual amount of scrutiny in the lead-up
to tenure, and regularly thereafter. But the reality is that their work
is different from that of other public employees, and they deserve
unusual protections. “We’re not delivering the mail here.”
Gorton added, “What people fail to understand is that tenure is one of
the important fortifications of American democracy, in that in the
areas of arts and sciences and literature, universities are a bastion
for intellectual freedom. … When tenure ends, the politically powerful
or economic elite can control what goes on in universities.”
It's unclear what kind of support exists for Zaun's proposal. He's
introduced it before, to see it go nowhere. But his party now controls
the Iowa Senate.
Broader Concerns
Tiede said he wasn't surprised that the new bills came from states in
which the AAUP has recently investigated public institutions for
violations of academic freedom or the norms of shared governance.
(AAUP's investigation of Mizzou related to the Click case also found
that legislators pressured the university to move against her.) Beyond
tenure, he said he was concerned by developments in other states, such
as legislators’ recent threats to link funding for the University of
Wisconsin at Madison to the discontinuation of a course on whiteness. A
proposed bill in Arizona also seeks to prohibit courses at state
colleges or universities that “promote division, resentment or social
justice toward a race, gender, religion or political affiliation,
social class or other class of people,” among other criteria.
Tiede said he didn’t expect that the picture would brighten under the
incoming administration.
“This looks like the perfect storm of government and legislative
attacks on higher education.”
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