Hack:
Fixing Tenure as it's clearly broken as a means of ensuring a high quality work force at many colleges
This is a very raw idea, but in my view, one of the things that is clearly holding academia back from a clear aggressive approach to developing new knowlege and advancing innovaion is this notion of life time employement known as tenure. Essentially, those that have tenure don't need it, and those that need tenure don't have it. I suggest we invert the tenure rules and give tenure to people only in their first seven years on a campus, and then all faculty should stand on their own merits.
Tenure, or the myth of life time employment creates a set of trade offs for faculty in an gambit that limits the ability of people to more directly be rewarded for advancing work. Also, in order to obtain tenure, junior faculty members work to become published in the usual journals, writing work that will be screened by the usual gate keepers. This leads to isomorphism, and prevents ground breaking and frame breaking innovative research in disciplines that are seen as heretical or outside the bounds of whatever tradition dictates what qualifies for tier one publications.
Invert tenure - give it to new faculty members who would need the protections of academic freedom to conduct the research they found most intriguing emerging out of their Ph.D. training programs. Upon working for 7 years under these protections, it is removed, and then you are measured by regular performance reviews and stand on your own merits. Can you continue to teach in innovative and invigorating ways? Do you conduct & publish applicable & viable research? Do you perform high quality service to students and the university? If not, you should be worried, but if so, you should be rewarded on your merits.
I think we would see more people busting out of the usual paradims of what we know to be the formulaic appraoch to research, which leads us to only slight variations on a theme, versus, if we let loose the shackles of tenure, we would find more invetiveness and creativity among the faculty ranks. More Eureka moments, if you will, and less, gee whiz, isn't that interesting results. Also, we might find more people willing to replicate prior works to test the theories as of now, there isn't a whole lot of testing of the tried and true statndars of the canon.
I don't have any. Any thoughts would be much appreciated,
This is completely my idea. This moves well beyond post-tenure review, and other ideas of the past. What this means is that we are wanting to remove the tenure decision as the defacto lone point for an up or out vote as to if a faculty member is worthy of employment, and also allows universities more lattitude to eliminate the deadwood that is clogging our Ivory Towers to this day.
Hey Aaron,
Great idea. More than the specific suggestion I like the approach of changing higher education (in this and in your second Hack on the practical MBA).
I am not in Academia yet. I am in the process of looking for a PHD program to go into this world and some of the issues you raise are things that bother me. In addition, I have both an LL.M and an MBA so I have spent some time listening to professors around the globe. Building on that, I want to make a point that you touch upon in your second hack between the lines.
If you are already suggesting changing the system of tenure, I would suggest changing the monopoly universities (or researchers) have over teaching higher education. The unnecessary connection between research and teaching is creating, if we are being optimistic, a mediocre product. In many classes that I have taken, the best researchers proved to be terrible teachers. And the best teachers were not always the greatest researchers (there are a few outliers here and there). But still, these to activities are interconnected. Why?
Great researchers spend time they could benefit society doing something they are not very good at and we lose twice. Once when the students are suffering from a very bad teacher, and twice, because important research is not being done by the best people.
What if we change the model so the teaching and the research would not necessarily be done by the same people? We can still continue to infuse great ideas from the brightest minds into the class, by making sure our teachers are up to date but they don’t have to conduct research themselves (again, with expectations here and there). How would that improve the quality of our education systems and of our research facilities? How helpful will separating the two will be to the incentives and measurement systems, by focusing effort on the right behaviors and outcomes?
Elad
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Great idea! Here's something to think about. When professors are tenured, they have the flexibility of taking risks and innovating. If you remove tenure, how would you motivate them to explore new things instead of focusing on practical ideas that will help them retain their jobs?
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Matt,
The people taking the biggest risks in academia are new and junior faculty members, and they are unprotected. Tenure has become a defacto personnel policy that is a surrogate for supervision & oversight (which is absent in higher education's faculty ranks). It was a good thing 50-60 years ago, but as a means of ensuring quality is generally moribund.
Moreover, research shows that the most productive years for faculty members across the board are in the run up to earning tenure, and there is a precipitous drop from which most never recover. My thinking is that what you get is isomorphism in the junior years, and then you get innovation only after tenure is earned, but only in rare cases (think about the number of faculty members balance against the number of really innovative faculty members in the US alone). If we unleash the potential of those in the junior roles, you may get more eureka moments in research which will lead to more productive senior years; which may even create new veins of innovative research which the gate keepers (read editors and panels of peer reviewers) block.
The reason why tenure was created was a reaction to McCarthyism and the witch hunts of the mid 20th century; that and a number of cases wherer faculty members were fired for their research. Today, the protections , legally, of academic freedom and freedom of speech work more to protect faculty such that tenure as a construct of protecting those things is obsolete. If we invert the paradigm, protecting new faculty members, we might see more rather than less innovation.
This may be a wild ass guess, but I'm thinking that those fresh out of Ph.D programs, hungry with the new knowledge are going to be more innovative than those who have been trotting down the same veins of research for the last 35 years (that is, if they are doing research at all because they stopped because they have tenure).
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Dear Elad,
I love your two key points. I've often raised the same questions.
This mythical link to great teaching and research resident in the same person is optimistic at best and an overarching flaw in the expectant design of higher education institutions across the board. Although, I do have to say, that as the author of a forthcoming book, I have been bringing in my findings into the classroom for a long while. Now it's finally going to be unleashed in December to the masses, but that doesn't mean that I'm great at both teaching and research as for some reason, I can't seem to get an interview for a faculty position to save my life. But I digress.
Often, in the fiscal model for most research institutions, the good researchers buy out of teaching their courses anyway. So what happens is that the courses they would have taught are delivered by either adjuncts/lecturers or graduate students - again, not the promised full professor. College students are then short changed and the promise of delivering new knowledge direct to the student by means of bringing the researcher into the classroom is delayed yet again.
This creates a disparity among and between the teaching faculty which is painfully obvious as the researcher is overly rewarded for NOT teaching. Moreover, there is no recognition for great teaching - beyond the once a year teacher of the year award - which rarely caries anything besides honor. Academics argue all the time about what constitutes great teaching. There is no agreement on how to measure it, and the perfunctory student evaluations (still done on paper in most cases, btw) are often pooh-poohed by poorly evaluated teachers and easily dismissed if some one has the requisite number of peer reviewed journal articles (varies by school).
There's no good existing model for ensuring that great teaching is going on in the classroom (and faculty are not willing to accept oversight in this area, nor willing to put in the required time to ensure that high quality teaching is going on in every one of their classrooms), and tenure protects those who are poor at it (but bringing giant buckets of grant monies, so they are tolerated despite piles of mediocre - at best - and denigrating student course evaluations semester after semester).
Higher education has a problem that has existed for a great long while. Mediocre teaching is accepted and promulgated particularly if some one is considered a "great" researcher - as measured by PRJs. That is because the peer reviewed journal article is the coin of the realm, it has become the only de facto measure of high quality faculty work. Why? Because it's easy to measure. Ask a faculty member to scan their own department and tell you who is the best teachers and do a comparative analysis as to what makes them different from the rest and they would be reluctant to respond, and moreover, have no idea what their colleagues are doing in the classroom next door. They may say they think they are doing a good job, but could it be verified? The assumption of a Ph.D. being an expert and being both good at research and teaching needs to be tested. And it may boil down to how we train Ph.D.s to begin with as the traditional method of giving us these "experts" typically involves no teaching instruction at all.
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Aaron, Thank you for your detailed response. I learned a lot from it.
One thing. You write: "There's no good existing model for ensuring that great teaching is going on in the classroom (and faculty are not willing to accept oversight in this area, nor willing to put in the required time to ensure that high quality teaching is going on in every one of their classrooms)".
I find the part you put in parentheses to be so sad (and it is true not only for college professor but for high school teachers as well). It is like we all forgot what the goal here is. And that it is a common goal for all of us. Better education and more engagement of students with ideas and learning.
I think that when professors will learn to accept constructive criticism and learn that they should use somebody else’s comparative advantage they will not only become great teachers, but also much better researchers.
Elad
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Elad,
Perhaps there is something critically wrong with how we train Ph.D.s to be instructors. That may lead me to another hack I've been mulling over for a while - that, clearly, what is fundamentally broken in higher education is the steep learning curve and massive barrier to entry that is the Ph.D. and when it comes down to it, the training may suffice to equip researches, however, the diploma is wholly inadequate for training high quality teachers and managers of the educational operation.
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Thanks Aron,
I could not agree more. Please let me know if you even write that additional hack!
Elad
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Matt, was it you that wanted to know when I finally posted the next barrier I've been mulling over for a great long while? Finally got it out of my head today: http://www.managementexchange.com/node/10108
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Here's another recent article in the WSJ offering further proof that tenure may, in fact, be wholly unnecessary in this day and age:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870344000457554832016309444...
Perhaps we are closer to faculty free agency, but if faculty abandoned tenure en mass altogether, it would be hard to predict how broadly that would affect the whole of the higher education industry, but the change would be interesting to watch unfold.
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