Trash Tenure

You'd think college administrators would learn something from all their economics department. Not necessarily.

Just look at the tenure system. This age-old process, installed at Harvard and most other American colleges, allows too much room for incompetent, apathetic or uncommitted professors.

It's a system which gives a blank check to professors and which does little for students. Tenured profs don't have to answer to anyone about their pedagogy, their out-of-class interaction with student (or lack thereof) or their overall fairness and competence.

To worsen matters, associate professors interested in impressing tenure committees are given little incentive to address student needs.

Since research and publishing are the primary sources of university's funding and prestige, they are the major factors considered in tenure decisions. Ironically enough, the center of attention seems to be the university as an institution and not the people it's supposed to serve.

As Mikhail S. Gorbachev might tell you now, salaries which remain fixed and independent of performance encourage laxity, negligence and mediocrity. Professor with life-time positions have no reason to maximize their teaching performance (or even improve).

They remain on the payroll regardless of significant fluctuations in their attendance, their availability, their expertise and their general aptitude in carrying out professional responsibilities. Ultimately, then, the students bear the consequences.

Some proponents of the tenure system argue that permanent professorships insure that free speech will never be stifled by university politics.

Quite rightly, they claim that unfettered speech in academia facilitates new debates and discoveries and promotes a more open and free-thinking environment. The question is whether it's possible to preserve, to the same extent, academic free speech without the tenure system.

The answer is yes. By democratizing the hiring/firing committees to include more students. Professors would be free of department or university politics but still accountable for their overall performance.

Committees which make all hiring and firing decisions should better represent the people who have to live with those decisions: students Committees should be comprised of several administrators, departmental representatives and, most important, graduate and undergraduate students in the department.

Another guarantee of academic free speech could be the institution of strict guidelines for firing professors, which would prohibit the termination of a professor for the views hie espouses and which would require compelling evidence that he is being fired for other reasons.

The tenure system also skews supply and demand laws by creating an artificial scarcity of tenured positions.

Since there is a fixed number of such positions, and because very few tenured professors vacate their spots, new and perhaps even more qualified scholars are locked out of the system. With the infrequent turnover in academia, market forces can't insure that the best professors are teaching and the worst are leaving.

To improve the quality of teaching, then the tenure system should be supplanted with time-limited, negotiable contracts. The period of the contract should be subject to the review of a hiring/firing committee which includes students, administrators and faculty.

If we expect performance out of $100,000 cars, why not of $100,000 education?

Gil B. Lahav '94 is a contributing writer for the Opinion page. He thinks all of his professors are worth every dime they earn. Every dime.