Naomi Schaefer Riley’s “The Faculty Lounges” – Examining Tenure

One of the first real policy issues that interested me was the institution of tenure. And an institution it is, with far-reaching implications from K-12 to higher ed and governance.

I remember being 14 or so and wondering how it was possible that so many of my teachers were… well, still teaching. Some knew far less than their students; others were as lazy as the day is long; a few were even flat-out dishonest and awful to their students, harming directly and purposely their academic futures. They weren’t good at their jobs — and worse than being neutral, they were destructive to some students — yet they still had jobs.

Through high school — and through more reading and research than I’d like to admit — I started to understand the costs and benefits of tenure. I started to see that some folks got it while others didn’t, and that there was usually a hell of a lot of politics driving the outcome.

And I really learned how seriously the subject was treated when I found a few academic works on tenure in a box of free books in a bookstore a stone’s throw from Harvard in Cambridge, MA. The box was huge, full of old bestsellers and trash, and it was take-what-you-want. I had a coffeemaker in my hands, so I figured I’d grab the tenure books a few hours later when I walked back through if they were still there.

When I walked back that afternoon, the free box was almost empty — except for a handful of books, including those analyses of tenure. I scooped them up and read them, but I probably learned more about tenure by realizing at 16 that those books were the literary equivalent of the slow, uninterested asthmatic in the dodgeball hierarchy.

In “The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Pay For”, published by Ivan R. Dee, Naomi Schaefer Riley has done a wonderful job examining the effects of tenure in higher education. Not only have her fingers been on the pulse of tenure throughout her life, but she’s done what no one has yet: she’s analyzed and written about how tenure in higher education actually affects the college student.

We’ll be running excerpts from “The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Pay For” over the next few weeks along with some words from Naomi and a formal review. Below is the beginning of the preface to “The Faculty Lounges,” which introduces some of those big — and difficult — questions surrounding tenure.

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Excerpt from “The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Pay For”
By Naomi Schaefer Riley

“First get tenure; then hoist the jolly roger.” I learned that pearl of pragmatic wisdom, originally offered by the eminent Harvard political scientist Harvey Mansfield, from my father somewhere around the time I was in 6th grade. For my father, a political science professor at a small college in Massachusetts, as for Mansfield, the institution of tenure has allowed him the freedom to be a serious contrarian on his campus. Whether he was giving difficult exams in an era of grade inflation or asking critical questions about the politically correct ideas of the day, tenure meant that he didn’t have to risk his family’s livelihood to defend what he believed in. It protected him from capricious administrators and angry colleagues and (in my biased opinion) it gave his students a deeper and more well-rounded education. For the record, I have no doubt that my father—who was expelled from kindergarten for his defiance—would have spoken his mind either way. But tenure made his principled stance a little less dangerous.

In the academic world, my father was (and is) one of the “haves.” He made it to a prestigious school in a city in the Northeast and has remained there for almost 35 years. My mother was one of the “have nots.” She moved with him for his tenure-track job when she was pregnant with me and then proceeded to teach at a half a dozen different colleges in the area over the next several years. Her job prospects seemed always to be subject to the whims of—and I’m being charitable here—unstable departmental personalities.

My parents received their PhDs from the same acclaimed university, but my mother was never offered tenure after that. Instead after several years of this itinerant academic life, she decided to become an entrepreneur. She saw a need for a think tank devoted to local public policy issues and she started it. She did the fundraising, the research, the writing, and when the time came, the hiring of additional staff. Despite her lack of tenure, she has never been afraid, as they say, “to speak truth to power.” And there were plenty of times during the past 25 years that her think tank’s future and her own position were in doubt.

But my father’s tenure meant that there would always be at least one salary coming in.

The effects of tenure on the academic labor market were visible to me in the form of my parents’ friends too. Couples who were forced into long distance relationships so one spouse could maintain a tenured position in the middle of nowhere while the other spouse went to find a job in a different city. Former students of my parents who were pushed off the long (and growing longer) road to a doctoral degree when they stopped to get married and start a family. The men and women who had already lost one tenure bid, who were trying to publish something—anything—to give to another school’s tenure committee.

I am both an insider and an outsider to this world. I always knew that the institution of tenure had a profound effect on those pursuing it, those who received it and those who never won that academic gold medal. It made many keep their heads down and their mouths closed. After that, it made a few bolder, some more reckless, but many never hoisted the jolly roger at all. They remained as meek and eager to please as ever.

Until recently I wasn’t sure whether the idiosyncratic promotion rules of the academy actually mattered to students, though. Sure, I knew that tenure had protected some mediocre faculty members—and a few downright terrible ones. But if people with PhDs thought tenure was the best way to promote quality in their profession, who was I to argue?

In truth, though, academics themselves have not spent a lot of energy reflecting on this question. For all the new fields of inquiry out there from medical ethics to business ethics—the study of which is often done by academics—there seems to be little in the way of higher education ethics. What sort of experience do colleges and universities owe their students? How can they make a college education more coherent? How can they teach subjects that are both timeless and relevant? How can they give students a broad range of perspectives in a particular discipline? How can they make sure that the best professors are put in front of the greatest number of young people? How can they make sure that good teachers are produced at all?

Naomi Schaefer Riley, a former editor at the Wall Street Journal, is the author of God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America (St. Martin’s). Her writings on higher education have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Boston Globe, and Chronicle of Higher Education. Ms. Riley graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University. She lives near New York City with her husband and two children. To find out more about Naomi Schaefer Riley or to purchase the book, visit http://naomiriley.com/.