Should Tenure Be Retired?

Julia Forest

Copy Editor

As tenure rates continue to decline, it raises the question of whether tenure is necessary or not. On April 23, Professors Gary Senecal, Bernard Dobski, Smriti Rao, and Daniel Maher participated in a Disputed Questions Forum titled, “Should Tenure Be Retired?”. The event was sponsored by Assumption University’s Provost Office. 

Senecal, who is a Professor of Human Services, recently earned tenure last year. “I’m going to argue in favor of tenure, but more for the process of tenure than the actual results of it. Though, I see some clear benefits to the results of tenure that I believe are absolutely central to the function of academia. Among these, specifically, are academic, intellectual, scientific, and political freedom to voice one’s research with conviction and without fear of employment reprisal,” he said. 

Senecal noted the lack of peer review and comradery in higher education. “Teaching

in higher education, one can feel relatively separated from one’s peers across

departments. Campuses are big, we all work different hours, we teach in different

buildings, hold our office hours in different buildings. There’s not always much of a

central nervous system to this type of work saved for the tenure review process. In

my opinion, the tenure review process is one of the defining central nervous

system pieces to being in academia,” he said

“Being reviewed by the institution made me feel connected to Assumption, made me feel connected to my colleagues and that was regardless of the outcome. It felt good to know that people were taking me seriously, taking my work seriously, taking my contributions to this place or my lack of contributions to this place seriously. Having a positive outcome in my tenure experience solidified a sense of commitment that I had felt to Assumption because Assumption had assessed me and decided that they wanted to commit to my employment here. I really appreciated that feeling and it deepened my sense of connection to the community,” Senecal continued.

Senecal enjoyed the tenure review process and believes that it helps to build a sense of community. “At Assumption, I believe we must keep tenure and perhaps, 

even expand access to it. However, I do want to implore a serious sense of responsibility that comes with full membership in a community. I hope that all of us consider the responsibility to uphold our tenure positions once they are allotted,” Senecal said.

Bernard Dobski, who is a professor of Political Science, believes that tenure should be rare and that there is more academic freedom with tenure. “I argue that we preserve tenure because tenure is a useful tool for preserving the possibility of a liberal education, rightly understood. But like all tools, tenure can be abused…we are right to protect the object of education from academic administrators who might undermine it, ” he said. 

As Dobski mentioned, some of the negatives of tenure include professors slacking in the classroom and departments replicating themselves, which leads to groupthink. Without challenging the standards, there’s a lack of diversity and freedom. “This is extremely dangerous. for while college administrators move on, retire, or get fired every few years, tenured academics remain. Once groupthink has overtaken a field or a department, it’s practically impossible to uproot it…The dangers to education from preserving tenure are thus every bit as great as those that come from tenure’s elimination. To protect itself from this, colleges and universities who are genuinely committed to their missions must aggressively maintain some form of quality control,” Dobski said. 

“What I am suggesting is that those responsible for the stewardship of higher education may mitigate the potential drawbacks of tenure by looking much more closely at hiring decisions…In other words, having faculty who are more likely to be a mission fit and then requiring those faculty to live up to their contracts. So to repeat, as far as I can see, the only way academic leadership can do this is if its members, both among the

administration and the faculty, insist upon hiring, retaining, promoting, and rewarding

those individuals who actively contribute to the school’s educational mission,” he said. 

“Afterall, universities like ours is a partnership in the most authoritative things. It is therefore only just that it distributes powers, honors, responsibilities, and privilege

to those who most contribute to its shared vision of education. such an arrangement is perfectly consistent with the faculty who can teach contending ideas and engage in robust disagreement with each other and their students,” Dobski continued. 

Smriti Rao, a professor of Economics, compared tenure to the rest of corporate America. “One, we get paid a lot less. Secondly, we have no mobility…I realize those are very real problems for me personally, with being so attached to the idea of tenure. And yet I do want to defend the institution…”

Rao highlights how there is more job security with tenure. “I know we like to talk about the fact that sometimes tenured faculty might be less attentive to their jobs or there may be inefficiencies and so on and so forth that arise from this process, but one of the most fascinating things about observing folks who work in corporate America is the amount of time they spend managing their bosses. So for better or for worse, I maybe spend two minutes a day on average thinking about the administration…Whereas my family and friends might spend three, four hours managing, persuading, assuaging…in corporate America, the threat of a new boss and of a complete corporate restructuring is just always around the corner,” she said. 

Tenure provides the opportunity for professors to dedicate more time and energy to their classes. “I think there’s a way in which it actually allows us to spend all our

time thinking about our students and our research, and I really value that very, very much,” Rao said. 

Rao believes that tenure allows her to be herself, meaning, she does not have to put up a front for anybody. “I am my whole self here…I am my whole self in the classroom…I really do not feel, and I think tenure has a lot to do with this, the need to pretend or to perform,” she said. 

“I think one way to summarize all of my arguments for tenure is not tenure as a standalone institution, but as a set of commitments that we’re making to the university as a less commodified space and the university as part of a push against commodified spaces. Successful or unsuccessful. I do see tenure as one aspect of that attempt to create a less commodified environment in which we can bring our whole selves to the classroom, so that we can meet the students as whole human beings, which I think resonates with the mission of this institution and arguably, should be the mission of most universities,” Rao concluded. 

Daniel Maher, who teaches Philosophy, also argued that tenure should not be retired. “I think, as others have said, that there are good and bad aspects of it. I want to just talk about one good thing that tenure makes possible, which is it allows people like me to stand on principle when I’m surrounded by unprincipled people, by whom I mean administrators,” he said.

Maher believes that tenure allows professors to speak their mind and contribute to conversation without ridicule. He brought up how many years ago, the administration wanted to begin an online program titled One Assumption. “Education’s a human encounter…because I was tenured at the time, I was able to say, I think that’s a harebrained idea. You can say this and resist these kinds of things,” he said. 

“I thought my job was to learn how to be a good citizen on this campus. It was not to tell the institution how it needs to run itself, but how do I be the kind of person who contributes well to this institution. And my understanding was that the institution belongs to the tenured faculty, as has been said, the administrators come and go, but if you’re gonna have an identity, a consistency, something that’s recognizable, it’s going to come from that faculty. For good and for ill,” Maher said. 

The whole panel agreed that they would like to see more observations and reviews of other professors’ classes and that tenured professors should continue to prove themselves in order to ensure a high quality education. 

“The real problem, and this is in all categories, is people have to be willing to pass judgment on one another. We’d like to offshore that to just the quantity of publications. We’d like to offshore it to ‘oh, look, top two categories of the students says he’s a good teacher,’ rather than us going in there and saying, ‘you know what, the students may think you’re doing a good job, but I don’t’… It’s hard for administration to pass judgment on us. The first stage in the tenure process, you have to evaluate yourself,” Maher said.