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Tenure in a Nutshell
- billswift 16y agoThey obviously didn't intend it that way, but the pro-tenure arguments in the comments are among the best evidence against tenure around.
- _delirium 16y agoIt's not quite the case that there's no pressure or evaluation post-tenure, at least at big research universities. It's common for a proportion of a professor's salary to be "soft money" that they have to pay themselves out of grants--- at the very least summer salary (i.e. 25% of full-year pay) is almost always paid out of grants, and increasingly a portion of 9-month salary is as well. So a professor is constantly selling their work not to tenure committees, but to grant agencies, and if they stop doing so, their pay gets a huge chop. They might also end up with more teaching load, depending on the university, since some universities assign more courses per semester to professors deemed "not research-active" (and if they really want them out, will start doing things like giving them shitty committee assignments, withholding annual cost-of-living pay adjustments, moving them to bad offices, etc.). More to the point, if we were to abolish tenure, I think we'd also have to reform how academics are evaluated. The current methods focus almost exclusively on some combination of publication count and citation count, driving a strong "publish or perish" CV-line-counting culture. A main advantage of tenure is that it opens up some breathing space for more senior academics to take risks on longer-term projects that may or may not pan out, and won't be producing the usual flurry of papers in the early stages.