7 ms·

I’m skeptical that tenure is good for students, I knew so many teachers that just didn’t much care for their work and probably would have been fired if not for

I’m skeptical that tenure is good for students, I knew so many teachers that just didn’t much care for their work and probably would have been fired if not for tenure. I understand the arguments in favor of tenure, particularly when it comes to recruitment, but given the bloated pipeline into academia, I’m not sure they hold.

tgv 3y ago
If you want to become a good researcher, go to university to learn from good researchers. If you want to become good in some other task, go to a school.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
y-curious 3y ago
Much like the lifetime appointment of Supreme Court judges, tenured professorship is a great idea that gets warped in practice.
- mgbmtl 3y ago
  Prof jobs might be researched-focused, teaching-focused, or a mix of both. Some universities really pushed research, in order to go for grants and donations. It also helps attract grad students. They usually make less enjoyable undergrad experiences. Then again, having profs that only teach, not research, can become very disconnected after a while. You may as well have a grad student repeat from the book. I know a few tenured profs (and my partner is one). I think most of awesome ones are those not pressured to run after grants constantly, and those that brag about them are red flags.
  - robwwilliams 3y ago
    Agree. One major difference is between: 1. Technical TRAINING to do job X (rote-style) 2. Conceptual LEARNING to think creatively about solving problems and asking and answering novel questions—big or small. Many of us on Hacker News understands the huge difference between this teo modes that has been so elegantly captured in Richard W Hammings “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn”. If you want to be TRAINED then sure, go to an institution that does no research. If you want to LEARN then go to an institution that does some research, better yet, a great deal of research. I was an undegrad at UCSC in the 1970s—-no grades and great faculty who loved both teaching and research. I learned to learn and I still live to learn. Now I am expected to TRAIN first year med students human genetics that will allow them to pass their boards. The boards demand insufferably ancient genetics—a cut-off date of 2001 would be fine-wonderful. But there has been a bit of progress in genetics in the last two decades. I tried to teach them a hybrid of the “classics” but with 50% of time devoted to cutting-edge modern genetics. I hate TRAINING to the test. You can imagine my reviews as a professor. Who is at fault?
    - HarryHirsch 3y ago
      You can imagine my reviews as a professor. Who is at fault? It's the system that's at fault. Remember the noncanonical version of the Monty Python Dead Bishops skit? The murderer admits the crime to the police (in fact the Church Police), saying "It was me, but the system is at fault." The police proceed to question everyone else: "Excuse me, are you part of the system?" - "Yes." - "Come with me then!"
kevinmchugh 3y ago
At the university level, good teaching is a value only some institutions hold. They'll all say they care, but research schools are paying way more attention to grants, publications, parents, etc than to student evals. There are universities that prioritize teaching over research and, unsurprisingly, they tend to have better teaching professors. I went to a school that didn't emphasize research and never had a TA teach a class, for instance
- stametseater 3y ago
  Considering the number of near-poverty retail workers trying to pay off college debt, I think it's a good idea for the government to focus more on improving the quality of teaching, even if that comes at the cost of diminished research output. As it stands, the system saddles undergrads with tons of debt and not much to show for it, with socially disastrous results. If a university wants to focus on research and doesn't care about undergrad teaching quality, let them drop the pretense of offering undergrad education at all.
  - yamtaddle 3y ago
    I'm not sure increasing the quality of teaching will do much for outcomes. A little, probably, but likely not much. AFAIK the vast majority of jobs that expect applicants to have a degree, or favor those who do, don't do it because they need their workers to have a good college education. I think if we increased the quality of education, say, 20% (let's just assume there's some useful measure of quality here, and that expressing it in percentages makes sense) across the entire country, it'd have only a small effect on employment for grads, all else being equal (i.e. those changes don't also reduce the number of grads per year) From what I can tell, most people attending US colleges and universities are mainly paying a fee to participate in a scheme that keeps the unemployment rate down by warehousing capable workers in dorms, keeping them out of the "seeking work" category, and those students-but-potentially-workers are doing so because (they believe that) participating in that program gives them advantage in the employment market, some years later... but not exactly to learn anything, which is a secondary concern at best, for a majority of those attending. I'm dunno how much of it was intended to work that way, but it seems like the main actual thing the whole system is doing now, whatever anyone's intentions were or are. Only semi-reasonable way I can think of to break the cycle would be to decrease the unemployment rate and keep it low for a long time, which ought to get employers to start "out-bidding" the alternative of "go to college, delay career" for recent high school grads, and to stop worrying so much about whether applicants have a degree. In fact, now that I lay it all out like that, I'm pretty sure one of the core problems with higher ed is that labor is too weak, which has led to some really weird outcomes as far as how higher ed is treated. [EDIT] Put another way, that seems perhaps less at-odds with itself than the above contention that increased university attendance acts to keep unemployment rates down, while I also think decreasing the unemployment rate might be a way to reduce university attendance—so many people are going to college, because companies aren't desperate enough for workers to offer many "mere" high school grads real money—they can afford to hold out for college grads, even if they don't really need them.
ok_dad 3y ago
Tenured researchers shouldn't be teaching, IMO. They can be doing research full-time, and leave teaching to those who care to teach. I, personally, dislike research, but I would love to become a CompSci professor and teach the next generation of software developers and technologists. The problem is, I do NOT want to do research. Give me a Master's in CS with some sort of "teaching extension" on it and I'll go teach and the researchers can go do important work researching! Edit: for the upper division courses, researchers certainly should have some involvement, I agree with several of you on that point!
- moab 3y ago
  You don't know what you're talking about. Research and teaching at the upper-division level can and should be two sides of the same coin.
  - ok_dad 3y ago
    I agree with your point that upper division courses need researcher involvement, but please try to be less rude about how you say things. This is a comment thread, so there’s no need to act like that, you could make your actual point in a nicer way and I would have seen it like the commenter above you and agreed that I overlooked this case. have a great weekend.
    - moab 3y ago
      That's very fair. I'm sorry for being rude and have a great weekend as well.
- noisenotsignal 3y ago
  My university had lecturers that were precisely this (masters in CS, focused on teaching intro undergrad courses). However, I think there is still a lot of benefit from having researchers teach upper level courses. Firsthand experience in research brings an additional dimension that can be appreciated by students who are beyond the introductory level. There are also tenured professors who are good at both research and teaching!
e40 3y ago
Agreed. It was a path to teaching 1 or 2 classes a year and doing whatever they wanted. I was at UC Berkeley in the 80's, if it matters.
usrusr 3y ago
Has that claim ever been made? Tenure is done not because of good average outcomes, it's done because of an assumption that it occasionally results in some positive outlier with enormous upside that would not have happened without.
kashunstva 3y ago
> I’m skeptical that tenure is good for students, I’m more skeptical of the motives that animate these decision makers. After all, these are the same people who ban books, insist on revisionist history in Texas school textbooks, and engage in all manner of opposition to free inquiry. Perhaps by some stroke of luck, it will be a net positive for students in Texas institutions of higher learning, but of all the ways of promoting the academic and economic well-being of students this would be among the most tangential.
- professorthread 3y ago
  Right. I'm surprised at the comments here that seem to be missing the bigger picture. If ultra-conservative proto-Gilead Texas is going after tenure, then that must mean the values we associate with a progressive good society are being incubated in academia, protected by tenure. Hence, tenure is good.
Someone1234 3y ago
If tenure goes away, then you have to pay more to compensate. If you're getting rid of tenure while keeping wages low, you'll still have bad teachers but for that reason instead. A lot of people want to have their cake and eat it too: No tenure AND low wages. It won't work out.
- fn-mote 3y ago
  > A lot of people want to have their cake and eat it too: No tenure AND low wages. It won't work out. Sure you can. That's what the current system of adjuncts is like. The problem is that you lose the people who are the most competent. Those who know what they are doing, have valuable skills, etc.
  - uberman 3y ago
    Adjuncts and lecturers dont do research nor do they typically do service. If one wanted to be educated by lecturers then they could attend a community college. That is of course a viable option but no tenure will be the kiss of death to any institution who thought they were going to do research at the R1 level.
    - giantg2 3y ago
      "If one wanted to be educated by lecturers then they could attend a community college." I'd argue that the vast majority of classes at a state school (what this rule affects) are already taught by non-research personnel.
      - gammarator 3y ago
        Correct. But universities want researchers because they bring in research grants (which provide the university 50%+ in overhead: slush funds).
        giantg2 3y ago
        It seems the state schools don't have as much incentive for that. The university president decided to build a conference center while I was at school. They didn't have all the money secured, so the state jumped in to pay a lot and tuition. Went up substantially. They're already cheap so the have no competition pressure and they know the state will bail them out.
palijer 3y ago
How important is teacher performance for students though? What are we even measuring when something is good/bad for students? Obviously anything akin to directly abusing students would be bad for students, but I imagine we're talking about the quality of the education they get based on the quality of their professor's teaching ability. If we are just talking about learning qualities, isn't the selection of students in higher level academic programs already heavily curated and biased towards students who have proven they are good at learning? Shouldn't this cohort of proven learners be resistant to any fluctuations in the teaching quality of professors? Forgive me if my question shows a higher level misunderstanding, but I stumbled into my career in tech without any post-secondary education - so I don't have firsthand experience with any real academic settings.
- professorthread 3y ago
  The heuristic often repeated by folks in the profession is that you've got a top 5% of students who match your description of students who've proven they're good at learning, a bottom 5% who is entirely unprepared for university life and who knows how they got admitted, and the rest whose understanding of the subject matter is influenced by the performance of the teacher. Post-COVID, lots of us (and you can find articles about this by conducting a simple search) have noticed that the top 5% hasn't changed, but the bottom 5% seems to have gotten significantly larger--10%, sometimes 15% of students in introductory level courses seem unprepared for university. I've seen functional illiteracy in some of my students at my good R1, for the first time ever. Our university is also on a huge enrollment drive, and are constantly hinting that faculty need to grade more easily to keep students happy.
robwwilliams 3y ago
Skepticism re teaching is fine, but tenure at this point is not given or denied based mainly on teaching but rather on research. Yes, UT Austin and TAM teach a lot, but tenure is driven very strongly by research performance and promise.
svc0 3y ago
The major benefit of tenure is as a protection for pursuing the truth when researching controversial academic subjects. It protects the behavioral genetics research which takes place at UT Austin from left wing attacks and the positions some professors have taken on Texas A&M's annual drag show from right wing attacks. As a student in the Texas system, I've raised questions which my professors refused to talk about fearing political backlash. Tenure is an important institution. I think you can only go so far to incentivize good teaching through termination.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
I'm not sure if the core duty of a professor at a research institution should even be teaching vs research...
- HarryHirsch 3y ago
  You can't believe how stale an introductory course can get when the teaching staff is left to its own devices and research staff looks the other way. And that's at a name brand top-10 university. Man, I wouldn't hire out of here.
Cyph0n 3y ago
Here is how I look at it. Major universities have two functions: (1) teaching and (2) research. Teaching is further split between (1a) undergrad (basic) and (1b) graduate (advanced). You could definitely sustain (1a) without the incentive (or carrot) of tenure. This is how most community colleges work. (1b) and (2) currently rely on the existence of tenure. Teaching advanced courses (1b) requires research experience. Finding people willing to spend their lives in research (2) requires some kind of incentive, especially in STEM fields. As others have mentioned, to eliminate tenure, you need to provide an equivalent incentive. If you don’t, you’ll end up with a race to the bottom and a very probable exodus of academics to either other states or - even worse - other countries.
- romwell 3y ago
  >You could definitely sustain (1a) without the incentive (or carrot) of tenure. This is how most community colleges work. Spoiler: this is how most universities work. They have teaching jobs that are either filled with adjuncts, or are contract-based; or pay such small salaries that tenure is the only thing that would attract anyone to work them.
  - Cyph0n 3y ago
    You’re missing my point. Universities that also do research cannot be sustained completely by adjuncts and teaching professors. Also, a portion of adjunct and contract-based positions are filled by those seeking a tenure track position. Removing tenure will affect this side as well.
    - romwell 3y ago
      No, I'm not missing your point - I agree with it. My comment was meant to point that that to the extent that tenure could be gutted from research universities, it has already been done so. Gutting it further would bring immediate ruin.
subpixel 3y ago
I was accepted to a UT Austin graduate program. After being accepted, I flew on my own dime to meet with the director and associate director, and several professors, because I couldn't imagine dedicating several years of my life and career path based on some paperwork alone. The director was unfamiliar with my published work, which had gotten some acclaim and been featured _alongside his own_ at two industry events that summer. At one of them, I had introduced myself! It was a tense, 'look kid, why are you here?' meeting, that made it clear he had no idea who was coming to study in his tiny department and didn't care. The associate director didn't show up to her office for our meeting, she was out of town. This was before the era of calendar-RSVPs, but she had confirmed via email a little more than a week prior. That department may have been more of a mess than others, I never spent time in academia after all. But both of those folks had tenure, and I think it contributed to the zero shits they had to give.
professorthread 3y ago
Some tenured professors slack on teaching, or were never that great at teaching to begin with. But tenure as an institution improves teaching quality. What professors teach is subject no less to academic freedom and the protections tenure provides than what professors research. Faculty subject to short-term contracts tend to have their contract renewal dependent on student evaluation scores, which study after study show are poorly correlated (and often anti-correlated) with student learning outcomes. Good teachers aren't necessarily popular; easy graders are popular. Conveying difficult subject matter that may be controversial or technically difficult to grok is crucial to learning outcomes. This is exactly what gets cut out when you lose academic freedom, become a cog of administrators who are out to maximize enrollments not learning outcomes, and have your job performance hinge upon student evaluations.
cafard 3y ago
Tenure is like the jury system, in that it has a political and an administrative aspect. The administrative aspects have drawbacks (patent cases in certain jurisdictions, bad teachers unfireable). But I don't think that the legislature has the improvement of undergraduate teaching in mind.
UncleMeat 3y ago
This isn't a property of tenure. This is a property of schools not caring about teaching. Tenured faculty can still be fired for shitty performance. Eliminating tenure will not change the systems that encourage research output over other kinds of work.

tgv 3y ago

If you want to become a good researcher, go to university to learn from good researchers. If you want to become good in some other task, go to a school.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

y-curious 3y ago

Much like the lifetime appointment of Supreme Court judges, tenured professorship is a great idea that gets warped in practice.

mgbmtl 3y ago
Prof jobs might be researched-focused, teaching-focused, or a mix of both. Some universities really pushed research, in order to go for grants and donations. It also helps attract grad students. They usually make less enjoyable undergrad experiences. Then again, having profs that only teach, not research, can become very disconnected after a while. You may as well have a grad student repeat from the book. I know a few tenured profs (and my partner is one). I think most of awesome ones are those not pressured to run after grants constantly, and those that brag about them are red flags.
- robwwilliams 3y ago
  Agree. One major difference is between: 1. Technical TRAINING to do job X (rote-style) 2. Conceptual LEARNING to think creatively about solving problems and asking and answering novel questions—big or small. Many of us on Hacker News understands the huge difference between this teo modes that has been so elegantly captured in Richard W Hammings “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn”. If you want to be TRAINED then sure, go to an institution that does no research. If you want to LEARN then go to an institution that does some research, better yet, a great deal of research. I was an undegrad at UCSC in the 1970s—-no grades and great faculty who loved both teaching and research. I learned to learn and I still live to learn. Now I am expected to TRAIN first year med students human genetics that will allow them to pass their boards. The boards demand insufferably ancient genetics—a cut-off date of 2001 would be fine-wonderful. But there has been a bit of progress in genetics in the last two decades. I tried to teach them a hybrid of the “classics” but with 50% of time devoted to cutting-edge modern genetics. I hate TRAINING to the test. You can imagine my reviews as a professor. Who is at fault?
  - HarryHirsch 3y ago
    You can imagine my reviews as a professor. Who is at fault? It's the system that's at fault. Remember the noncanonical version of the Monty Python Dead Bishops skit? The murderer admits the crime to the police (in fact the Church Police), saying "It was me, but the system is at fault." The police proceed to question everyone else: "Excuse me, are you part of the system?" - "Yes." - "Come with me then!"

kevinmchugh 3y ago

At the university level, good teaching is a value only some institutions hold. They'll all say they care, but research schools are paying way more attention to grants, publications, parents, etc than to student evals. There are universities that prioritize teaching over research and, unsurprisingly, they tend to have better teaching professors. I went to a school that didn't emphasize research and never had a TA teach a class, for instance

stametseater 3y ago
Considering the number of near-poverty retail workers trying to pay off college debt, I think it's a good idea for the government to focus more on improving the quality of teaching, even if that comes at the cost of diminished research output. As it stands, the system saddles undergrads with tons of debt and not much to show for it, with socially disastrous results. If a university wants to focus on research and doesn't care about undergrad teaching quality, let them drop the pretense of offering undergrad education at all.
- yamtaddle 3y ago
  I'm not sure increasing the quality of teaching will do much for outcomes. A little, probably, but likely not much. AFAIK the vast majority of jobs that expect applicants to have a degree, or favor those who do, don't do it because they need their workers to have a good college education. I think if we increased the quality of education, say, 20% (let's just assume there's some useful measure of quality here, and that expressing it in percentages makes sense) across the entire country, it'd have only a small effect on employment for grads, all else being equal (i.e. those changes don't also reduce the number of grads per year) From what I can tell, most people attending US colleges and universities are mainly paying a fee to participate in a scheme that keeps the unemployment rate down by warehousing capable workers in dorms, keeping them out of the "seeking work" category, and those students-but-potentially-workers are doing so because (they believe that) participating in that program gives them advantage in the employment market, some years later... but not exactly to learn anything, which is a secondary concern at best, for a majority of those attending. I'm dunno how much of it was intended to work that way, but it seems like the main actual thing the whole system is doing now, whatever anyone's intentions were or are. Only semi-reasonable way I can think of to break the cycle would be to decrease the unemployment rate and keep it low for a long time, which ought to get employers to start "out-bidding" the alternative of "go to college, delay career" for recent high school grads, and to stop worrying so much about whether applicants have a degree. In fact, now that I lay it all out like that, I'm pretty sure one of the core problems with higher ed is that labor is too weak, which has led to some really weird outcomes as far as how higher ed is treated. [EDIT] Put another way, that seems perhaps less at-odds with itself than the above contention that increased university attendance acts to keep unemployment rates down, while I also think decreasing the unemployment rate might be a way to reduce university attendance—so many people are going to college, because companies aren't desperate enough for workers to offer many "mere" high school grads real money—they can afford to hold out for college grads, even if they don't really need them.

ok_dad 3y ago

Tenured researchers shouldn't be teaching, IMO. They can be doing research full-time, and leave teaching to those who care to teach. I, personally, dislike research, but I would love to become a CompSci professor and teach the next generation of software developers and technologists. The problem is, I do NOT want to do research. Give me a Master's in CS with some sort of "teaching extension" on it and I'll go teach and the researchers can go do important work researching! Edit: for the upper division courses, researchers certainly should have some involvement, I agree with several of you on that point!

moab 3y ago
You don't know what you're talking about. Research and teaching at the upper-division level can and should be two sides of the same coin.
- ok_dad 3y ago
  I agree with your point that upper division courses need researcher involvement, but please try to be less rude about how you say things. This is a comment thread, so there’s no need to act like that, you could make your actual point in a nicer way and I would have seen it like the commenter above you and agreed that I overlooked this case. have a great weekend.
  - moab 3y ago
    That's very fair. I'm sorry for being rude and have a great weekend as well.
noisenotsignal 3y ago
My university had lecturers that were precisely this (masters in CS, focused on teaching intro undergrad courses). However, I think there is still a lot of benefit from having researchers teach upper level courses. Firsthand experience in research brings an additional dimension that can be appreciated by students who are beyond the introductory level. There are also tenured professors who are good at both research and teaching!

e40 3y ago

Agreed. It was a path to teaching 1 or 2 classes a year and doing whatever they wanted. I was at UC Berkeley in the 80's, if it matters.

usrusr 3y ago

Has that claim ever been made? Tenure is done not because of good average outcomes, it's done because of an assumption that it occasionally results in some positive outlier with enormous upside that would not have happened without.

kashunstva 3y ago

> I’m skeptical that tenure is good for students, I’m more skeptical of the motives that animate these decision makers. After all, these are the same people who ban books, insist on revisionist history in Texas school textbooks, and engage in all manner of opposition to free inquiry. Perhaps by some stroke of luck, it will be a net positive for students in Texas institutions of higher learning, but of all the ways of promoting the academic and economic well-being of students this would be among the most tangential.

professorthread 3y ago
Right. I'm surprised at the comments here that seem to be missing the bigger picture. If ultra-conservative proto-Gilead Texas is going after tenure, then that must mean the values we associate with a progressive good society are being incubated in academia, protected by tenure. Hence, tenure is good.

Someone1234 3y ago

If tenure goes away, then you have to pay more to compensate. If you're getting rid of tenure while keeping wages low, you'll still have bad teachers but for that reason instead. A lot of people want to have their cake and eat it too: No tenure AND low wages. It won't work out.

fn-mote 3y ago
> A lot of people want to have their cake and eat it too: No tenure AND low wages. It won't work out. Sure you can. That's what the current system of adjuncts is like. The problem is that you lose the people who are the most competent. Those who know what they are doing, have valuable skills, etc.
- uberman 3y ago
  Adjuncts and lecturers dont do research nor do they typically do service. If one wanted to be educated by lecturers then they could attend a community college. That is of course a viable option but no tenure will be the kiss of death to any institution who thought they were going to do research at the R1 level.
  - giantg2 3y ago
    "If one wanted to be educated by lecturers then they could attend a community college." I'd argue that the vast majority of classes at a state school (what this rule affects) are already taught by non-research personnel.
    - gammarator 3y ago
      Correct. But universities want researchers because they bring in research grants (which provide the university 50%+ in overhead: slush funds).
      - giantg2 3y ago
        It seems the state schools don't have as much incentive for that. The university president decided to build a conference center while I was at school. They didn't have all the money secured, so the state jumped in to pay a lot and tuition. Went up substantially. They're already cheap so the have no competition pressure and they know the state will bail them out.

palijer 3y ago

How important is teacher performance for students though? What are we even measuring when something is good/bad for students? Obviously anything akin to directly abusing students would be bad for students, but I imagine we're talking about the quality of the education they get based on the quality of their professor's teaching ability. If we are just talking about learning qualities, isn't the selection of students in higher level academic programs already heavily curated and biased towards students who have proven they are good at learning? Shouldn't this cohort of proven learners be resistant to any fluctuations in the teaching quality of professors? Forgive me if my question shows a higher level misunderstanding, but I stumbled into my career in tech without any post-secondary education - so I don't have firsthand experience with any real academic settings.

professorthread 3y ago
The heuristic often repeated by folks in the profession is that you've got a top 5% of students who match your description of students who've proven they're good at learning, a bottom 5% who is entirely unprepared for university life and who knows how they got admitted, and the rest whose understanding of the subject matter is influenced by the performance of the teacher. Post-COVID, lots of us (and you can find articles about this by conducting a simple search) have noticed that the top 5% hasn't changed, but the bottom 5% seems to have gotten significantly larger--10%, sometimes 15% of students in introductory level courses seem unprepared for university. I've seen functional illiteracy in some of my students at my good R1, for the first time ever. Our university is also on a huge enrollment drive, and are constantly hinting that faculty need to grade more easily to keep students happy.

robwwilliams 3y ago

Skepticism re teaching is fine, but tenure at this point is not given or denied based mainly on teaching but rather on research. Yes, UT Austin and TAM teach a lot, but tenure is driven very strongly by research performance and promise.

svc0 3y ago

The major benefit of tenure is as a protection for pursuing the truth when researching controversial academic subjects. It protects the behavioral genetics research which takes place at UT Austin from left wing attacks and the positions some professors have taken on Texas A&M's annual drag show from right wing attacks. As a student in the Texas system, I've raised questions which my professors refused to talk about fearing political backlash. Tenure is an important institution. I think you can only go so far to incentivize good teaching through termination.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

I'm not sure if the core duty of a professor at a research institution should even be teaching vs research...

HarryHirsch 3y ago
You can't believe how stale an introductory course can get when the teaching staff is left to its own devices and research staff looks the other way. And that's at a name brand top-10 university. Man, I wouldn't hire out of here.

Cyph0n 3y ago

Here is how I look at it. Major universities have two functions: (1) teaching and (2) research. Teaching is further split between (1a) undergrad (basic) and (1b) graduate (advanced). You could definitely sustain (1a) without the incentive (or carrot) of tenure. This is how most community colleges work. (1b) and (2) currently rely on the existence of tenure. Teaching advanced courses (1b) requires research experience. Finding people willing to spend their lives in research (2) requires some kind of incentive, especially in STEM fields. As others have mentioned, to eliminate tenure, you need to provide an equivalent incentive. If you don’t, you’ll end up with a race to the bottom and a very probable exodus of academics to either other states or - even worse - other countries.

romwell 3y ago
>You could definitely sustain (1a) without the incentive (or carrot) of tenure. This is how most community colleges work. Spoiler: this is how most universities work. They have teaching jobs that are either filled with adjuncts, or are contract-based; or pay such small salaries that tenure is the only thing that would attract anyone to work them.
- Cyph0n 3y ago
  You’re missing my point. Universities that also do research cannot be sustained completely by adjuncts and teaching professors. Also, a portion of adjunct and contract-based positions are filled by those seeking a tenure track position. Removing tenure will affect this side as well.
  - romwell 3y ago
    No, I'm not missing your point - I agree with it. My comment was meant to point that that to the extent that tenure could be gutted from research universities, it has already been done so. Gutting it further would bring immediate ruin.

subpixel 3y ago

I was accepted to a UT Austin graduate program. After being accepted, I flew on my own dime to meet with the director and associate director, and several professors, because I couldn't imagine dedicating several years of my life and career path based on some paperwork alone. The director was unfamiliar with my published work, which had gotten some acclaim and been featured _alongside his own_ at two industry events that summer. At one of them, I had introduced myself! It was a tense, 'look kid, why are you here?' meeting, that made it clear he had no idea who was coming to study in his tiny department and didn't care. The associate director didn't show up to her office for our meeting, she was out of town. This was before the era of calendar-RSVPs, but she had confirmed via email a little more than a week prior. That department may have been more of a mess than others, I never spent time in academia after all. But both of those folks had tenure, and I think it contributed to the zero shits they had to give.

professorthread 3y ago

Some tenured professors slack on teaching, or were never that great at teaching to begin with. But tenure as an institution improves teaching quality. What professors teach is subject no less to academic freedom and the protections tenure provides than what professors research. Faculty subject to short-term contracts tend to have their contract renewal dependent on student evaluation scores, which study after study show are poorly correlated (and often anti-correlated) with student learning outcomes. Good teachers aren't necessarily popular; easy graders are popular. Conveying difficult subject matter that may be controversial or technically difficult to grok is crucial to learning outcomes. This is exactly what gets cut out when you lose academic freedom, become a cog of administrators who are out to maximize enrollments not learning outcomes, and have your job performance hinge upon student evaluations.

cafard 3y ago

Tenure is like the jury system, in that it has a political and an administrative aspect. The administrative aspects have drawbacks (patent cases in certain jurisdictions, bad teachers unfireable). But I don't think that the legislature has the improvement of undergraduate teaching in mind.

UncleMeat 3y ago

This isn't a property of tenure. This is a property of schools not caring about teaching. Tenured faculty can still be fired for shitty performance. Eliminating tenure will not change the systems that encourage research output over other kinds of work.