What is the one last full employment holdouts in the world of work today? It's not corporate America-even IBM started actually laying people off several years ago (Hays, 1994). It's not the government-witness the recent emphasis on "leaner and meaner" and fewer headcounts throughout every agency. If fact, as my friend and colleague Janine has pointed out to me recently, there are only two places left where lifetime employment is a virtual guarantee: the world of academia and the Mafia. In both cases, your job is generally secure until death, unless, of course, you really make a mistake.

Let's focus on tenure for the present. It has more relevance to I/O practitioners (I hear, however, that 360 degree feedback is making a splash in the organized crime business). Although only 36% of SIOP membership are currently employed full-time in academic settings, given that 89.8% hold doctorates and another 9.7% have their masters (Howard, 1990), the issues surrounding the tenure debate should resonate with almost everyone. After all, we all have either experienced directly or heard of someone who has experienced one of "those" professors who clearly should not be teaching (for any one of a variety of reasons). Moreover, since the faculty of these institutions of higher learning represent the first line of socialization into the field of I/O psychology, or any other specialty for that matter, the impact that tenure has on both the processes of teaching and research is critical.

Whenever I think of tenure I am reminded of a professor I knew of in college who was anything but exemplary. As a member of one of the student advisory boards, we were often privy to information that was one step beyond general knowledge, although I seriously doubt if most people didn't know what was really happening. At any rate, this fully tenured professor was known by many to teach classes while intoxicated. Between student comments of alcohol on his breath, missing lectures inexplicably, and often jumbling those that were presented, the course evaluations were needless to say not particularly positive. Despite repeated requests to have this person removed, the only recourse the faculty of this department had was to relegate the individual to teaching only 1 class per year. Unfortunately, the one course this individual was still "qualified" to teach was still one that was recommended for acceptance into graduate school programs. Thus, while student exposure to this individual was minimized, the situation went unresolved until nature corrected the situation on its own.

Given these issues, and the implications that tenure has for the study and practice of our field, I thought I would solicit others' opinions on the topic. More specifically, the questions posed for this discussion were as follows:

What should be done about the academic tenure system? If you feel it should be revised or abolished altogether please explain your reasoning and what new system(s) might be used to replace it. If you feel that tenure should remain as it is please explain the reasoning for your decision (e.g., to whom and in what ways it benefits others).

Rather than use my standard method of identifying potential contributors and approaching them directly, I thought I would try the internet instead. Given the sensitivity of the topic, and the potential difficulty in finding individuals who would agree to respond openly to my question, I chose to cast the net as wide as possible and see who would bite. Thus, I posted a request for contributors on both the ODCNET-L and IOOB-L news groups. To my surprise, I received responses from six different individuals including an I/O psychology professor, an external consultant, a political activist, and a travel writer. Five of these presented primarily negative views, while the sixth chose to defend the system for a variety of reasons.

The first contributor is Ted Micceri, Coordinator of Institutional Research for the University of South Florida. Ted provides us with the context for the whole tenure concept and raises some interesting issues about its relevance in contemporary learning organizations.

At least two factors were primary causes of the Tenure concept: First to assure that at least some part of society would have the ability to "freely" comment even in repressive environments, and second, to allow a small portion of society (tenured professors) enough study time to become "Masters" of their subject area. Over the past 50 years, at least three things have strongly influenced the environment in which this historic system functions:

The information explosion has caused "Masters" both to have to work harder for mastery and to become masters of smaller and smaller pieces of their subject area. Whereas the psychologist of 1900 may only have to read the equivalent of 10 treatises a year to keep up with the entire world's research and development, today's psychologists may have to read 10 treatises per week to do the same. Masters must specialize to reduce their workloads to a "reasonable" level. Such specialization changes the very nature of "faculty".

The number of students attending higher education, and therefore, by necessity, the number of faculty, has increased geometrically over time as a portion of the population. Whereas only 5% of high school graduates in 1900 attended higher education institutes, the High School and Beyond Study on the 1982 high school graduating class found that 66% of them had attended college within eight years. The cost of having enough faculty to teach this multitude is greater than society can bear if most are tenured.

Technological developments and a constantly changing world environment has resulted in rapid world-wide communication and considerably greater personal mobility throughout society, and especially among Experts. The rapid development of communications technology makes it considerably more difficult for even the most repressive socio-political environments to control protesting voices. This effect, to a large extent, reduces the need for a primary underpinning of Tenure: the freedom to write and speak openly.

Of course, as the information required for mastery has increased, and because promotions and tenure are usually based on high status research, the time the average tenure-earning professor devotes to teaching has necessarily dropped. As awareness of this phenomenon has spread, effects such as the University of Utrecht's (Netherlands) tripartite advanced graduate degree have appeared. Students there now work toward one of three degrees, a traditional research degree, the Ph.D., a teaching oriented degree within a subject area, the THE (which is theoretically of equal status to the Ph.D.), or both (this we assume will be of higher status than either of the others). Of course, steps such as this only deal with one problem, the lack of effort devoted to teaching. Societal costs and "freedom of speech/writing" suggest that the following effects, which have been increasing steadily over the past 20-30 years, will continue their growth:

Increasingly greater numbers of students will study with Experts, rather than Masters, particularly at the introductory levels of higher education. This effect is clearly visible in the huge increase of community college enrollments and in the steadily greater use of adjunct faculty and graduate students to teach lower-level courses at major universities around the nation.

Tenure as an institution will be under increasing fire, as the monies that formerly supported this group are spread to a wider base of students. Over time we should expect:

That only the upper levels of undergraduate and most of graduate education will be handled by tenured faculty.

That institutions will become increasingly diverse, with some oriented toward instruction, some research, etc..

In view of the preceding, we can be sure that over the next several years, those who wish to "profess" will experience the Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."

Royleen White, an external consultant specializing in organizational improvement and team development, questions the nature and purpose of tenure itself. Her critique is short and to the point.

Academic tenure does not encourage professors to be "learners." Once they receive tenure, many declare themselves "learned," and they often stop learning altogether. James O'Toole has compared tenure to a drug or alcohol, at first medicinal and later addictive and destructive. He has renounced his own tenure at the University of Southern California and claims to have witnessed the transformation of the American Associates of University Professors from a professional association into a labor union.

Others have suggested that tenure still allows for termination for cause; however, as I understand it, a tenured professor can not be terminated unless he/she has committed some egregious evil. The tenured individual essentially has a job for life.

It strikes me that the tenure problem gets at the heart of the purpose of higher education. Does the university exist to prepare people to contribute to society? To teach them how to think critically? To write? To communicate and to problem solve? Or is the university here to promulgate research? Do we need so much self-indulgent inquiry? If this research benefits corporate America, perhaps it should be footing the bill. Some would argue that corporate America is already footing the bill-with grants, endowments, bequests, and sponsorships. However, few would argue that considerable university research is funded by the good old American taxpayer.

That taxpayer is "tapped out," and in no mood to continue increasing the investment; let's face facts: most people despise government these days. The taxpayer has witnessed (or perhaps been the victim of) right-sizing, down-sizing, and just plain brutalizing. The taxpayer has had to answer not only "How do you add value to this business?" but also "What have you done for me lately?" A tenured professor doesn't have to answer those questions. And in the last half of the last decade of the twentieth century, with American competition in the global economy at risk, that makes no sense.

Tenure should be abolished, and replaced with a contract system that enables university administrators to link desired outcomes with each professor's contributions.

On a similar vein, but in greater detail, are the following comments provided by an Assistant Professor of I/O Psychology who would like to remain anonymous. His chose to summarize his comments using the following points:

The purpose of establishing the tenure system was to protect academic freedom of professors. The basic assumption was that the professors will use their academic freedom to realize some individual goals that are consistent with organizational goals, and for some reasons they could be terminated for doing so. A big area for discussion is what type of goals belong here.

What social norm lay behind the idea of establishing a tenure system? It may be surprising to realize that it was the equality norm that is not much heralded in this culture.

Who deserves to be protected by the tenure system? Only those people who have individual goals that are congruent with organizational goals, should be protected. One could argue that most tenure reviews are not assessing and considering this issue.

Who needs to be protected by the tenure system? My guess is that very few professors need such protection. I looked around my department, and concluded that out of 32 professors, maybe one would need such protection but there is no problem, s/he was already denied tenure and is on non-tenure track. It would be interesting to survey our colleagues around the country to find what is the predominant perception about this.

Paradox 1: If the famous "publish-or-perish" rule is the indispensable heuristic to obtain tenure, then tenure, in fact, quite often curtails academic freedom. It is not a secret that the more innovative, the more ground-breaking, and the more controversial that one's research is, the more difficult that is to publish it.

Paradox 2: If the research on work motivation makes any sense, then it is obvious that some faculty members will lower their effort under low instrumental rewards and/or punishments. The paradox here is that the tenure system that should increase accomplishment of organizational goals can, in fact, work in the opposite direction.

Paradox 3: There are at least two motivations to get rid of and/or to reform the tenure system. Some administrators copy their counterparts in the business world and only want to replace higher-paid tenured faculty with cheaper, beginning assistant professors. Some faculty members and, I hope some administrators, see the problems with the tenure system as it is and would like to replace it with a better system of protecting academic freedom. The paradox is that these different motivations to eliminate tenure should come with different solutions.

Paradox 4: In the US, with some exceptions (e.g., public school teachers), only university professors enjoy the safety of tenure. If universities are there to serve their communities, the tenure system can exacerbate the problem of elitism and detachment from their communities.

In general, it would be probably very difficult replace tenure with another system. The discourse and actions that have been taken around the country suggest that the tenure system is only a small part of struggling academe. If this is true, any changes to the tenure system should involve more global changes in university organizations. In conclusion, it's time to start treating students as members of our organizations and not only as customers who got stuck with us.

Vasos Panagiotopoulos, a conservative activist and businessman, sent me his comments on the education process in general. From this material, I culled the following points of his regarding tenure. Although brief, his observations are interesting nonetheless:

At Ivy universities, professors are so engrossed in federal research that they give mixed-matched old exams (for which there is a black market). In many European universities, the education process has already degenerated to only examinations because there is not enough room in the classes for all the students. And as others have shown, today's professoriate is more interested in grants and bizarreness than in teaching (hence superfluous?) students. Many university students report that those who attend fewer classes get better grades because they stay home and study: Then why make them pay for the faculty? Paraphrasing Barzun: Junk education and junk research to go with junk bonds and junk mail?

What is outrageous is that academicians like Charles Handy, Tom Peters, and Peter Drucker, rather than being ashamed of the decrepitness of the university feudal system, demand, in works such as Age of Unreason, that it be extended to the workplace; the university is one of the last surviving bastions of feudalism, and the Reagan Revolution which brought down the Kremilin walls must finally be allowed to demolish the tenured professoriate's paranoid delusions of grandeur that seeks the public pay them tribute in the form of grants!

It is obscene to hear professors condemn supposed corporate short-termism and greedily high salaries when they insist that university investments (even internal venture capital) provide maximum annualised returns and that they seek ever-higher salaries for themselves, their administrators and their lobbyists: instead of behaving like paranoid dictators accusing supposed "immorality" for the failure of their hare-brained schemes-instead of "teaching" ethics-they should teach by example, for the sad state of societal ethics today is primarily the fault of the professors' hypocritical example. We can ill-afford to allow faculty who reserve the right to be both absent-minded and stubborn to continue pretending to teach our future leaders justice and competitiveness.

Doug Dylan, currently a nationally syndicated travel/humor writer and author of "How Survive High School with Minimal Brain Damage", provided his reflections on the utility of the tenure system.

Tenure, with all that it implies today, is about as beneficial to college students as a psychotic with a machine gun on the roof of the admissions office. Before begin my assault on tenure, I must define a few parameters:

I believe that communicating with a class of students and compiling a bibliography are two entirely different skills. Research skills and teaching skills are as similar as football and baseball and should not be linked as such. Teaching and research are both academia just as football and baseball are both athletics. Those who can achieve both at the highest level are as rare as a Bo Jackson.

A Ph.D. trains someone to teach a class like an astronomy course trains someone to pilot the space shuttle. Therefore, to find exceptional teachers under the current system, you have to recruit. There is no way to know if a teacher is exceptional, however, by looking at a rsum. With a rsum, you can only find exceptional researchers, which is exactly what we have been doing. There should be scouts traveling around the country questioning students about top teachers and then attending their classes. For teacher recruiting, high schools and junior colleges may act as a "minor league" for the high-powered teaching institutions.

I support a divided profession of academia: teaching professors and research professors. Teaching professors will, to get their degree, have to study and practice the techniques of teaching. Research professors will, to get their degree, have to learn how to get grants and learn how to look at what society needs so they can provide research accordingly, not just research what they feel like researching. Teaching is often boring and difficult for researchers. If their real skills lie in research, let's not burden them with students. To get the best out of each person, these skills should be separated.

You do not need to be pushing the frontiers of thought in order to teach along those frontiers. Once Columbus discovered America, any navigator could find it (go west!). Once Einstein invented the theory of relativity, others could explain it. Once the information is out there, you don't need the original thinker to teach it. A good teacher stays abreast of their field and should be able to explain what is happening along the "cutting edge."

The best teachers should be concentrated in the lower level courses, where students are trying to discover for themselves if this is a field they should pursue. They are often not yet motivated about the field and don't know enough about it to pursue things on their own. Because this is an introduction, we want to put our best foot forward.

A Ph.D. is not necessary for teaching many courses. We have gotten hooked on attracting PhD's because accreditation firms like it and, thus, US News & World Report began to chart it, which increased it's importance. I took a Calculus 101 course in high school, and then again in college and I learned much more from my high school teacher who was both more challenging and more enthusiastic.

Now back to tenure. The most incredible thing about tenure is that the definition has changed so much. Most know its original meaning as a shield for those who possess unorthodox views, specifically for the social sciences. Today, it implies a sort of untouchability for all faculty who can attain it. Academic freedom is the major issue here and let me start by saying that I hold it more highly than most. In fact, I want to extend this academic freedom not only to tenured professors, but to every professor, from the instant he or she signs the contract. Grant freedom to possess unorthodox views to all faculty members. It does not, I remind you, in any way, protect a professor from the standards of teaching excellence adapted by that institution.

Publish rubbish or perish-even in the theoretical world of academia, people need quantitative things to point at. Research is on paper and you can point to a stack of papers and say, "look, I did that" and people will know what you're talking about. The papers don't actually have to say much, and they often don't. And even if they did, few actually read it. It's often just important that there are a lot of pages. In a quest to produce pages, researchers will often forgo a long-range, say, eight-year project because it won't produce enough paper. Teachers don't have to point to anything quantitative in teaching. The closest thing to quantitative results are student evaluations, and most colleges don't place much weight on them. For tenure to crack, it will have to be a movement of the students. Tenure does not prevent, but does not encourage exceptional teaching.

The classroom is for the students. The students are paying for a service-to be taught. The faculty too easily loose sight of this, often because no one does anything to enforce it. They get these weird schemes floating around that students and/or their parents have an obligation to support whatever sort of research they deem relevant. After all, they are furthering the thinking of mankind. In fact, most professors are furthering the thinking of mankind like my grandmother is forwarding rap music. Some profs are genuinely pushing the frontiers of thought, but the rest are trying to fill pages of academic journals that only a few colleagues read and books that even fewer read to achieve that holy-of-holies-tenure.

Professors are the very people who set up working models to analyze political, scientific and economic situations. Tenure, however, would never survive such analysis-it can only survive in academia, where people don't strive for excellence, as they expect us in the classroom do to, they strive for security.

And now for something, completely different. Stephen Guastello, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Marquette University, was the only contributor to actually take a positive stance toward the notion of tenure.

Why the Tenure System Should be Maintained

The function of the university is to preserve, reorganize, transmit, and discover the knowledge base accumulated by the culture, both locally and globally. The discovery aspect, i.e., research, did not gain the prominence that his has today until the 1930s, that is, until nearly 400 years after the establishment of the major Renaissance universities. Although many aspects of the tenure debate may rightly center on research quantity and quality, the totality of the university function cannot be ignored when considering the broader question of whether the tenure system should be retained or dismantled.

One might reasonably ask whether the tenure system, which guarantees employment after certain qualifications are met, serves to reinforce lack of research productivity, and thus whether it would be better for research if the tenure system were dismantled. There are two parts to that answer: One is "no" with respect to the existing body of knowledge concerning creativity and innovation. The other is "no" with respect to a university's utilization of its resources. In each case there is a decision concerning the relative merits of each potential project in terms of the certainty and size of the potential payoff. Without tenure, the natural proclivity in the face of risk to employment is to forego risky long-term involvements in favor of more immediate publication of less important material. If risk to employment from capricious political behavior of administrators and peers were to be extended to everyone, then the products of university science would amount to no more than drivelous essays about the pimples on Pavlov's nose. Long-term visionary thinking of scientific value would be more rare than it is today.

At recent meetings of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology & Life Sciences (SCTPLS), discussions about tenure have spontaneously emerged. We note that the majority of participants fall into two major categories: tenured professors and graduate students. The tenured claim that tenure was highly necessary to support their efforts. The graduate students are adventurous and seek to participate in this burgeoning area of science. They commonly report, however, that professors who are interested in their pursuits are scarce; thus they look to the professional organization for what is missing in their home institutions.

Even if one were to catalog the tenured professors who were not productive, and research and eliminate those who were involved in a bona fide high risk long term project, there would still be a bunch left over. However, according to an article reported in the Providence Journal Bulletin this summer, tenured professors nationally report that they work 55 to 60 hours a week. This is hardly the aggregate behavior of "deadwood." I propose, therefore, that if there are any underutilized professors among the ranks of the tenured, that is only the result of myopic management and perhaps a reward system that promotes myopia.

It would be a shame, if not collective stupidity, for faculty to relinquish their tenure and the tenure system. I have met several business people who remark, with a dab of drool at the edge of their lower lip, that the information economy is some kind of gold mine-an infinite renewable natural resource. Indeed it would be wise to contemplate this assertion. There is some merit to the natural resource analogy. More specifically, the university system and its knowledge service capabilities today is the compounded result of over 400 years of work before we even include the contributions of the Ancients. What does industry do when it encounters an ancient forest of hardwood? It cuts it down and turns it into coffee tables. The ancient forests are mostly gone now, and in their place are the tree farms. The university is analogous to the ancient forest. Dismantling its long term maintenance function by replacing tenured professors with transients is analogous to cutting down the forest and selling it off. No one on earth has offered a clue to how to plan an "information farm" in place of a devastated university system. Once the university resource is devastated, it will take enormous resources to reconstruct it. Alternatively it will become a shadow of its former self, highly unstable, and susceptible to any corporatist or political whimsy that might present itself as a form of "help." Meanwhile, the future generations would have a very difficult time obtaining anything resembling an education, whether they have the tuition money or not.

It should be clear from the foregoing essay that the idea of dismantling tenure is not good for most parties involved. Tenure is a protection of academic freedom, and the threats of the future are no less great than the threats of the past. Tenure supports long term maintenance of the university system as well as high risk ventures to discover new knowledge. Dismantling tenure will only stifle discovery, lead to the extrication of the universities' best human resources, and cause irreparable damage to the system as a whole.

So what can we make of all this? Well, if this discussion were a democracy, tenure would be history. Not that there is too much in the way of proposed alternatives, mind you, but the general feeling among contributors is that tenure does not protect the right things while it reinforces the wrong things. While there are many teachers and researchers who are well deserving of tenure and all that it confers, the fact is, that these are the people who need it the least. One of the reasons that so many people are down on tenure (and this applies beyond the present set of contributors), is that they have personally experienced at one time or another the dark side of tenure. Whether it's exposure to an intellectual burnout, rejection from the tenure process itself, or the pursuit of an "acceptable" research agenda, the image of a tenured professor has clearly be tainted in our eyes. Moreover, in many business circles (as some clients have been known to comment) tenure reinforces the negative stereotype of academics as "pie in the sky" or "ivory tower" types. Tenure, in their minds, often extends the distance between research and application, by not holding academics accountable for the contribution of their research to the real world.

One potential solution to this problem is the idea of term limits. If they can do it in the government, we can do in the hallowed halls of academe. If your limit is up at University X, you move to University Y where your past credits can be applied, pending a review of course. At the very least, why not develop a formal contract describing a "continued tenure" process that delineates what types of papers need to be published where, what levels of teaching excellence will be required and how they will be measured throughout the person's academic career instead of just in the early stages? If the terms of the contract are not continually met at regular review intervals, the professor is simply released. While such a system might reek havoc on the existing institutional systems, it has possibilities.

I would like to thank Ted, Royleen, the anonymous contributor, Vasos, Doug and Stephen for their contributions to the present discussion. Special thanks to Janine Waclawski for helping me put this issue together-soup to nuts. Although I don't have lifetime tenure in my present job, I'm sure I'll be here at least through the next issue so send your comments, reactions and ideas to me at W. Warner Burke Associates Inc., 201 Wolfs Lane, Pelham, NY, 10803, (914) 738-0080 or fax (914) 738-1059, e-mail AllanHC@AOL.COM.

References:

Cunningham, B. (1995). Soaring profits-but workers don't share.

Report No. 82. Washington, DC: AFL-CIO Economic Research Department.

Hays, L. (1994). Blue period: Gerstner is struggling as he tries to change ingrained IBM culture. Wall Street Journal, May 13, A1.

Howard, A. (1990). The multiple facets of industrial-organizational psychology: Membership survey results. Arlington Heights, IL: Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Inc.

Biographies:

Ted Micceri holds a Ph.D. in Educational Measurement, an M.A. in Social Gerentology, and B.A.s in Philosophy and Slavic Languages and Literature. For the past three years he has worked as an Institutional Researcher at the University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida. He has worked for the state of Florida's DOE and USF's College of Education.

Royleen White is a principal of Rolyeen White and Associates specializing in organizational improvement, facilitation, and results-oriented team development. She began her consulting practice more than ten years ago and has experience in local government, as well as technical expertise in training, organizational development, and group facilitation.

Our anonymous contributor is an Assistant Professor of Industrial/Organizational Psychology in a Department of Psychology at a U.S. University. He has conducted theory-based research (on groups and work motivation) prior to applying for tenure, and was punished for it.

Vasos Panagiotopoulos is an conservative activist and businessman. A Columbia alumnus and former NY Federal Reserve analyst, he is listed in Marquis' Who's Who in Finance & Industry. His columns have appeared in the NYC Tribune.

Doug Dylan graduated from Colorado College with a degree in Political Economics and is the co-author of How to Survive High School with Minimal Brain Damage (1988). His experience includes: Assistant Talent Coordinator "Late Night with David Letterman"; Editorial Asst. Spy Magazine; Asst. European Sales Manager The New Yorker Magazine. He is currently a nationally syndicated travel/humor writer.

Stephen J. Guastello is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Marquette University in Milwaukee. He received his doctorate in I/O psychology in 1982 from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Currently, he is president of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology & Life Sciences.