Tenure is a category of academic appointment existing in some countries. A tenured post is an indefinite academic appointment that can be terminated only for
cause or under extraordinary circumstances, such as financial exigency or program discontinuation. Tenure is a means of defending the principle of
academic freedom
Academic freedom is a moral and legal concept expressing the conviction that the freedom of inquiry by faculty members is essential to the mission of the academy as well as the principles of academia, and that scholars should have freedom to teac ...
, which holds that it is beneficial for society in the long run if scholars are free to hold and examine a variety of views.
By country
United States and Canada
Under the tenure systems adopted by many
universities
A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, ...
and
college
A college (Latin: ''collegium'') is an educational institution or a constituent part of one. A college may be a degree-awarding tertiary educational institution, a part of a collegiate or federal university, an institution offerin ...
s in the United States and Canada, some faculty positions have tenure and some do not. Typical systems (such as the widely adopted "1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure" of the
American Association of University Professors
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is an organization of professors and other academics in the United States. AAUP membership includes over 500 local campus chapters and 39 state organizations.
The AAUP's stated mission is ...
) allow only a limited period to establish a record of published research, ability to attract grant funding,
academic visibility
Academic visibility relates to the dissemination, accessibility, and recognition of scholarship produced by college faculty, especially in terms of promotion and tenure criteria and academic rank. Traditionally, "visibility" was a function of pri ...
, teaching excellence, and administrative or community service. They limit the number of years that any employee can remain employed as a non-tenured instructor or professor, compelling the institution to grant tenure to or terminate an individual, with significant advance notice, at the end of a specified time period. Some institutions require promotion to Associate Professor as a condition of tenure. A university may also offer research positions or professional track and clinical track academic positions which are said to be "non-tenure track". Positions with titles such as Instructor, Lecturer, Adjunct Professor, Research Professor etc. do not carry the possibility of tenure, have higher teaching loads (other than maybe the research positions), have less influence within the institution, lower compensation with few or no benefits (see
Adjunct professor), and little protection of
academic freedom
Academic freedom is a moral and legal concept expressing the conviction that the freedom of inquiry by faculty members is essential to the mission of the academy as well as the principles of academia, and that scholars should have freedom to teac ...
.
In response to Nazi manipulations of university faculty in Germany and Poland, the modern conception of tenure in US higher education originated with the
American Association of University Professors
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is an organization of professors and other academics in the United States. AAUP membership includes over 500 local campus chapters and 39 state organizations.
The AAUP's stated mission is ...
' (AAUP) 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Jointly formulated and endorsed by the AAUP and the
Association of American Colleges and Universities
The American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) is a global membership organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., United States. It works to improve quality and equity in undergraduate education and advance liberal education. ...
(AAC&U), the 1940 Statement is endorsed by over 250 scholarly and higher education organizations and is widely adopted into faculty handbooks and collective bargaining agreements at institutions of higher education throughout the United States. This statement holds that, "The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition" and stresses that academic freedom is essential in teaching and research in this regard.
In the United States, tenure rights for teachers serving in
(K-12) public schools also have been in existence for more than a hundred years.
United Kingdom
The original form of academic tenure was removed in the United Kingdom in 1988. In its place there is the distinction between permanent and temporary contracts for academics. A permanent lecturer in UK universities usually holds an open-ended position that covers teaching, research, and administrative responsibilities.
Germany
Academics are divided into two classes: On the one hand, professors (W2/W3&C3/C4 positions in the new&old systems of pay grades) are employed as state civil servants and hold tenure as highly safeguarded lifetime employment; On the other hand, there is a much larger group of "junior staff" on fixed-term contracts, research grants, fellowships and part-time jobs. In 2010, 9% of academic staff were professors, 66% were "junior staff" (including doctoral candidates on contracts), and 25% were other academic staff in secondary employment. Permanent research, teaching and management positions below professorship as an "Akademischer Rat" (a civil service position salaried like high school teachers) have become relatively rare compared to the 1970s and 1980s and are often no longer refilled after a retirement. In order to attain the position of Professor, in some fields, an academic must usually complete a "
Habilitation" (a kind of broader second PhD thesis; the very highest degree available within the university, entitling the holder to be a "full professor"), after which she or he is eligible for tenureship. This means that, compared to other countries, academics in Germany obtain tenure at a relatively late age, as on average one becomes an Academic Assistant at the age of 42. In 2002 the "Juniorprofessur" position (comparable to an assistant professor in the US, but not always endowed with a tenure track) was introduced as an alternative to "Habilitation". However, the degree of formal equivalence between a "Habilitation" and a successfully completed "Juniorprofessur" varies across the different states (''Bundesländer''), and the informal recognition of having served as a "Juniorprofessur" as a replacement for the "Habilitation" in the appointment procedures for professorships varies greatly between disciplines.
Due to a university system that guarantees universities relative academic freedom, the position of professor in Germany is relatively strong and independent. As civil servants, professors have a series of attendant rights and benefits, yet this status is subject to discussion. In the W pay scale the professorial pay is related to performance rather than merely to age, as it was in C.
Denmark
Danish universities in advertisements for faculty positions usually state that professor positions are tenured. However, the interpretation of tenure at Danish universities has been a matter of controversy.
Denmark adopted a more hierarchical management approach for universities in the early 2000s. This new system was introduced by parliament on proposal by the Minister of Science, Technology and Development,
Helge Sander
Helge Mølsted Sander (born 27 August 1950) is a Danish politician. He is the former Danish Minister of Science, Technology and Development ( Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation of Denmark) (from 27 November 2001, as member of the Ca ...
, based on his vision that Danish universities in the future should compete about funding in analogy to football clubs in order to increase their attention to marketing and industry.
The controversial understanding of tenure in Denmark was demonstrated by University of Copenhagen in 2016, when the university fired the internationally renowned professor,
Hans Thybo
Hans Thybo (born 19 February 1954) is a Danish geophysicist and geologist. He was a Professor of Geophysics at the Geological Institute and the Institute for Geography and Geology at the University of Copenhagen, as well as at the Centre for Ear ...
, after 37 years of employment in academic positions. A later court decision ruled the dismissal illegal after a court hearing demonstrated that the university's reasons for the dismissal were false accusations by managers, but the university did not reinstall Thybo in his position. The university maintained the dismissal after having received written statement from the postdoc that the accusation was false, and that Thybo never put pressure on him to do anything. This particular university carried out other similar dismissals after Thybo's case.
Arguments in favor
Defenders of tenure, like Ellen Schrecker and Aeon J. Skoble, generally acknowledge flaws in how tenure approvals are currently run and problems in how tenured professors might use their time, security, and power; however, as Skoble puts it, the "downsides are either not as bad as claimed, or
recosts outweighed by the benefits"—and he points out that the very debate about tenure in which he is engaging is made possible by the academic freedom which tenure makes possible. "Tenure remains scholars' best defense of free inquiry and heterodoxy," writes Skoble, "especially in these times of heightened polarization and internet outrage. Let us focus on fixing it, not scrapping it."
The job security granted by tenure is necessary to recruit talented individuals into university professorships, because in many fields private industry jobs pay significantly more; as Schrecker puts it, providing professors "the kind of job security that most other workers can only dream of" counterbalances universities' inability to compete with the private sector: "Universities, after all, are not corporations and cannot provide the kinds of financial remuneration that similarly educated individuals in other fields expect." Furthermore, Schrecker continues, because research positions require extreme specialization, they must consolidate the frequency and intensity of performance evaluations across a given career, and they cannot have the same flexibility or turnover rates as other jobs, making the tenure process a practical necessity: "A mathematician cannot teach a class on medieval Islam, nor can an art historian run an organic chemistry lab. Moreover, there is no way that the employing institution can provide the kind of retraining that would facilitate such a transformation... even the largest and most well-endowed institution lacks the resources to reevaluate and replace its medieval Islamicists and algebraic topologists every year. Tenure thus lets the academic community avoid excessive turnover while still ensuring the quality of the institution's faculty. It is structured around two assessments -- one at hiring, the other some six years later -- that are far more rigorous than those elsewhere in society and give the institution enough confidence in the ability of the successful candidates to retain them on a permanent basis."
Above all, however, tenure is essential because it protects academic freedom: not only in cases in which a scholar's politics may run counter to those of their department, institution, or funding bodies, but also and most often in cases when a scholar's work innovates in ways that challenge received wisdom in the field. As much Ellen Schrecker identifies its flaws, she asserts tenure's crucial role in preserving academic freedom:
In elementary and secondary schools, tenure also protects teachers from being fired for personal, political, or other non-work related reasons: tenure prohibits school districts from firing experienced teachers to hire less experienced, less expensive teachers as well as protects teachers from being fired for teaching unpopular, controversial, or otherwise challenged curricula such as evolutionary biology, theology, and controversial literature.
If the "social justice" element of Schrecker's defense makes it seem like present-day assurances of academic freedom create a politically left echo chamber in academic departments, Skoble observes that tenure thus becomes all the more necessary to preserve a diversity of ideas: "There is an orthodoxy in the academy, a well-documented leftward slant in political affiliation. To Bruce, this is an argument against tenure, but my point is that the more I am persuaded that there is groupthink orthodoxy afoot, the more I want assurances that I would not get fired if I write an essay on free trade or the Second Amendment or a book on anarchism. I take it the counterargument is that the more entrenched the orthodoxy becomes, the less likely a heterodox scholar will be tenured, or even hired, in the first place... I can see that this poses a problem but fail to see how abolishing tenure would help. As things stand, some heterodox scholars do get hired and tenured.. If only the heterodox need formal protection, and we have a problem with growing orthodoxy, then eliminating the formal protection will exacerbate the problem."
Skoble argues categorically and plainly against critics that say "tenure protects incompetent professors": "My argument is that when this happens, it is a malfunction of the system, not an intrinsic feature of its proper use. The way it is supposed to work is that incompetent professors do not get tenure in the first place. The rebuttal is 'but they do, therefore tenure is a bad idea.' But that is like arguing that because you ran a red light and caused a train wreck, driving is a bad idea."
Arguments against
Some have argued that modern tenure systems diminish academic freedom, forcing those seeking tenured positions to profess conformance to the level of mediocrity as those awarding the tenured professorships. For example, according to physicist
Lee Smolin
Lee Smolin (; born June 6, 1955) is an American theoretical physicist, a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo and a member of the graduate faculty of the ...
, "...it is practically career suicide for a young theoretical physicist not to join the field of
string theory."
Economist
Steven Levitt, who recommends the elimination of tenure (for economics professors) in order to incentivize higher performance among professors, also points out that a pay increase may be required to compensate faculty members for the lost job security.
Some U.S. states have considered legislation to remove tenure at public universities.
A further criticism of tenure is that it rewards complacency. Once professors are awarded tenure, they may begin putting reduced effort into their job, knowing that their removal is difficult or expensive to the institution. Another criticism is that it may cause the institution to tolerate incompetent professors if they are tenured. Gilbert Lycan, a history professor at
Stetson University
Stetson University is a private university with four colleges and schools located across the I–4 corridor in Central Florida with the primary undergraduate campus in DeLand. The university was founded in 1883 and was later established in 1887 ...
, writing in respect of a fellow professor he deemed unacceptable, stated that "the dean ... would not tolerate ineffective teaching by a non-tenured teacher who was making no effort to improve,"
[Lycan, Mountaineers Are Free at 297 (Stone Mountain, Georgia: Linton Day Publishing Co. 1994).] thereby tacitly admitting, or at least leaving open the fair inference, that ineffective teaching is tolerated if the professor is tenured.
See also
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Academic tenure in North America
Academic tenure in the United States and Canada is a contractual right that grants a teacher or professor a permanent position of employment at an academic institution such as a university or school. Tenure is intended to protect teachers from d ...
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Faculty (academic staff)
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Habilitation
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List of academic ranks
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Academic ranks (Australia and New Zealand) This article is about academic ranks in higher education in Australia and New Zealand. Both systems have derived from a common heritage in the British university system.
Overview in Australia
The system of academic titles and ranks in Australia is ...
References
Further reading
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{{Authority control
Academic terminology
Labor relations