I won't deny it. Holding a lifetime secured academic position for more than 30 years is a wonderful benefit. Unless I commit moral turpitude, become grossly incompetent, or witness the disappearance of the discipline I teach, my job security is absolute. So, I am no automatic detractor of this state of grace, which most other people in less protected work environments consider a path to mediocrity. After all, they say, what is the incentive to perform at the highest possible level, if you can coast?
Maybe I enjoy the pleasure of tenure because there were sufficient incentives generated by daily terror, which even after tenure was bestowed, drove me on. If the fear of failure is in your bones, you never stop worrying about your last class or your next. We also possess, as a profession, enough intellectual curiosity (and vanity) to keep writing. We like to see our names in print, we like to see our ideas displayed, so most of us continue with our scholarship after tenure. To be sure, I have met a few too many colleagues who, having done what was necessary to gain tenure, ceased scholarly publication about ten minutes after the trustees vote.
Finally, the idea of a permanently protected environment for ideas, free from the tyranny of a hierarchy, turned out to be necessary. The idea of tenure, which is a product of the 20th century and came to Tufts only around l950, grew out of events just before and during World War I, when some professors had the temerity to speak out against American involvement. One such faculty member at Columbia University in New York found his furniture and books out on the street, by order of Columbia's president, who didn't tolerate such an opinion.
Increasingly as the l920s and l930s saw faculty expressing their opinions on the rising ideologies of Fascism and Communism in Europe, university and college administrators and trustees tried to muzzle them. The result was the American Association of University Professors' Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which in l940 laid out the general notion of what a lifetime appointment would look like. Remarkably, American universities bought into the idea, and tenure provided the protection of free speech to the academic community.
So, why the current general attack on this institution of tenure? Why are so many non-academics and no small number of professors themselves saying that tenure has had its day, and we need more accountability in the profession? Two recent articles in journals many professors read provide a hint. "ACADEME" is the publication of the American Association of University Professors, that organization which first established the idea of academic freedom and has been a voice for the professoriate for nearly l00 years. In the November-December 2001 issue, devoted to "Universities and the Law," there is an article entitled, "Does Collegiality Count?" A similar idea is expressed in the Feb. l issue of "The Chronicle Of Higher Education: Do You Have to Be a Nice Person to Win Tenure?"
What emerges is the nasty side of human nature. Instead of providing faculty with protection of dissenting opinions, tenure in recent times has given many academics protection to be despicable human beings and miserable colleagues. There are about five hundred academic departments across the land in institutions of higher learning that have been placed in receivership, i.e. the people in the department cannot function together, either because a clique or one individual is in the process of destroying the department.
Faculty have protection to say things to the university administration and to each other that, if such words were expressed in a "normal" corporate environment, would get them bounced immediately. If taken to its pathological conclusion, tenure gives the faculty freedom of speech which, when taken to its extreme, is uncivil, often cruel, and until recent times, protected. But, now even the AAUP is saying that collegiality-or the lack of it-has its limits.
How would I vote on tenure now? Don't ask. If we abolish it, you can be certain that the excesses of trustees and presidents that produced tenure fifty years ago, will return in another fifty years. That's human nature, too. But, right now, I have seen enough abuse of the privilege to make me at least think it over.
Sol Gittleman is the Provost of Tufts University.
