The negatives of tenure are clear. It's difficult to punish or fire faculty who do not do the work. This has a subtle corollary: it makes an academic career difficult to get into because you have to make the grade before you get tenure. Everyone knows granting someone tenure is risky, what if he turns out to be a schmuck? So they can be rough on new faculty.
So here are the positives about tenure:
Tenure in the public universities is an unfair system; the people who pay for it, the taxpayers, themselves have no security in their jobs. In no other segment of society is a job guaranteed. This is manifestly unfair to the people paying for lifetime employment for others.
It is also an expensive system. Eliminating tenure would surely result in significant cost savings, particularly if the replacement workers were themselves only part-timers, without costly benefits.
Tenure provides security for faculty; why is providing job security a goal for any our of institutions? We can certainly bring down the wage base if we put each faculty member’s job up for reconsideration each year, just like everyone else’s.
Why should any group of people, particularly a self-selected lot feeding at the public trough, not also be faced by the continual terror of losing their means of livelihood, of constantly competing for that ever-diminishing pool of dollars? It is just a matter of fairness that in this day of “flexible” work arrangements that the only remaining pool of safety and security be removed forthwith. Why should the taxpayers fund permanent jobs for anyone, when they themselves have no job security? Why should academicians be afforded any of the dignity that the rest of us have had to surrender?
Just think of the vast savings that could be effected by having no more protected pools of salaries at the university. Instead, if a Teaching-And-Research Employee, or TARE, is clearly not pulling his weight by fees received for teaching and by grants, then let’s replace with him with a cheaper version. This will save the taxpayers and the universities money. Our new goal should be to have TAREs be profit centers rather than cost centers. By having university TAREs compete with everyone around the world for these jobs on a continual basis --- and by a great stroke of planning, universities are already exempt from H-1B requirements --- we can drive real wages down very rapidly, and profits up!
And when new management comes in, these employees should share the fears of their fellow workers about who will be summarily shoved out of the door. All other Americans are subject to the whims of others: CEOs to the whims of corporate boards of cronies; politicians, to the whims of the electorate; workers, to whomever is arbitarily assigned to be their manager.
And if a university wants to toss out an employee with unpopular views, then in a right-to-work state it should be able to, without this silly recourse to calls of academic freedom. No other group has a protected right to express itself and retain employment, and why should we grant university TAREs such special privileges? Everyone except for TAREs have the right to starve; let them partake in that right, and if TAREs want to speak freely, let them have recourse to the same right to starve that everyone else has for daring to exercise their right to express themselves in unpopular ways.
Yes, it is amply clear that a fundamental revision needs to be made to the anachronistic university TARE retention system. TAREs that have long been in the system have often had several raises; by weeding out these expensive TAREs who will no longer be safely ensconced in their positions, we can seed the universities with younger and less expensive TAREs who are undoubtedly, having been freshly educated, much more up on the latest aspects of their field than the older, more stale TAREs that they replace. Since we will be able to use high salaries as a negative weighting factor in the retention for each individual TARE, we can quickly eliminate the highly paid who are not producing maximum revenue.
In fact, since it is cheaper to employ people on a part-time basis --- and this type of partial employment has the fortuitous benefit of engendering very cooperative behavior by the part-timers for fear of losing what little livelihood they have --- larded with the fact that the university will not have to make any type of retirement system payments or health care for part-timers, we will save even more money. We may even safely assume that we can squeeze the same amount of actual work from the same number of TAREs while only paying for a part-timer.
Taking the definition of work one step further to straight “pay for performance”, by linking the number of students in a TARE’s class along with the number of hours the TARE teaches directly to his pay, we can ensure the profitability of the universities. By making TAREs more entrepreneurial in their hunt for grants --- by, again, directly linking their salaries to whatever grants that they can cully, we can ensure that TAREs will anxiously watch the political winds to make sure that their teaching as well as their research is in the deepest part of the mainstream. This glorious working together should give us the double benefit of TAREs teaching very large classes of the most popular classes, along with a strong research emphasis on whatever is popular currently.
The conjunction of grinding more work from lower paid individuals --- and it is more productive since it is bringing more revenue per dollar invested --- we will have the triple global competitiveness wins of paying less for more work that generates more revenue.
In our “race for the bottom” (and for fattening the bottom line!), we can hardly pass up this golden opportunity. It will save the states money at a time when they most need it, provide even more healthy competition for those part-time TARE positions in universities, and surely those who are displaced --- the TARES that are weeded out --- will feel proud that we can all save some money at their expense.
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