Now It’s Time to Eliminate Tenure

California Gov. Gavin Newsom just signed a law banning legacy and donor considerations in admissions at all private colleges and universities in the state. California is the fifth state to do so, following Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, and Virginia. Newsom praised the law, saying, “The California Dream shouldn’t be accessible to just a lucky few.”

According to the Stanford Daily, 13.6% of admits to Stanford University in 2023 were children of alumni or donors. Inside Higher Ed reports that it was 14.4% at the University of Southern California in 2022, and 13.3% at the University of Santa Clara. Pepperdine University’s is around 9%.

Last year, 2.5 million students were enrolled in California’s colleges or universities. Even at USC—with the highest percentage of legacy or donor admits—nearly 87% of the student population of more than 45,000 were not the children of alumni or donors.

This hardly sounds like college in California is available only to “a lucky few.”

But whatever. The truth is that giving spots to children of alumni isn’t the big problem with academia. Saving a few seats for relatives of megadonors isn’t the big problem with academia. It isn’t even preferential treatment for athlete applicants that’s the big problem with academia.

Tenure was originally intended to protect faculty from retaliatory action for pursuing meaningful, if controversial, research. But what it was intended to do and what it’s doing are different things entirely. The scandals and headlines coming out of higher education provide plenty of evidence.

Last year’s ugly anti-Semitic protests, threats, and violence on college campuses shocked the nation. But when three Ivy League presidents from Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania testified before Congress and none was willing to condemn calls for violence against Jewish students, that shock turned to outrage.

Liz Magill, then-president of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned after the Congressional hearings. The university’s announcement stated that Magill would “remain a tenured faculty member” at the law school.

Claudine Gay, then-president of Harvard University, initially refused to resign—until it was discovered that she had plagiarized parts of her dissertation and other research. Gay then stepped down from the presidency. She kept her tenured chaired professorship and her approximately $900,000 annual salary.

The standards for publication in the social sciences and humanities have become a theater of the absurd. In 2018, scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian exposed this by writing, as The Atlantic described it, “20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions,” including homophobia in dog parks and Hitlerian feminism. A significant number were accepted for publication.

Then there’s the serious scholarship that gets condemned by the academic community because it skewers sacred cows. Brown professor Lisa Littman coined the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” in a 2018 paper; Littman’s research revealed the explosion of self-identification as “transgender” among pre-teen and young teen girls with diagnosed disabilities (like autism) who spent large amounts of time on social media. Littman was viciously attacked as being “transphobic,” and the journal that published her findings was cowed into retracting her paper (which was later republished). A later article by researchers Suzanna Diaz and Michael Bailey that supported Littman’s theories was similarly attacked and forced to be retracted.

Critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi was awarded tenure and a chaired professorship at Boston University for promoting a worldview that espouses retaliatory discrimination “to remedy past discrimination.” He has plenty of company on college campuses across the country.

And then there are the countless lesser-known tenured faculty members at American colleges and universities who defend Marxism, communism, and socialism, despite a death toll of more than 100 million people, as well as widespread economic devastation, poverty, starvation, government oppression, incarceration, and torture.

Those economic and political philosophies should have been condemned to the “dustbin of history” decades ago. But they weren’t. Why? Because tenured faculty keep them alive. In what other profession—besides perhaps government—do you get to espouse catastrophically societally detrimental views and not only remain utterly unaccountable for the consequences but have guaranteed employment from which to do it?

It isn’t just the social sciences. The processes associated with obtaining research funding, and those for hiring, promotion, and tenure within universities, enable tenured faculty in the hard sciences to block the research of applicants to doctoral programs, Ph.D. candidates, and untenured faculty members whose work might call into question, contradict or even disprove that of senior faculty members. This has had profound (and negative) consequences for Alzheimer’s research, as author Sharon Begley explained in her 2019 article in the medical research journal Stat. These same structures have also prevented researchers whose work refutes the prevailing claims about anthropogenic climate change from making their work more visible and well-known to the general public.

The appalling state of our press is another consequence of bad theories espoused by tenured faculty. Journalism schools used to teach that the profession required the pursuit of truth and holding powerful people accountable. Now a popular approach is that the role of journalists is to manipulate the public into believing what they’re told and behaving the way you want them to.

It should not surprise us, therefore, that our media has been working with government to censor truthful speech and characterize it as “misinformation.”

And when opponents of those who want to increase their power point to the constitutional prohibitions against those encroachments, here come the “scholars,” prepared to argue that the limitations of presidential power in Articles 1 and 2 are the problem. The Electoral College is the problem. The composition of the United States Senate is the problem. The First Amendment is the problem. The Second Amendment is the problem. The Due Process and Equal Protection clauses are the problem.

Recent polls show declining public confidence in higher education. As more Americans realize that some of the country’s most grievous problems have their origin in academia, enrollment, confidence, and donations will continue to dwindle at least until academia acknowledges the problems and takes steps to address them.

Elsewhere in the private sector, employment is not guaranteed. However, employees can be protected from retaliation, and unlawful or unethical termination of their employment by well-drafted contracts and properly crafted human resources policies and procedures. There’s no reason academic employment cannot operate the same way.

I taught at the university level at two Big 10 universities and one private university and had tenure. At the private university, I had an Intro to Econ class with over 100 students in it. I had over 150 students in a typical semester. One History professor had 4 classes with a total of 12 students. While we were both tenured, his salary was about 30% higher than mine. Truthfully, he was a horrible teacher. He would consistently come to class 10 minutes late, and let them leave 15 minutes early.

The university tried to get him to quit but, since the American Association of University Professors protected tenured profs, they couldn’t fire him. They tried giving him 7AM, 11AM, and 4PM class schedules, Saturday classes and extra committee assignments. He wouldn’t quit because he was drawing a salary with no work. When I left, he was still “teaching” there.

I am against tenure. However, the universities have adopted a new approach. Hire new profs in at the Assistant Professor level and let them teach until the tenure decision needs to be made, then fire them and hire some new Assistants. But that doesn’t always work, either. You might let a really good prof go only to hire a replacements who sucks. Or, you might grant tenure and then have them fall back to the History professor’s conduct.

I don’t know how universities are going to kill tenure, but it’s needed. There would likely be fights from the AAUP, but I would hire new profs with a contract that clearly states that this university does not grant tenure. If they hire on, they are aware of the non-tenure status they agreed to.

Universities need to do something.

Parents need to sit down with their child before the child starts school and explain to them what a teacher does.

“Your teacher will introduce you to subjects that our society thinks you need to know about like English and math. These are subjects that everyone agrees on. Your teacher will also introduce you to other subjects that not everyone agrees on like science and history. We will give you our thoughts on these subjects, too. The teacher will instruct you on how to behave in school.The teacher may try to instruct you on subjects that are beyond their job to teach you like who you should care about and how you should act outside of school. We will teach you these things. If the teacher tries to teach you these things, you must tell us about it.”

You should have this conversation with your children before the start of every school year until they are out of school.

35 year prof here who agrees 100% with your post. This and spousal hires and sabbaticals drive me nuts.

I am on an 11 month appointment and see many profs as you say, quit showing up. It shows in their teaching TEVALS and the admins don’t do a thing about it.

Covid was devastating to the entire concept of a unified faculty. I absolutely detest Zoom attendees at a dept meeting when they should have their asses in a seat. Rant off

‘According to the Stanford Daily, 13.6% of admits to Stanford University in 2023 were children of alumni or donors.’

It is undeniable, even to the most perfervid defenders of tradition, that the practice of legacy admissions, while draped in the nostalgic finery of continuity, represents a fundamental inequity.

To privilege a student on account of familial or financial ties is to, in fact, deny a place to another whose qualifications, by merit alone, might surpass those of the legacy applicant.

The principle of fairness is subverted when birthright supplants achievement. In doing so, the institution itself risks undermining the very meritocratic ideals upon which it ostensibly stands.

there are children of alums who deserve to be admitted, based on their high school record etcetera

these are often included in the “legacy admits” statistics because it is so easy to include them (parents are alums? include the kids in the stats)

and it is a bit more difficult to screen these deserving students out of the “legacy admits” stats

just saying.
besides, legacy admits are NOT the problem!!!
the problem is racial and religiously discriminatory admissions policies. and racial and religious discrim in financial aid. ‘

it is all done “officially” they ask your race and they write down your race if you get interviewed

we know one TOP OF CLASS graduate of the leading university who was not even granted interviews at their own university’s professional school because of religious discrim

we know a couple TOP OF CLASS graduates at leading college who was admitted immediately (by special courier letter received within 24 hours of application signed by the dean himself) to its law school ......and then denied any (none!) financial aid because “the faculty has voted to reserve all available financial aid to persons of X race group” (another race). not everybody can afford nearly $100,000 a year to attend college, sorry. so the entire system is set up to deny or restrict Caucasian, Christian, Jewish, and Asian admissions. Either up front or in the discriminatory financial aid

it works the same both ways, to keep you out while admitting (and often financing) students who were NOT competitive, did NOT have equal qualifications to attend

THE SAME HAPPENS IN THE HIRING AND PROMOTION AND TENURE processes!!!!!!!!!!!!!

discriminatory all through and through.’
These are the big problems. A few hundred legacy admissions yes we can discuss those but they are NOT NOT NOT the BIG problem that is rotting out our higher education system. DISCRIMINATION in admissions, financial aid, hiring, promotions, and tenure... discrimination all through and through is the big problem. Our colleges are being run by a bunch of communist BIGOTS!
respectfully,

Thanks for the input.

My profs in school (ISU late 90’s) were very good in the engineering classes, horrible in the gen ed. It was like you said. They were trying to get them to quit, and they would not.

My wife is a HS teacher, and sees the same thing.

However there is a caveat. My wife would be cut immediately if tenure was dropped and replaced with a DEI teacher who can’t do the math.

I was on the economics faculty for a combined 40 years at two research universities, tenured for 32 of those years. A few observations:

1. In all of those years, I witnessed only three tenured faculty in my department who quit performing their research responsibilities. Two of the three were excellent teachers, however. All three were eventually given increased teaching loads, equivalent to what is expected of non-tenured lecturers, and minimal or no salary increases most years.

2. There have to be hard-nosed tenure decisions made at the department level, backed up by committees and administrators at the higher (college and universty) levels. I acknowledge that this is too much to expect in some cases.

3. Tenure protects not only freedom of inquiry but also the innocent targets of unwarranted vendettas by tyrannical department heads and deans. I witnessed too many of these over the years.

4. Abolition of tenure would most likely mean higher faculty salaries, to compensate for the absence of job protections, lower faculty quality (however objectively measured), or some combination of both.

5. Many universities have post-tenure reviews every five to seven years. While many, if not most, of these are pro-forma paperwork exercises, they don’t have to be. I have witnessed some faculty in other departments resign or retire to avoid an embarrassing review, but I realize that some people are beyond embarrassment!

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Tenure shields faculty members that promote harmful ideologies and fosters unaccountability, contributing to societal problems and declining trust in higher education.