Decent salary three months vacation every year and a permanent job contract that restricts your employer from firing you sounds like a great deal – and an opportunity to be as lazy and unproductive as you want.
A prominent educational authority argues the tenure system ensures just that – lazy workers who don’t have students’ best interests in mind. But while problems within the system arise they ultimately lie in the hiring process not the firing process.
In recent months Washington D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has been aggressively pushing to eliminate tenure in order to root out lazy and ineffective teachers. As an alternative she has offered teachers substantial pay raises if they agree to give up tenure for a year after which they would need a principal’s recommendation to keep their jobs. She said she believes this policy will allow schools to be better oriented to serve students and make teaching positions more competitive.
The problems she identifies applies equally to private universities and her proposed remedy is as bad of an idea for Pepperdine as it is for K-12 schools in Washington D.C.
There are certainly teachers and professors who do not deserve a complete guarantee of their position and salary. Under the tenure system performance in the classroom does not matter as they have a permanent job contract with the school.
The problem has been well noted by Bill Maxwell a professor who received tenure at a community college and at a state university. “I enjoyed job security and academic freedom the most significant reason for tenure in higher education. I had incompetent tenured colleagues at each school who did not deserve it and who should have been fired he said.
At Pepperdine, professors are able to apply for tenure after six years of service at the university. Pepperdine’s Rank, Tenure and Promotion Committee, comprised of one faculty member from each division and one non-tenured faculty member, handles the proceedings and ultimately recommends a tenure candidate to President Andrew K. Benton and the Board of Regents to approve.
This process makes firing a tenured professor extremely difficult, as well. A tenured faculty member has the right to continue to be employed by the University unless there is adequate cause” for termination of tenure according to the Pepperdine Tenure Policy Statement. The adequate cause “must be related directly and substantially to the fitness of the faculty member … to a situation of serious neglect of duty incompetence gross misconduct moral turpitude or to a clear demonstration of a consistent pattern of disregard for the policies the Christian values or the mission of the University.”
Even when adequate cause to fire a professor has been found it is still difficult to get rid of them completely. Pepperdine discovered this in 2007 after a two-year legal battle against former sociology professor Dr. Ronald Fagan.
Pepperdine fired Fagan after learning he had forged several student evaluations. Fagan sued the university and the L.A. Superior Court ruled Pepperdine had wrongfully terminated him and violated the tenured employment contract. The administration was forced to pay him $47000 in lost wages.
But problems seem to arise from granting tenure to undeserving teachers and professors in the first place not from the system itself.
Tenure helps ensure the preservation of unbiased academic scholarship especially in higher education. Professors must be able to tackle controversial issues in their respective fields. Without tenure many professors might choose to avoid certain areas of study or hesitate to speak their minds academically in fear that what they say is not in line with the University’s views.
While there are indeed a few professors who reap the benefits of tenure without meeting standards of academic excellence the system of tenure allows professors to focus entirely on their scholarship and education of students without having to fear job loss for being too controversial.
If changes are made to the system they should be to establish higher standards for granting tenure not to eliminate the entire system in the name of one or two lazy teachers.