Audience Tenure and the Tenure

¶ … Audience

Tenure and the tenure review process: How best to implement it?

The question of the potentially helpful or harmful aspects of granting tenure to faculty members affects all individuals involved in higher education. For professors, of course, it relates directly to the question of their future employability -- the granting of tenure leads to a much longer period of secure contract renewal, in most of its incarnations (Johnson & Kelly 1998, 739). However, even for a student, the ability to go to a school where faculty members can engage in freedom of expression as a result of a fair tenure review process can potentially improve the quality of his or her education, according to some theories of the benefits of tenure. Critics, however, might note that in general, institutions that grant tenure tend to be research-heavy universities (McPherson & Schapiro 1991, 98). This would suggest that tenure helps faculty members, rather than students, and rewards academic standards more of interest to department heads, rather than improves the quality of teaching, especially for undergraduates. Even some nontenured professors might feel frustrated with the tenure concept. Quite often the principle "when in doubt, do not give tenure" is the philosophy of more and more committees, and the ranks of part-time and other types of nontenured faculty are growing (Johnson & Kelly 1998, 740). The presence of a few tenured faculty members and many nontenured adjuncts leads to overall lower salaries as well poorer working conditions for the majority of professors, and only serves to benefit a tenured minority (McPherson & Schapiro 1991, 87).

However, the tenure review process is also not without some controls -- periodic reviews take place as a form of performance evaluation, even if dismissals are only granted to tenured faculty based upon extreme misconduct. And there is a new trend towards creating a post-tenure review process with more stringent penalties such as salary reduction, dismissal, censure, and a reduction in workload for professors with poor records (McPherson & Schapiro 1991, 95).