Liquidating tenure

You can always count on any hack neoclassical economist to celebrate free markets and corporate governance and to make the case against academic tenure.

In the debate staged by the New York Times, Richard Vedder fills the bill with the usual arguments—that tenure is an obstacle to conservatives’  being hired and it makes it more difficult for colleges to quickly reallocate resources. He even adds a kicker about the role of faculty in the governance of educational institutions:

Tenure contributes to the inefficient and expensive system of shared governance, where decision-making is by committee, and compromise and deal-making trump sound policy-making, including introducing cost-saving innovations.

No surprises there. And he’s joined on the flexible market side of the debate by none other than Mark C. Taylor, who argues that “tenure is financially unsustainable and intellectually indefensible.”

Capital is not only financial but is also intellectual and here too liquidity is an issue. In today’s fast changing world, it is impossible to know whether a person’s research is going to be relevant in five years let alone 35 years.

If you were the C.E.O. of a company and the board of directors said: “We want this to be the best company of its kind in the world. Hire the best people you can find and pay them whatever is required.” Would you offer anybody a contract with these terms: lifetime employment, no possibility of dismissal, regardless of performance? If you did, your company would fail and you would be looking for a new job. Why should academia be any different from every other profession?

It’s clear that Vedder and Taylor are attacking not only tenure, but the entire idea of the noncorporate university. Their view is that academic owners and managers are (or should be) the despots of educational institutions, and they should use whatever carrots and sticks are necessary to get the no-longer-tenured faculty (and, I should add, never-tenured staff) to do what they want.

Fortunately, there is a sane voice allowed into the debate. According to Cary Nelson,

Tenure and academic freedom together ensure that faculty members can speak forthrightly in their classes without fear of retribution. They have made American college classrooms places where students can be challenged and inspired. They have helped make American higher education the envy of the world.

The irony, of course, is that Vedder, Taylor, and others are trumpeting the new free-market university in the midst of the worst crisis of free-market capitalism since the Great Depression. Flexibility and corporate governance didn’t work out so well in the case of financial markets. What makes them think such measures, including liquidating tenure, will solve the current crisis in higher education?