That’s the position of an editorialist writing in the Washington Post. The author is a tenured professor so this is not an attack from the outside. He argues that tenure continues to be an important safeguard of academic freedom but that
…the system has turned the academy into one of the most conservative and costly institutions in the country. Yes, conservative: Economists joke that their discipline advances one funeral at a time, but many fields must wait for wholesale generational turnover before new approaches take hold.
The system also hamstrings younger untenured professors, making them fearful of taking intellectual risks and causing them to write in jargon aimed only at those in their narrow subdiscipline: Thus in economics, people have “utility functions” instead of needs and wants.
Tenure is indeed important for academic freedom. I have seen a few cases in which tenure insulated from public pressure academics who expressed controversial views. However, in my opinion this is a small part of the benefit of the tenure system and in fact the editorial has it backward.
It is true that academia is conservative. But by merely observing that
- We have tenure
- We are conservative
it does not follow that 1 implies 2. Without tenure it would be even worse. Basic research occurs in universities because there is a missing market: it is too difficult to guage its benefits in the short-run. This is often true even for insiders within the field, let alone outsiders who would make hiring, firing, and promotion decisions based on published research. Without a good measure of successful research, these decisions would be based on litigatable bright-line criteria which would create greater distortions in research than tenure has. Witness that a professor of political economy would judge economists for using “utility functions.”
Indeed, the author makes exactly my point with the example of untenured professors. Only untenured professors face the prospect of having their research evaluated for promotion. They understand very well the incentives this creates. Unfortunately there must be one such evaluation period. Tenure ensures that there is at most one, and that it is as short as possible.
Cheap Talk 
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
April 21, 2009 at 2:40 am
w
It seems as though the author of the article is subtly implying that the bulk of the tenured professors make up a older age demographic than untenured professors (which makes sense). Could the point of the article be that new ideas formulated by younger minds are being stifled due to the tenure system? Older, more established professors are more likely to be unwilling to submit to what the author refers to as ‘newer approaches’ (or so I would assume), whereas younger and typically untenured professors are more willing to embrace newer ideas, yet are not able to for the fear of being rejected for tenure. I would assume that the main problem is not that individual professors are forced to be ‘conservative’, but that intellectual progress is slowed by the system.
April 27, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Jeff Kilpatrick
It should be noted that the editorialist in question is Francis Fukuyama (FF) who, even by his own admission, is struggling to clarify his legacy after the wholescale failure of the neoconservative project. I don’t mean to make an ad hominem attack here but instead think the context is important. FF is a very intelligent man who has come to realise that many of his ideas have been proven wrong and need to be revised and scrutinized.
I applaud him for his own level of self-reflection. In this context, however, he may be over-sensitive to the ability of professors with tenure to continue to follow proven-wrong ideas whilst forcing new and better ideas to languish in junior positions or, gasp, adjunct hell.
His target is misplaced, however, as tenure does not protect professors from the true arbiter of quality within disciplines: the peer review process. I still believe that most academics, while protective of their own ideas and reputations, value even more the understanding the world—dare I say they value truth more than reputation to a Straussian like FF. So, if a young whipper-snapper’s ideas are better than a tenured professor made of straw, their ideas will gain prominence in the discipline.
This does not address his concerns of expense, and it does not imply that the pursuit of knowledge is not conservative as it is and should be. It does surely imply that change in a discipline is regulated by a process that has all the benefits FF attributes to removing tenure whilst retaining assurances toward intellectual freedom entailed by tenure.