Imagine a career track where you "interned" for 5- 10 years at a salary at about 20-25% of what your first-year income would be. After this "internship," you'd be qualified (maybe) to compete with between 50 and 300 people for each job to which you apply--and if you didn't intern in the correct field, there might be four or five jobs open in your field in the entire country, if not the entire world. If you're lucky enough to snag one of these prize positions, you'll be lucky to be making $50,000 a year during your first few years. You do your job, working 50-60 hours per week, for six or seven years, after which your coworkers decide, via a process that's not at all transparent, whether or not you get to keep your job. And if you lose this job, you're very unlikely to get another one like it (if you'd even be willing to go through it all again). Such is the tenure track at colleges and universities in the U.S. and elsewhere.

There's been quite a bit of chatter in the academic blogosphere lately about the concept of tenure in higher education. These bloggers are far more eloquent than I could ever be on this subject, so I'm going to quote liberally this time.

Oso Raro of Slaves of Academe gives us a rundown on the recent denial of tenure to one high-profile scholar, Andrea Smith, at the University of Michigan, and then offers some thoughts on why tenure persists:

That said, there are elements of the case that seem strange. For someone so accomplished, at least on paper, to not receive tenure begs the question of where the bar is for the rest of us. [...]

Aside from the talk of abolishing it, tenure remains important for all of the usual reasons (primarily academic freedom), but for others perhaps more important, especially faculty governance. Without the job security of tenure, the professoriate is reduced to the role of a paid workforce serving at the whim of various bottom lines. More importantly, ending tenure would mean throwing the whole sadistic and ritualistic system into disarray: it means, oddly enough, removing the mystery, and replacing Christ on a Cross with a test tube, or worse, a torn glossy photo of the latest talentless starlet from Vanity Fair. That guild model upon which tenure is based is dead as a doornail, yet we dwell in its ashes, rubbing them on our faces like barbarians, in the mistaken belief that they still connote magic. We still believe in tenure because it is linked to the mysteries of the profession, and like all dead systems, that faith is much more dangerous in decline, like a drowning swimmer.

Some graduate students at my university sent around an e-mail in support of Andrea Smith, asking for additional signatories. On the one hand, I wanted desperately to support a leading scholar, but on the other hand, I could help but feel signing that letter would constitute butting into someone other institution's process, someone else's business, where we don't know enough to really make a judgment, no matter how strong our suspicions of racism or sexism. Any of us who have sought a tenure-track position are buying into the system, and yet we're also quick to criticize it. We want the best of it (academic freedom and security of employment) without its attendant darknesses (refusal of tenure, petty politics). Oso Raro also notes this tendency:

As the gears of the online posts, remarks, petitions, and even a group on Facebook (!) slowly move forward and gather speed, there is for me one part familiarity and one part curiosity. The familiarity of course consists in the overheated speech one now associates with such actions, the endless outrage, the high-flying yet strangely naïve rhetoric, the easy slippage into épater le bourgeois whilst simultaneously declaring ownership over one of its primary symbols.

In "Tenure: what is it good for? (Absolutely nothing?)," Historiann alternately muses and rants with her usual insight and wit:

One of the things about tenure is that most of us are in denial about its costs, even (or especially?) those of us who are casualties of destructive work environments and/or bruising tenure battles. It seems like every woman faculty member I know has been brutalized by the system at some point–if not as a junior faculty member, at the point of tenure and promotion to Associate; if not at that point, then they get it when they go up for their next promotion to Professor. Both institutions that I’ve been affiliated with as a regular faculty member have suddenly and arbitrarily invented higher tenure standards when a generation of women Assistant Professors came up for tenure and promotion. Example: In my former department, there were men promoted to Associate Professor before they were tenured (and then tenured easily as a matter of course), but just a few years later when a handful of women came up for tenure, they were offered the pink-collar designation of tenured Assistant Professor. Nice, huh?

And yet, we don’t talk about this. Although feminist intellectuals who have sophisticated understandings about how power works, we still feel shame about our own experiences. We still see them–to one degree or another–as personal failures, rather than the fault of the system and of the people who interpret and enforce the system’s rules. We don’t want to discourage our graduate students or new junior colleages. After all, who among them wants to hear that “the evil claw of patriarchy will get you too, my pretty!” It’s easier for all of us to assume that the roughed-up or ultimately untenured must have done something to deserve it, because we don’t want to believe that it could happen to us. We’re good girls, we did everything right, we went to conferences and had publications on our CVs when we were graduate students. We’ve won national fellowships. We’re protected. We’re bulletproof.

Maybe we should all get T-shirts, like the “I had an abortion” T-shirts, that read, “I was denied tenure,” or “I had to go up for tenure twice,” or “I was told that I ‘intimidate’ senior faculty members,” or “I sued my department,” or, “I was told to shut up and take it.”

(Historian also provides news of a very curious denial of tenure to a female faculty member who was denied tenure--after teaching at her Baptist college for years--because the men at the institution “believe women are biblically forbidden from teaching men.”)

Tenured Radical elaborates on the concentric circles of damage caused by tenure:

The number of walking wounded out there is staggering. I traded some email with someone this morning who told a familiar story: working in a department where so many people had been turned down for tenure, the senior people had forgotten how not to be abusive as a matter of daily practice. Not only does a tenure case gone bad hurt the person who has been denied, it creates havoc for supporters of that person. Furthermore, relationships crack open when an entire narrative is built up around the failed case by supporters and by opponents that, in the end, bears almost no relationship to the truth of what happened.

Years ago, when I still lived in Manhattan part time, I was out walking my dog one morning when I encountered a man, also with dog, and the dogs began walking around in circles sniffing each other's behinds, as dogs do. The companion man and I exchanged a few words, and in seconds he was blowing his stack -- not at me in particular -- but at Zenith, because 'lo and behold, he had not only failed to get tenure at Zenith, but had failed to get tenure in my very same department some ten years previously. What were the chances of that? And if he talked this way to strangers...well, you get the point. This guy's tenure case had changed his life forever. For the worse.

Who else is hurt by tenure? All the people who are friends, lovers, children and companions of those who come up for tenure. People who get tenure are harmed by tenure, often because they have had to bow and scrape for so long before The Man and the women who are also The Man that they don't know how to get back up again. Or they are so damaged by the process that they turn around and do the same thing to the next candidate coming up the pipeline.

Be sure to read Lumpenprofessoriat's rebuttal. She writes,

There are lots of things that have hurt me in academia, but tenure is NOT one of them.

I have been hurt by the lack of health care from my years as an adjunct. I have been hurt by the uncertainties of working as migrant, contingent labor in academia for more than a decade. I have been hurt by Deans, Provosts, and by some of my colleagues who put time and effort into delaying my start in a tenure track line and in further delaying my final tenure decision for another decade. I have been hurt by decades of debts and low wages that I may never recover from. I have grudges, depression, anger, rage, and issues aplenty from my sojourn through the academic labor market. But the one thing that has NOT hurt me is tenure.

Tenure has put an end to these predations.

Dean Dad writes about the advantages and liabilities of the opacity of the tenure system, and Timothy Burke asks,

How do you document processes and decisions which by their nature cannot be documented? Motivations which remain unspoken, choices that happen by passive assent to an implicit narrative, secrets and silences: all institutions work by these processes as well as by public transcripts, transparent deliberations, honest actors.

Of course, no discussion of tenure would be complete without a nod to the tens of thousands of adjunct faculty who are also very much abused by the system. For more details on the abuses of contingent faculty, check out How the University Works and recent posts by ArticulateDad, who in the past couple of months decided, after much deliberation, to turn his back on academia because it's too abusive.

Finally, Profacero makes a modest proposal:

While driving back and forth I considered everyone’s posts on tenure and decided what we should do: eliminate the tenure track by tenuring everyone when hired. Then as their careers developed and changed, it could be flexibly determined what their jobs would actually be in a given year - more research, more teaching, more administration, and so on.

I had not thought seriously of this because: what if you make a disastrous hire? But looking back, I have been on more hiring committees than I can count, and we’ve done well. It is quite arguable that all of the less good hires would have been better had it not been for the insidious way they were corroded by the tenure track. This plan has a great advantage: everyone would be free to start the struggle for unionization right away. What do you think? :-)

I also notice, by the way, that those who say the tenure system is fair tend to be men, and I notice that the many problems I have had in academia are traceable not to the tenure system, but to misogyny.

Be sure to check out the comment threads on all of these posts--that's where some of the best discussion takes place.

What are your thoughts?

After two years on the market with nary a single phone interview and more adjuncting experience than she'd care to confess to, Leslie Madsen-Brooks ditched the tenure-track job search in favor of helping university faculty improve their teaching. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and The Multicultural Toy Box.