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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