Date: 10-09-96
Headline: Post-tenure review system would harm universities 
Section: Editorial
Column: PUBLIC FORUM
Byline: David Braybrooke
Edition: Final

A university is not a family; it is not a church; it is not an industrial corporation either. It needs, like a church and
like a family, to be businesslike in some connections. A great mistake, however, generated by conceptual
confusion, would be to impose on it the same demands that an industrial corporation must answer to. The present
clamor about faculty tenure in Texas threatens to make just that mistake, and to jeopardize the quality of the
University of Texas and, indeed, of all public universities in the state. A university should be a milieu for
encouraging faculty and students alike to join in the advancement and diffusion of knowledge. Imposing
inappropriate demands on such a milieu can easily cast a blight on it and dry up the encouragement. It is
dangerously inappropriate to demand that the tenure system give way to, or even approximate, practices followed
in industrial corporations. Imagine a tenure system in a milieu to which people can belong permanently only if
they pass a rigorous test for proficiency and performance. Once this test has been passed, people are free under
certain conditions to proceed in activities designed to advance and diffuse knowledge on topics of their own
choosing, in their own styles, and at their own paces. What are the conditions? 
The general condition is that they
continue to take a helpful part in the activities of the milieu, in any of a variety of ways: 

* Accommodating the
needs of their departments to cover the specialties in teaching and research that they were appointed to cover; 

* Keeping abreast of the subjects that they teach and do research on; 

* Teaching effectively; 

* Performing their share of administrative duties; 

* Having serious research projects continually on the go and bringing them in due time to fruition; 

* Seizing occasions for scholarly or scientific discussions. 

The helpful part may be a very
provocative one. Tenure safeguards faculty against reprisals from people outside the university who find the
provocation intolerable. UT-Austin has had a troubling history in this regard. Only in the past couple of decades
has it lived down events in the '40s and '70s. Factional divisions Quite as important, and a point neglected so far
in the current public discussion: Tenure safeguards members of the milieu against reprisals from their colleagues.
It is not uncommon for departments to be divided by schools of thought. Analytical and non-analytical
philosophers find it hard to tolerate each other; so do quantitative and nonquantitative political scientists; so do
modernists and postmodernists in departments of English. It is not uncommon in such situations for people of
one school to do their utmost to get rid of people who think differently. Attacks on academic freedom often begin,
not with outsiders, not with university administration, but with factions within departments. Factional divisions
tend to bias procedures for granting tenure. Repeating those procedures, with the threat of termination in the
background, throughout a professor's career will make the operation of bias permanent. Other things go wrong
with the procedures for granting tenure. It is much easier to test for proficiency than it is to test for promise. It is
all too easy, furthermore, to have the test for proficiency reduced to numbers of publications. This invites the
application of an inappropriate industrial model for productivity. Candidates for tenure appreciate this. If they
want to play it safe, they will pass up creative and innovative projects in favor of those that will more surely lead to early publications, often redundant ones. Too rigorous an emphasis on quantitative productivity is bound to have
perverse effects on the candidates' teaching. The candidates will certainly make sure that their teaching record is
adequate. But once this is done, if they want to play it safe, they will pour their energies into compiling a record of
publication. If post-tenure reviews repeat the procedures for granting tenure, these effects will continue
throughout professors' careers. Suppose that by good luck they have not been turned away permanently from
creative and innovative projects before getting tenure. They are going to be turned away now.

Threat to innovation 

What will happen to experiments in new methods of teaching? In new topics, including
interdisciplinary ones? It will not be safe for professors to embark on such ventures. It will not be safe, either, to
spend too much time in free conversation on topics that may not turn out to be immediately productive. As it is,
professors at the university, too busy being industrially productive, do not take much time to read their colleagues'
work and talk to them about it. So worse research and worse teaching will come from measures intended to give us
something better in both. Imposing tenure reviews of the industrial mode also will have bad effects on the
relations of the university to the outside world. It will conflict sharply with the deepest motivations of academics.
Academics forgo careers outside universities that for many would be more lucrative. Instead, they bargain with
universities to perform certain services in return for the freedom to pursue inquiries wherever the inquiries lead
them. They must keep their bargains respecting the services; but they ask for the freedom, and a secure sense of
having the freedom, in return. If they do not get these things here, the university will lose badly in respect to
academic standing. If the threat to tenure makes the university known (again) for not being able to give academic
values full respect, it will not be able to attract, it will not be able to keep, the best people in the profession. It will
slip in national academic rankings -- today below Texas A&M, tomorrow below the University of Idaho.

Braybrooke holds the Centennial Commission Chair in the Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin and
is professor there of both government and philosophy. He is a former national president of the Canadian
Association of University Teachers. 

© 1995 Austin American-Statesman