Links for 7/29/10 Tenure Edition

Dean Dad

Whenever we allocate course reassignments for full-time faculty, we hire adjuncts to make up for it. Sabbaticals? Adjuncts. Grant work? Adjuncts. Someone has to teach the classes the tenured faculty won’t. (As one embittered adjunct put it in a department meeting, “I teach so you don’t have to!” Exactly.) Aristocrats need serfs, and the tenured need the adjuncts…

The ‘bait’ of tenure is part of what lures so many young idealists into graduate school, replenishing the reserve army of the adjuncts. That oversupply allows the adjunct trend to continue. The crushed dreams of a generation of underemployed academics are a cost of tenure…

Combine an ownership interest with the lack of a mandatory retirement age, and you get some pretty entitled, embittered, ineffective people lumbering around, their life support paid by the surplus value created by the adjuncts who teach they courses the cranky veterans would rather not. And do you know what those seventy-somethings are waiting for? Retirement incentives! Another cost of tenure…

Explain to the rational taxpayer why he should continue to pay progressively more for someone unaccountable (faculty) managed by someone incompetent (administrators). That is the AAUP’s actual position, and it’s insane on its face…

Megan McArdle

When an academic starts pushing the tenure model for anywhere outside academia, I will find their defense of its use in academia more convincing.

Arnold Kling

I think that the general problem in the academy is that it is too strongly cartelized. Perhaps the most appalling symptom of that is the disparity between tenured professors and adjuncts. Such a disparity would almost surely not emerge in a free market.

Tenure is one way in which incumbents enforce the cartel. But getting rid of tenure would not be sufficient.

Tyler Cowen

If you argue "abolish tenure" the real question is this: under what conditions will professors be fired?...

the proposed gains from abolishing tenure can be reaped simply by increasing teaching load, relying more on on-line instruction and/or reintroducing mandatory retirement.