Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/161013
36 September/October 2013 BizEd tenure each year. Cathy Trower, a senior research associate and director of the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at Harvard University, notes that those numbers are likely unchanged today. In my 40-year academic career, I have never heard of a single business professor at any university losing tenure. A Rational Alternative I suggest that, rather than guaranteeing lifetime employment, colleges and universities offer faculty rolling contracts, which last three years for newly promoted associate professors and five years for full professors. Please note that a rolling contract is different from a renewable contract. In a renewable contract, a professor's job is at risk each time his or her contract renewal approaches. In a rolling contract, however, the length of the contract rolls forward each year. So with a five-year rolling contract, a professor would receive a minimum of five years' notice prior to contract termination. That means that when an administrator calls for a professor's dismissal, faculty have time to organize and respond. On the other hand, if administrators need to dismiss professors, the worst-case scenario is that they will have to negotiate a multiyear contract buyout. Is this not a better exit strategy for both sides? It's certainly preferable to subjecting tenured professors to terrible teaching schedules and office accommodations in hopes of making them quit, and it's much better than subjecting students to poor teaching indefinitely. Rolling contracts were welldebated by commenters responding to my March 2013 Harvard Business Review commentary, "It's Time for Tenure to Lose Tenure." But I think the debate will become more onesided, in favor of rolling contracts, as time goes on. In an ongoing poll in The Wall Street Journal—whose audience has a high concentration of college graduates, senior managers, and educators—three out of four respondents indicated a preference for abolishing tenure. Abolishing tenure only reinforces faculty's credibility in the business community. It also improves their ability to negotiate with administrators to design less traditional academic careers, as I did 20 years ago. It's already happening in other countries: The United Kingdom abolished tenure more than two decades ago with its Education Reform Act of 1988. Wouldn't it be better for U.S. institutions to initiate change now, rather than wait until public pressure forces more drastic measures? James C. Wetherbe is the Stevenson Chaired Professor of Information Technology at the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. He resigned tenure from the University of Minnesota 20 years ago after previously earning it at the University of Houston. He has opted for oneyear rolling contracts at the University of Memphis and Texas Tech. A list of all of the sources cited in these two commentaries—as well as links to their full content online—is available at www.bizedmagazine.com/features/sources/topic-of-tenure.pdf. F1on li n e R M /G low Imag es tenure. What self-respecting professor would do otherwise? In fact, in nearly 40 years in academia, I've never heard of a business faculty member who needed tenure to exercise his or her academic freedom. In the U.S., the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees all citizens, including faculty members, freedom of speech. Is that not a sufficient safeguard for academic freedom? However, I have heard from faculty who have said they needed tenure to protect their positions from capricious administrators, as Drucker suggested. I argue that, at the very least, we should no longer claim that the purpose of tenure is to protect academic freedom, as it was in the 1800s. In today's academia, tenure has a much different purpose—job security. In a recent interview, a student journalist for the Daily Toreador, Texas Tech's newspaper, asked if I thought tenure protected subpar professors. I responded, "Yes." He then asked if I thought there were such professors at Texas Tech. I said, "You're a student here. Have you had any?" He laughed and responded, "Point made." Advocates of tenure argue that post-tenure reviews address this problem of giving "jobs for life" to faculty whose performance is less than stellar. But do they? Loss of tenure through post-tenure review is so rare that it's a nonissue. A 1994 Chronicle of Higher Education study found that out of 280,000 tenured professors in the U.S., only 50 to 75 lost