Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/54806
Your Turn Tenure: An Obstacle to Change After working for 21 years in the Univer- sity of Wisconsin system, I gave up tenure to accept a one-year visit- ing professorship in the School of Business at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. This decision was difficult, particularly as I made the change during 2008, just as the financial crisis was intensify- ing. Yes, it would have been easy for me to stay in the UW system and ride out my remaining years to retirement. But the Hamline School of Business is new, and I jumped at the chance to participate in a program that would move MBA education forward. Not only did I give up tenure for myself, I am against it in general. I believe it hinders business schools in what I am convinced should be one of our critical goals: integrating across functional disciplines. I am not proposing the incendiary course of abolishing tenure altogether, but I do believe that business school deans and administrators need to understand its weaknesses—and exploit its strengths—if they are to make desperately needed changes in our programs. Critics have complained that the traditional discipline-based MBA curriculum is ineffective in prepar- ing students to solve the problems of the 21st century and that what we need are more cross-functional courses and programs. But as any- one who has tried to integrate across the curriculum can attest, formidable obstacles exist. Writing in BizEd last year, Peter Lorange noted that even when a business school integrates its courses, it rarely manages to inte- grate its faculty. "They still work in 66 BizEd MARCH/APRIL 2011 separate departments, garner titles based on academic specialty, and seek tenure in their disciplines," Lor- ange writes. "They pursue axiomatic research and publish predominantly in axiomatic journals." In effect, they think in silos. Therefore, if we want to integrate the MBA curriculum, we first must change how faculty think. To do that, we must identify and analyze all obstacles—and one of the most for- midable is the tenure system. How Tenure Works Established during the 19th century to protect professors from arbitrary firing, tenure has many benefits, including the promotion of ideas and fomenting of intellectual dis- course. Ideally, the tenured professor can stimulate intellectual debate in the classroom, or pursue research that might pique vested interests, without fear of invidious reprisal. But to receive tenure, profes- sors must acquiesce to the current system, which means subscribing to the silo mentality. They must be obsequious to a small cadre of elders, themselves tenured. Tenure begets conformity; it extirpates dis- sent and innovative ideas. So why should we expect intellec- tual thought to flourish post-tenure when the tenure system is designed to root it out? Indeed, why should any individuals pursue innovation when innovation could delegitimize the system itself, thereby devaluing their own accomplishments? The word tenure is derived from the Latin teneo, tenere, tenerui, meaning to hold, keep, possess, restrain. The tenure system is used By Jack Reardon to restrain intellectual freedom while retaining the status quo, which in turn is decided by an elite group whose members are removed from stakeholder accountability. This elite group decides what is orthodox and what is heterodox, what is acceptable and what is not. It constricts the tenure candidate into conformity. I find it ironic that we teach our students how to succeed in a highly competitive market, galvanized by the prospect of failure, while doing our best to insulate ourselves from these very same forces. Where the System Breaks Down It's also somewhat ironic that aspects of the tenure system actu- ally support the goal of curriculum integration. Because many of the ideas that could promote cross- disciplinary programming are con- troversial and iconoclastic, tenure protects the people who articulate these radical notions. The tenure system also encourages older fac- ulty to mentor younger ones—and such cooperation between senior and junior professors is essential to integration across the curriculum. While the tenure system is funda- mentally flawed, we might be able to use it, at least in the short term, to make faculty incentives align with the objective of integrating the cur- riculum. But the current system will need to be revamped if the goal is to promote cross-disciplinary study. Most new faculty pursue tenure by publishing discipline-specific research in discipline-specific jour- nals. If I'm a new professor with a PhD in economics and I'm con- ducting research with a marketing specialist, I don't want to publish our findings in a marketing journal,