John Carroll University Eliminates Tenure

[valpo95]

There have been several threads about changes happening at other universities, including the closure of Concordia Portland and Bronxville and cuts at VU. This recent announcement caught my eye, in part because I lived in northeast Ohio for a while several years ago:
https://www.cleveland.com/news/2021/03/john-carroll-university-can-now-cut-tenured-professors-under-financial-hardship-projections.html

Long story short is that John Carroll University has a plan that allows for selective cutting of tenured professors rather than eliminating whole departments.

I'm not advocating VU should follow a similar path in cutting tenure, yet the struggles faced by JCU and VU have many similarities. JCU is a faith-based university (Catholic); a good reputation (#4 in USNWR Midwest Rating in 2018), a similar endowment (approximately $225M), size (3,100 undergrad, 500 grads). They also have been undergoing a re-structuring effort in an attempt to cut costs.   

[crusadermoe]

Good   Tenure is a relic of a bygone era when America prospered and everyone could get a job on grauation pretty easily. 

All the arguments for academic independence to justify tenure are ringing pretty hollow in this day and age of peer pressure from social sciences professors are verifiably 80-90% liberal and police their peers to think one direction anyway. The real world is a tough place faculty folk.  Sorry.

[vu84v2]

Good   Tenure is a relic of a bygone era when America prospered and everyone could get a job on grauation pretty easily. 

All the arguments for academic independence to justify tenure are ringing pretty hollow in this day and age of peer pressure from social sciences professors are verifiably 80-90% liberal and police their peers to think one direction anyway. The real world is a tough place faculty folk.  Sorry.

There are definitely problems with tenure in that some professors abuse what academic freedom is meant to be (it should not be a license to push your ideologies tp students with no possible recourse from the university). Another problem is that it can foster free-riding, in which the quality of teaching or the degree of research can decline with no impact on job stability or pay.

But there is another side of this argument. How do you attract and retain professors that are needed for engineering, business, hard sciences, health sciences, etc? At a minimum, it takes nine years of education to get one of these positions (four years of undergraduate and five years of PhD work). We (society) need good professors in these fields and they need to commit five years (though they are paid a stipend) to be eligible to gain a position. If you tell them that after five years of PhD work that they will have few protections from being dismissed, fewer good people will pursue PhDs. Further, if some universities offer tenure and others do not, the better professors will go to the universities with tenure unless the universities with no tenure offer much higher pay.

[valpotx]

I've never really understood the whole tenure aspect of teaching.  To me, as crusadermoe mentioned, it is a relic of years past, similar to companies giving out pensions instead of 401k. 

[vu84v2]

The entire concept of why tenure exists has evolved over time (not necessarily for the better). In my view, tenure was originally created for the following reasons: (1) that professors have the freedom to pursue research of their choosing and cannot be fired or disciplined for choosing controversial or riskier research areas, (2) an up or out promotion philosophy in which new professors must achieve at the level set by their college and the university for seven years (for most schools, this is a pretty high bar) or they are fired. Virtually every university has tenure, so you are not going to get rid of it (you would never get good faculty, because they can go elsewhere).

I have seen tenured faculty removed (and not for misconduct)...but they have to be performing very badly. We can agree that something needs to be done about that.

[David81]

Tenure is not the problem when it comes to the challenges facing higher ed. The % of full-time faculty positions that are tenure-track or tenured has dropped precipitously during the past several decades. F/t faculty positions hired by contract have been reduced as well. In the meantime, many of the schools eliminating f/t teaching positions are adding layers of administrators.

If you want your kids taught by stressed out, overworked, underpaid, justifiably angry part-timers who are jutting from campus to campus as they cobble together some semblance of a livable income by teaching 5 sections of freshman comp, then start by eliminating tenure and go on to reduce full-time teaching positions generally. If you want your school to have difficulty attracting quality faculty when competing against other academic institutions that have retained tenure, then here's your ticket as well. Once you eliminate tenure because of financial pressures, you're saying that you cannot play in the higher ed big leagues any longer. John Carroll just threw in the towel. It's a race to the bottom, and it reinforces the rankings-based caste system in higher ed.

But at least the school will have more $ to hire said administrators and to put up more fancy buildings to attract lower-caliber students who don't understand that who teaches them in the classroom is more important than whether there's a coffee bar in the library.

[vu84v2]

David81 makes good points, but these points do not consistently apply across colleges.

The professional colleges (business, engineering, health sciences, etc.) in better universities (of which Valparaiso is included) are accredited, and the top accreditation bodies (AACSB, ABET) have standards that must be upheld to sustain being accredited. One of the major standards is that a substantial number of sections for all courses must be taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty. Many disciplines also have clinical professors who are experts in their field and work full-time for one university (this is common in health sciences and some business disciplines), and these clinical professors are often very good teachers. There are also professionals (usually later in their career) who want to teach a class (as a way of giving back), and they are also usually good to excellent at teaching.

From my experience, a substantial majority of tenured and tenure-track faculty are good to excellent teachers. One point in my prior post is that there are a handful of tenured professors who "free ride", which includes poor teaching, and there is little that a university can do to remove them. Another issue is that there are some professors who believe that tenure allows them to promote (as truth) their own ideologies, instead of encouraging students to learn, consider and argue different perspectives (note: the media portrays this as constant promotion of liberal ideology, but I have seen it both ways). This is much more associated with A&S, though it happens in other disciplines.

But David81 is correct that there is a problem with A&S courses being taught by people teaching five or six sections per semester at multiple schools. In retrospect, A&S put themselves at a disadvantage relative to the professional colleges by not having meaningful accreditation. Having more adjuncts for accounting could destroy the program, while having more adjuncts for first-year comp has far less pain on the university. I would think that students (and parents) should be very concerned about this when making decisions to attend a university, but it is very questionable that this is seriously considered in their decision-making. Since having students in classes with tenure, tenure-track or clinical professors is still a priority for Valparaiso, I do think that the university should promote this more heavily.

[valpotx]

I very much support the draw of tenure to universities, but I am disgusted by how difficult it is to fire a poor performer, just because of tenure.  That is my biggest gripe with union-focused positions.  If you suck at your job, you should not be guaranteed to do it for perpetuity. 

[David81]

Waaaay back when I was considering colleges, a huge draw for me with VU was its (honest) claim that most of its courses were taught by full-time faculty, including the arts & sciences.

It made a difference. Overall, the VU faculty of the late 70s and early 80s was a very good teaching faculty, dedicated to undergraduate education. You don't find that everywhere, for sure.

That marketing pitch plus accompanying reality should still count for something.

[David81]

I very much support the draw of tenure to universities, but I am disgusted by how difficult it is to fire a poor performer, just because of tenure.  That is my biggest gripe with union-focused positions.  If you suck at your job, you should not be guaranteed to do it for perpetuity. 

There will be some tenured clunkers at most universities. IMO -- and I say this as a fulsome supporter of tenure -- part of that problem is due to senior administrators looking the other way, rather than trying to engage the problem of a tenured professor who is truly not getting it done. A lot of deans don't want to deal with this, or they deal with it poorly. In actuality, the claim that it is very difficult to fire a truly poor performer is rarely tested in terms of tangible attempts to revoke tenured status for failing performance. It rarely happens.

Furthermore, in my observation, in cases where someone barely made tenure in the first place, or made tenure because people liked them despite so-so performance, it is unlikely that they will turn into excellent professors after they've jumped through the hoop. In such instances, while you probably aren't stuck with an incompetent professor, you're likely stuck with a mediocre one for the duration.