Fewer college instructors in the United States have tenure than ever before, and that number is expected to keep going down. At Western Washington U., however, tenure remains common.

Tenure is the right to hold an ongoing job at a university in a specific department or program. Some professors are hired on a tenure track, meaning they have a chance to get tenure after being at the university for a few years. No one is given tenure immediately when hired.

In 1975, 57 percent of all college professors in the U.S. had tenure or were on a tenure track. By 2007, that number had dropped to 31 percent.

Western’s percentage has hovered at about 65 percent for the past two years.

Steve VanderStaay, Western’s vice provost for undergraduate education, said Western’s goal is to have as much of its faculty on a tenure track as possible because professors who have the job security of tenure can devote more time and energy to students.

A cheap education

Budget shortfalls have contributed to the shift at schools around the country toward non-tenure-track instructors.

Universities pay tenured and tenure-track professors more than they pay short-term, contracted instructors. Smaller budgets contribute to what Western English professor Bill Lyne calls an assault on tenure.

“[It’s] really about trying to produce our students’ education as cheaply as possible,” said Lyne, who is president of the United Faculty of Washington, the union for college professors in Washington state. “Our students deserve more than a cheap education.”

Instructors who are not on a tenure track make less money and teach more classes. They often have to teach at both Western and another institution, such as Whatcom Community College or Skagit Valley College, to make enough money to support themselves. This means they have less time for students, Lyne said.

Questions of academic freedom

The American Association of University Professors supports tenure, saying instructors need it so they can express controversial ideas without fear of being fired.

Mark C. Taylor, chairman of Columbia University’s department of religion, said in a July 20 New York Times editorial that professors seeking tenure censor themselves so they don’t risk their chances by saying something unpopular.

“Nothing represses the free expression of ideas more than the long and usually fruitless quest for tenure,” Taylor wrote.

That quest is usually not fruitless at Western. VanderStaay said about 90 percent of the faculty members who come up for tenure get it. He said annual reviews help professors improve, so by the time they apply for tenure, they deserve it.

Western associate professor of elementary education Matthew Miller said now that he has tenure, he is more at ease when he does research.

“I think with tenure, there’s no concern about if I find things that are, for example, challenging in our own program or department, that there won’t be any sort of repercussions for those investigations,” Miller said. “I don’t think there necessarily would have been before, but it does give you the sense that the scholarship that you pursue can be done without those kinds of repercussions that might impact your work.”

Tenure’s incentives

Western associate professor of economics Brandon Dupont, who was awarded tenure this year, said vying for tenure gives instructors extra incentive to do a good job at teaching, research and serving their departments.

“But I think most faculty try to do good work whether tenure is on the horizon or not,” he said, adding that his own quest for tenure did not affect the way he did his job.

Dupont said he felt less pressure to be published or do research to get tenure at Western, as opposed to at a larger research school like the University of Washington. However, Western still requires faculty to do research in addition to being successful as a teacher.

Professors at larger research schools typically have lighter teaching loads and have graduate students helping them with research projects. Before coming to Western, associate professor of special education Chuck Lambert was a tenure-track professor at Cleveland State University, where he taught fewer classes and published more articles than he does now. He said he still does research, but works more hours a week at Western and has more contact with students.

Western’s tenure process emphasizes both research and teaching. Faculty senate president Scott Pearce said one aids the other.

“It’s the expectation that people need to have done research – done systematic organizational knowledge within their own minds,” Pearce said. “But we insist on good teaching, so it’s an insistence that people do significant amounts of work within their field and get publication, and then that they translate that into good teaching for the students at Western Washington.”

Even with the amount of tenure-track jobs diminishing, Lyne and Dupont said those jobs are still the ultimate goal of a career in academia because they pay more and come with the potential for job security.

“When you come out of graduate school, you’re looking for a tenure-track job,” Lyne said.

It takes all kinds

Tenure is an important part of an academic career path, Dupont said, but not all faculty need to be on a tenure track. Non-tenure-track positions allow departments flexibility to fill short-term positions. Before coming to Western, Dupont taught at Wellesley College for a year when a full-time, tenured professor was on leave.

Western needs both kinds of faculty, VanderStaay said. Hiring non-tenure-track instructors lets Western add sections of classes if demand for those classes rises. He said it also lets the university hire people who are talented teachers even if they do not have a strong background in research.

Almost all instructors should be on a tenure track, Lyne said. Administrators need the flexibility to add or remove positions from departments as student demand changes or full-time professors take leave, but Lyne said that should account for only about 5 percent of faculty jobs.

Job security and job performance

Taylor wrote that professors’ arguments in support of tenure are out of self-interest because tenure gives them job security. Tenure costs universities too much money because it guarantees professors’ positions no matter what, tying up salary money for decades to come regardless of how well they do their jobs, he wrote.

Dupont said he worries about the possible effects tenure can have on work performance, but most professors he knows continue to work hard despite the job security that comes with tenure.

“Tenure has and can reduce one’s incentives to be a top-performing professor,” Dupont said. “However, most of us get into academia because we really like teaching and/or we really like doing research.”

Miller said getting tenure gave him the sense that his students were having a good experience and his colleagues saw his work as valuable, which made him push himself to improve even more.

“Some people might think that getting tenure pushes a professor to sit back on his or her laurels, and I think that that can happen sometimes,” Miller said. “But the way I see it, and the way I think the colleagues with whom I work see it, is that it really provides even more fire under your feet to do right by the people who are looking to you for learning.”

Pearce, an associate professor of liberal studies, said the institution of tenure builds a culture in which students can be led in new directions and creates a sense of duty among professors to pass on their knowledge.

Lyne said tenured professors, whose jobs are more secure, can act as the faculty’s voice to the administration, especially in the face of budget cuts that can affect academic programs.

Having fewer tenured professors means the faculty starts to lose its say in how the university is run, Lyne said. Year-to-year teaching jobs are precarious because those instructors have to worry about whether their jobs will be renewed each year, he said.

A formal commitment

The tenure process is laid out in the United Faculty of Western Washington’s Collective Bargaining Agreement, a contract between the faculty union and the university that outlines

the relationship between the two.

Tenure ends only if the faculty member resigns or retires. Tenure can also end if a professor is fired or laid off, as long as those actions meet the guidelines laid out in the agreement.

A tenured professor can be fired for the same reasons such as general misconduct as well as scholarly misconduct, which includes plagiarism.  Tenured professors can also be laid off if the university faces a financial emergency or, for example, eliminates a degree program.

At Western, instructors hired on the tenure track work toward tenure during a probationary period in which they are reviewed every year by their peers and department or college heads as well as the provost.

“I think it is healthy both for a faculty member and for a university to take time to get to know and learn about each other. That’s what the probationary period is about,” said Lambert, who came to Western in 2004 and got tenure this year. “But then there comes a point where both parties need to agree to formally commit to each other.  It is like in personal relationships: there comes a point where there needs to be a commitment that you are both in this together. It sounds hokey, but I think it is a good analogy.”

Professors can apply for tenure at any time during this period as long as they apply by their sixth year at Western. VanderStaay said Western is unique in allowing professors to go up for tenure and promotion early on.

Professors applying for tenure must put together a file that includes evidence of how they meet departmental standards in teaching, research and service to the department. The file also contains course evaluations from every class the professor has taught.

“Every time a student thinks, ‘Wow, do these evaluations really matter?’ – that’s when they matter,” Lyne said.

The application file goes through a long process before it is officially approved or rejected. All the tenured faculty in the department review the file, then it goes to the department chair, a tenure review committee composed of other professors in the college, the dean of the college, the provost and finally to Western President Bruce Shepard, who can recommend that the Board of Trustees grant the professor tenure.

If a tenure-track professor’s seventh year at Western does not come with tenure, it is considered that professor’s final year here.

Tenured professors are evaluated every five years using a similar process as the one they went through to get tenure. These standards are just as rigorous.

“I am challenged to think of many other jobs that provide such thorough evaluations,” Lambert said. “My college is evaluated by the state and other accreditation boards to make sure we are producing quality graduates. I am evaluated every quarter by every student I teach. I am evaluated annually by all the tenured faculty in my department, including my department chair, as well as by my dean. Then [once I have tenure], every five years, I have to organize all this work and make a convincing case to my peers why I should be allowed to keep my job.”

Two consecutive poor reviews could lead to a tenured professor being disciplined or discharged.

This protects against professors resting on their laurels, because they still need to prove in evaluations that they are doing their jobs well. However, two consecutive poor reviews, when reviews are done every five years, means 10 years can pass by before anything happens to a professor whose performance has dwindled.

Lambert said many people think tenure is a lifetime appointment and that there are no consequences for professors if they do not do their jobs.

“You can’t just get tenure then quit doing quality work here at Western,” he said.

Although he, Pearce and Lambert all said Western’s non-tenure-track faculty work hard and do a great job, Lyne said tenured professors are more committed to students because they are more invested in the university.

Tenure provides the freedom for professors not to worry that what they say or what they find in their research will be unpopular, he said.

Like any other employer, a university can still fire people for not doing their jobs.

“Tenure protects your work,” Lyne said. “Not your job.”

Examining the system

As tenured and tenure-track faculty continue to be outnumbered by non-tenure-track instructors at Western and across the country, some scholars have taken the opportunity to examine whether the system is working.

“The tenure system, hatched in another era by a generation of mostly white males, does not fit contemporary economic realities, nor does it accommodate today’s faculty,” wrote Cathy A. Trower, a research associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, in a July 20 New York Times editorial.

Trower suggests an overhaul of the system, starting with a “constitutional convention” of faculty members meeting to design something more flexible, which might include putting time limits on tenure or changing the lengths of probationary periods.

If it weren’t for its commitment to giving tenure, Western could not attract and keep the quality of teachers it has, VanderStaay said.

Pearce said tenure can be modified, and he would be happy to look at making changes to the system. However, he said he is also wary of starting from scratch.

“Everybody has ideas,” Pearce said. “But sometimes, when you get rid of systems, the alternative that appears is not all that useful either.”