Over at the Freakonomics blog, Steven Levitt takes up the question of tenure in academia. As you might expect, it’s bad from an economic perspective, and ought to be eliminated:
If there was ever a time when it made sense for economics professors to be given tenure, that time has surely passed. The same is likely true of other university disciplines, and probably even more true for high-school and elementary school teachers.
What does tenure do? It distorts people’s effort so that they face strong incentives early in their career (and presumably work very hard early on as a consequence) and very weak incentives forever after (and presumably work much less hard on average as a consequence).
One could imagine some models in which this incentive structure makes sense. For instance, if one needs to learn a lot of information to become competent, but once one has the knowledge it does not fade and effort is not very important. That model may be a good description of learning to ride a bike, but it is a terrible model of academics.
As with most blogospheric discussions of tenure, the comments are breathtaking for the sheer range of uninformed opinions. I swear, some of the people making confident assertions about the effects of tenure on academia– both pro and con– sound like they’ve never been to college, let alone worked in an academic position.
There are a few really good comments, though, particularly this one:
That said, we’re looking at this backwards… what is/was the purpose of academe. Is it a corporate institutional commodity. If so, treat it like one with quarterly reports, shut down the unprofitable sections and fire the bunnies you don’t need. Though if that’s the case, we should only keep the profs who the customers like anyway. I’d like that… I’d have my salary tripled because the students like me. As it is now, one of my courses has been cut because it is too popular, and we need students to be forced to enroll in a less popular course so it doesn’t get dropped. In the context of my school, I agree, but in the brave new world where the student is customer, that wouldn’t happen.
The university is a place of learning, inquiry and reflection. I’d rather let the corporate institutional commodity folks go; they can get snapped up by industry if they’re hot, and flip burgers if they’re not.
(Sadly, he sort of blows it in the next sentence, by saying something really silly about community colleges…)
I think this really gets at the essence of the question. Are schools merely another type of business, to be run in accordance with the latest corporate management fad, or are they doing someting fundamentally different, that isn’t particularly well suited to the corporate model? Your opinion on that question probably goes a long way toward determining what you think of tenure.
(Freakonomics link via Angry Physics.)