Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake Young has an anti-tenure post that repeats one of the classic mistaken arguments:
1) Tenure supports bad teachers as much as it supports unproductive researchers. I can’t tell you the number of bad lecturers that I have had over the years. It has to be like 90%. Science in particular is filled with a lot of very smart people, very few of whom have the slightest idea how to convey that miraculous intelligence to another scientists, much less a lay-person.
As it exists now there is no incentive to teach well after you receive tenure. Teaching duties are often inflicted on faculty members who have no real interest in them.
While this is true as far as it goes, I’m not sure how this is related to tenure. The crucial mistake here is assuming that these people were once good, and just went to hell after getting tenure. That’s the popular myth, but it’s nowhere near as common as you might think. The real problem here is that teaching just isn’t valued on an institutional level– there are lots of bad teachers with tenure because they were hired and promoted based on things other than teaching.
My undergraduate alma mater is a small college, and as such puts a higher priority on teaching than most research universities. During my undergraduate career, I can think of exactly two faculty members that I thought did a genuinely bad job teaching a class I took with them. Out of 36 classes with probably 25 different faculty, that’s not too shabby.
Of those two, only one had tenure, and he had been hired with tenure from some sort of think-tank job. The other was an assistant professor, who was denied tenure a few years later, in large part because he did a lousy job teaching introductory classes.
I can think of two faculty on campus who were widely believed (by students) to be totally incompetent and hanging onto their jobs only because of tenure. At the same time, though, one of the most sought-after professors on campus was a tenured full professor who had been teaching there since the 1930’s.
If you value teaching on an institutional level, and hire and tenure people who are good at it, you don’t end up with a faculty full of people who are just playing out the string waiting for retirement. If you don’t value teaching on an institutional level, and make tenure decisions based solely on research productivity, you end up with classes being taught by people who don’t have any interest in teaching, and the results are bad.
This has nothing to do with tenure per se. It’s a question of insttutional values, not how easy it is to fire people once they’ve been around a while. The tenured faculty who are lousy teachers were probably lousy teachers before they had tenure– they weren’t hired to teach, and they weren’t promoted for their skill in teaching. Taking their tenure away isn’t going to make them good teachers, unless the university suddenly starts putting a higher value on teaching, and what makes you think that’s going to happen?
This does, I think, point to one of the reasons why the whole tenure argument has such staying power. Everybody who’s been to college has had at least one class with a professor that they just hated, and wondered “Why don’t they just fire this jackass?” The usual answer given is “Tenure,” and thus it becomes associated with protecting bad professors, at least in the minds of students. Add in the fact that most students don’t get to see a significant fraction of a faculty career, and you get the myth of post-tenure collapse– the idea that people are hired as good teachers, and become terrible about ten minutes after they get tenure, and then stick around for thirty years doing a lousy job.
Like many student beliefs (such as “If your roommate commits suicide, you get A’s in all your classes”), I think this has only a tenuous connection to reality. Yes, every campus has a few examples of the old professor who has totally lost it, and is just hanging around because they can’t think of anything else to do. Every campus also has a few professors who have been around for forty years and are still among the best-loved teachers on the campus.
The fact is, the vast majority of tenured faculty are very good at what they were hired to do. At places where teaching is valued highly, they’re excellent teachers, by and large. The problem isn’t with the tenure system, it’s with the values of the institution granting tenure, and making it easier to fire bad teachers doesn’t mean a thing if the university isn’t interested in teaching in the first place.