Faculty, in conjunction with students, represent the core of an academic institution. Without either, colleges and universities don’t have a purpose. It is faculty who provides education, advice, and enlightenment to our next generation of leaders, entrepreneurs, politicians, educators, and hopefully change-makers. However, as higher education continues to find itself on the brink, questions around the appropriate faculty structure remains critical to thinking of the future of institutions.
For a long time, academia has constructed and developed a structure wherein obtaining tenure allows faculty to ideally have a lifelong appointment at an institution as long as the faculty member fulfills their duties of teaching, advising, researching, and partaking in the governance of the institution. This structure has been critical to building the prestige of colleges and universities while allowing faculty to develop groundbreaking research that has changed the world and improved the overall human condition. This structure supported a system that valued the thirst of individuals to obtain knowledge that would create citizens of the world who became well-rounded in enjoying culture, understanding global connectivity, and viewing power and politics as a place of privilege. The point? Faculty have played a tremendous role in influencing a culturally, socially, and politically diverse society that can support the arts while also working in business – the power of the liberal arts.
Previously, faculty and institutions were not viewed for their value in terms of how one could immediately benefit from educational attainment via job obtainment. Education’s value was focused on long-term, intrinsic impact of seeking new knowledge, building a cultured society, and moving humanity forward through research, experimentation, learning, creativity, and innovation. Faculty remained at the core of the higher education community and the structure of faculty allowed this value system to exist. Instead this structure has become eroded at many institutions—tenure has become a controversial topic as colleges and universities are thinking about their future in a market that continues to contract as a result of financial pressures that forces institutions to think differently.
As the landscape of higher education changes, so has the need to think about whether the current structure makes sense. Can institutions continue to have a model where they provide lifelong appointments, which has major implications for an institution, or does the structure need to be changed because of the new found landscape in which institutions are finding themselves?
Here’s Happening in Higher Education
A confluence of factors has ushered higher education to the point it now finds itself vis-à-vis the faculty structure of tenure and institutional preferences for non-tenured, long-term contract, or adjunct professors. For starters, the principle of tenure incorporated in faculty handbooks renders it an enforceable contract between a tenured faculty member and the institution. Procedural and substantive protections with due process measures protect faculty against termination. This means the burden of proof for dismissal is borne by administration and the grounds for termination are restricted.
In recent years, the integrity of tenure protections has been weakened. In short, express statements in a contract that one has tenure might give one academic freedom—the purpose of tenure—but it does not necessarily grant indefinite employment. Measures to revoke tenure at public colleges and universities in some states is underway. Wisconsin revoked the statutory protection of tenure in its public institutions and replaced it with a less protective policy. Missouri and Iowa are working on implementing policies that revoke tenure and/or refuse to offer it to newly hired faculty.
