The Three Meanings of Tenure

It has become apparent to me recently that not everyone understands the term “tenure” in quite the same way. Basically, the misunderstanding comes down to this: is tenure a very limited term which is specifically related to protections related to academic freedom? Or does it refer to the entirety of job protections that professors have acquired over the years, many of which are not related to academic freedom? The quick answer is that strictly speaking, it’s the former, but colloquially, outside the university in particular, it’s the latter. And this can sometimes cause confusion.

Let’s start with the narrowest of definitions. Basically, it is the right, earned through several years of strong research and (one hopes) teaching performance, to full academic freedom. That is, in effect, the absolute freedom to research, teach, or communicate ideas or facts without the fear of losing their job. That is unequivocally a Good Thing. In Canada, this freedom of research/teaching is protected through collective agreements; in other countries, it is protected through legislation or even through constitutional provisions. No matter: this is a core principle of Western academia. In Canada at least, very few people disagree with it.

Where the concept of tenure gets tricky is when protection from dismissal over issues of academic freedom – a concept I think most people believe in – gets extended to mean i) protection from dismissal for poor performance, and ii) protection from dismissal in cases of institutional financial crisis. Which, not to put too fine a point on it, most people outside the academy think is pure nonsense.

Let’s start with the “poor performance”. Faculty unions don’t disagree with the notion of getting rid for “just cause”, but they perhaps have a different understanding of what that means that the typical non-academic. “Just cause” for them tends to mean things like outright criminal behaviour rather than poor performance, which to them is sort of definitionally impossible. It should not be controversial that tenured staff should have to keep up relatively similar levels of effort and output across their careers. That is, frankly, the only way to make academia fair. Except that’s not the way it works, as pretty much any junior faculty will tell you. It’s far from uncommon to see junior faculty working much longer hours than more senior faculty, and it leads to significant resentment. One way of countering that – not the only way, but one way – is through what are known as post-tenure reviews.

Faculty unions don’t think much of this argument. CAUT says such practices are “unacceptable”, “gratuitous” and “damaging”. In less over-the-top terms, their position is that any attempt to remove job security or tenure on grounds of underperformance can never be trusted because the employer might actually be trying to dismiss people on grounds of politics, or whatever. And look, that fear isn’t completely unfounded because there have been examples of that kind of behaviour (most recently at the University of Florida). On the other hand, it seems very odd to me to argue that tenure processes are fair and must be held sacrosanct whereas post-tenure processes are unfair and spawn of Satan. If tenure processes – which are mostly about scholarly output – can be considered objective, then surely it can’t be beyond the wit of mortals to create post-tenure process with similar levels of objectivity. 

(I mean, yes, just having department chairs with both the duty and intestinal fortitude to enforce fair workloads would solve this problem too, but my read is that might be even harder than setting up a fair system of post-tenure review). 

The other aspect of “tenure” which isn’t actually tenure is what happens to job security when a university is in financial crisis, or if there simply is no longer demand for a program. In the latter case, the CAUT position is that: “phasing out of courses or programs by an institution is not a reason for terminating a tenured appointment. In such circumstances the institution is obliged to transfer a member with a tenured appointment to another tenured position for which the member is qualified, or can obtain credentials, to fill”. Which, you know, is bananas. The number of faculty who are actually qualified to achieve tenure in more than one field is infinitesimal. You can’t even reasonably redeploy a Canadian historian to teach Chinese history let alone physics or accounting. This is effectively saying an institution can never cut a program because it will never save an institution money on salaries.

Or – almost. The CAUT position does carve out an exception for situations when an institution is in “financial exigency”. This is less generous than it sounds, though. The financial exigency provisions contained in most collective agreements i) make it ludicrously difficult to declare exigency in the first place, ii) require institutions to drop staff in order of seniority (i.e. making the most expensive employees the hardest to fire), and iii) exact an excruciating amount of severance pay (equivalent to roughly 2 years’ pay) for each employee displaced (HESA did an analysis of these clauses about a decade ago, which you can see here – and not much has changed since it was published).

From the union perspective, the idea of negotiating these exigency clauses was to allow layoffs, but only at a price so high that no institution would ever dream of doing it, which of course was why Laurentian chose bankruptcy as the cheaper option. It’s hard to “blame” these clauses on unions – after all, it takes two to sign an agreement, and if university admins were so colossally stupid as to accept them, then whose fault are they really? But, at the same time, unions need to understand that the inclusion of these job-protection clauses in the same documents that define tenure and academic freedom tends to cloud public perspective; from the public’s point of view, it all merges into one giant set of disproportionate, and perhaps undeserved ,web of job protections that make professorships seem like a sinecure.

So, to sum up, there are three interrelated sets of job security clauses in faculty collective agreements: one that protects academic freedom, one that protects jobs in the face of weak performers, and one that protects jobs in case of financial crisis. When faculty talk about the importance of tenure to the very nature of universities, they are talking about the first and narrowest aspect of tenure. When the public, or government, talk about how tenure is an unbelievably sweet gig that prevents universities from responding to changes in demand/technology/pedagogy/ whatever, they are talking about the other two aspects of tenure.

I think it is worth being clearer about the nature of academic job protections. Some are crucial to the academic enterprise and the pursuit of truth; others are not. Universities need to be willing to die on the hill of the former, but they should very definitely not be required to commit suicide to defend the latter. Understanding the distinction will be key to surviving the next few years.