Chronicle of Higher Education
October 5, 2001

POINT OF VIEW
Professors Who Defend Tenure: Are They Hypocrites?

By JAGDISH BHAGWATI and BRENDAN O'FLAHERTY

A note of controversy marked the recent announcement of Shirley Tilghman's appointment as president of Princeton. Even though most people thought she was well qualified in all respects, a few critics observed that she had once publicly doubted the institution of academic tenure. After all, tenure is to professors what executive privilege is to the White House: a practice elevated to a special status almost beyond challenge.

And yet, challenged it is -- and increasingly. The question often thrown at tenured academic economists like us on campuses, where many of us teach the value of flexible labor markets and the efficiency of the freedom to hire and fire workers, is: Are you not guilty of hypocrisy in wanting tenure for yourselves while asking all others to accept flux and change?

We think not, but not because of the traditional defenses of academic tenure, like the protection of academic freedom. In fact, such classic defenses are indefensible. Yet there are other novel but persuasive arguments that could be decisive.

Is tenure necessary or desirable to defend free speech? Not really. Consider the recent case of Edward Said, our colleague. He is a University Professor (the highest academic rank) at Columbia University. A strong champion of Palestinian causes, last July he was photographed poised to hurl a stone in the general direction of an Israeli guardhouse on the Lebanese border. The picture provoked an outcry from students, but Columbia's provost, Jonathan R. Cole, determined that the university had no grounds for taking any disciplinary action whatsoever against Said.

Then again, reflect on the case of Ardith McPherson. She was a 19-year-old clerk typist working in the constable's office in Harris County, Texas. In 1981, when news came over the radio that President Reagan had been shot, she talked with a co-worker about how Reagan had not been a friend of blacks or the poor, and remarked, "Shoot, if they go for him again, I hope they get him." Overheard and reported to supervisors, McPherson was fired, but the Supreme Court ordered her reinstated.

Both incidents, one involving a member of the elite and the other a member of the proletariat, demonstrate that freedom of speech and expression remains vital in the United States today. Said and McPherson were both covered by codes that protected all members of their communities -- Columbia's university statutes for Said and the First Amendment for McPherson. If Said had been a clerk typist or McPherson a University Professor, the outcomes would -- and should -- have been the same.

Said differs from McPherson, however, in that he has academic tenure, and the legitimate reasons for which he can be dismissed are much more limited than those for which she could be dismissed. Some would argue that the Said case demonstrates the value of academic tenure. We disagree. Provost Cole made clear in his decision that a student would have been treated the same way Said was, and the sections of the university code that he quoted apply equally to untenured assistant professors and to lecturers.

The Said and McPherson incidents make it clear why academic tenure is not necessary to protect free speech. In fact, tenure is an extravagant way of protecting it. Granting people lifetime tenure so that they can express themselves freely about public issues is like giving people Rolls Royces so that they can use the cigarette lighter in the dashboard. In the academic setting, contracts and laws forbidding universities from dismissing professors based on the exercise of First Amendment rights would be about as effective -- without any of the heavy costs of tenure.

Indeed, if you were trying to pick a group whose voice you would want to be louder than all others in public-policy debates, you wouldn't pick professors. Tenured faculty members are overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly middle-aged or older, and overwhelmingly affluent. Compared with the professoriate, the Republican National Convention looks like a hip-hop concert.

If McPherson had lost her job permanently, she probably would have suffered serious financial damage, and no one outside her immediate circle of family and friends would know her name. If Said had lost his job, another top university would have snapped him up immediately, and his writings would continue to appear in influential publications around the world; he would probably be even better known than he is today. It's clear who can use the protection more.

In fact, one might even say that tenure may discourage open debate with diverse points of view. For example, it may add to the difficulty of getting greater gender diversity because the tenure decision comes at a very inconvenient point in the life of many women. That was the point that Professor Tilghman raised. In a society where women continue to bear most of the time and energy costs of raising children, they are often placed at a considerable disadvantage in competing with men who can give more of their attention to research in the crucial period preceding tenure.

But what does one make then of the argument that tenure enables professors, unthreatened by retribution in the form of a lost job, to provide bold and impartial advice? Surely, such advice contributes to a robust democratic polity. But tenure is not a good way of getting it.

Why? Tenure doesn't preclude consulting contracts, or even require that they be disclosed. With judges, by way of contrast, impartiality is produced by the combination of judicial tenure and strict rules against conflict of interest (and even then the combination doesn't always work). Academics have no rules against conflicts of interest in public-policy matters, no code of conduct, no disciplinary body. Without such rules or codes, it is hard to take seriously any claim that academic tenure promotes impartiality.

If the popular arguments for tenure for professors are shallow or wrong, a plausible case can still be made for it. But that case, which we owe in its most developed form to the economist Aloysius Siow at the University of Toronto, reflects not the unjustifiable assertions of direct and favorable impact on the social good. Rather, it recognizes tenure's contribution to the productive efficiency of universities -- and its indirect effect on the public good, because better universities translate into a better society.

The major argument revolves around the observation that producing and distributing new knowledge is the cornerstone of modern universities. That was not always so; nor was tenure. Tenure as we know it became an established part of academic life in the 1960s, when the academic transition to novelty and research became more or less complete.

Now, specialization is necessary to produce such knowledge and, in turn, is created by it. Tenure feeds and sustains this specialization. A key reason is that, with knowledge growing rapidly, specializing is risky: What one picks as a subfield of specialization may, and often will, turn out to be as dead as a dodo years down the road. By ensuring that you will not be put out to pasture when the fields are dry, tenure reduces the risk of specialization and thus promotes it.

Of course, tenure is not the only mechanism that universities could use to promote specialization. Professional sports teams have a similar problem with promoting specialization, but they solve it more simply. They pay athletes huge salaries during their most productive years, and force them into retirement when they are no longer productive. If insurance were the only reason for tenure, universities could operate the same way: Hire academic stars at big salaries, work them hard for 10 or 20 years, and then release them on waivers. No one would have to worry about what fields would be hot in 40 years.

The reason universities don't operate like sports teams lies in a deeper problem with intellectual specialization: Only other specialists can properly evaluate specialists. Either of us is about as qualified to judge microbiologists as we are to judge shortstops, and the president of Columbia University is not better than we are on either of these tasks.

Universities thus rely on the faculty they already have on board to decide who should be hired and who should be promoted. Nobody else can do it as well. So instead of pushing older scholars out like over-the-hill outfielders, universities turn them into evaluators of younger scholars. Tenure becomes rational.

That doesn't mean that the current tenure system is without flaws. For instance, universities should look for ways to remove biases against female scholars -- both at the time of tenure decisions and, more crucially, before those decisions. A widely followed 1999 study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology described a host of mainly small, informal, and unconscious ways that women faculty members were disadvantaged before and after tenure -- and outlined measures to combat those issues, such as providing discretionary financial support for research projects. Other institutions should pursue similar approaches. More recently, some universities have adopted parental-leave policies that stop the tenure clock for scholars with small children. Although, like all innovations, those policies will probably require future refinements, they are steps in the right direction.

As modern societies move into competition on the basis of scientific prowess, our universities are the nation's principal assets. They produce much of the world's advanced research and many of its top scholars. By strengthening our universities' ability to conduct such important, and increasingly specialized, research, tenure becomes compelling. But so do policies to remedy its defects.

Jagdish Bhagwati is a University Professor, and Brendan O'Flaherty is an associate professor of economics and public affairs, at Columbia University.