What Is The Tenure System

Academic tenure has allowed under-performing teachers the privilege of keeping their job no matter what. Some feel that they do not have to properly teach after they have earned tenure. Students do not get a proper education because of this and teachers cannot be fired because of the job security that tenure has granted them. Brian

February 25, 2015 was the national adjunct walkout day. Like the previous year, adjunct faculties performed a rally around their administration, a shout out for their rights for a couple of hours and returned to their homes. Adjunct faculty members are, in fact, the professors, instructors, and other employees who work part-time and are non-tenured in the universities and colleges. Although the national adjunct walkout day educates about the problem that adjunct faculties are facing and it is negatively affecting education in schools, it is not causing the educational system to increase their pay nor is it giving them rights to be treated equitably to tenured faculty.

Richard Kahlenberg, the author of the article Tenure said that tenure was to protect students’ education and those who provide it. He goes on to say that before we can start digging into tenure we should first define what it is. Tenure, for American teachers is awarded after three years, and when it is awarded they have the right to know why a discharge is being sought out by the employer. They also have the right to have the issue decided by an impartial person. Kahlenberg listed why tenure is still necessary, some of them being; it strengthens legal protections, protects a range of people who may be discriminated against that the race and gender antidiscrimination laws do not, and tenure gives teachers the confidence to stand up to outsiders

Teacher tenure is life-long job protection for teachers who have been employed as a teacher for one or more years depending on the state. The purpose of teacher tenure is to protect teachers from being fired for political or personal reasons. It also prevents school districts from eliminating experienced teachers in favor of less expensive teachers. The fundamental problem with teacher tenure is that it is given to a teacher after only one year on the job and requires little to no additional effort. The increased job security breeds complacency in many teachers who are teaching only to collect a paycheck. There is a need for teacher tenure but the program must be drastically reformed.

American colleges and universities employ an impressive number of people in a wide-range of occupations. While universities have a number of goals and interests, the general assumption among most individuals is that universities have the sole purpose of teaching students and preparing them for success in the world. Given this line of thinking, one would be led to believe that professors and other academic instructors hold the majority of positions within an institution, but this would be incorrect. While the faculty do serve a critical function, their service to the students would not be possible without the various support services that exist throughout a college campus. To ensure these services are set up and provide the resources necessary to ensure the university is successful in its mission, colleges require a large number of employees, all working under unique job titles and classifications, to take on the responsibilities that come with working in an industry that generated more than $124 billion in 2001 alone (Lowenstein, 2001).

Paul said “45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were fulltime, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970”.

What is tenure? Academic tenure refers to a policy which gives professors and teachers a permanent contract, effectively ensuring them a guarantee of employment … for life (Garrett 2013). Tenure prevents schools from dismissing teachers without cause or due process in the K-12 school systems. Teacher tenure is the increasingly controversial form of job protection that public school teachers in all states receive after 1-7 years on the job (ProCon n/a). How tenure is attained, protections it provides, and impacts it may have on institutional structures are key factors when researching tenure. The ultimate question is should tenure be required for teachers in the K-12 school systems?

Although there are many varying opinions on what revisions should be made to the tenure system in America, I believe that even though there are many complaints, Tenure needs to be maintained in order to promote academic freedom and educational security. Tenure is defined by Mathew Finkin as “At the expiration of a period of probation, commonly not to exceed six years of full-time service, a faculty member is either to be accorded “tenure” or to be given a terminal appointment for the ensuing academic year. Thereafter, the professor can be discharged only for “just cause” or other permissible circumstances and only after a hearing before a body of his or her academic peers” (Finkin 3). Tenure, in recent years, has become a point of heated

Tenure was meant to protect college professors from unfair firings and was only gained after many years of teaching and going through a long and difficult process. Even then many college educators don’t ever get tenured. Public schools

Before reading the article and attending Tuesday evenings class I did not know much about the tenure process, I knew that it was a form of job security for professors but not much more. Reading the National Education Association article gave me an understanding of what the tenure process is and what the importance is of being a tenured professor other than having a sense of job security. The area that stood out to me in the reading for this week was the fourth myth in the article, that most professors have tenure. This was surprising to me because when reading the reality section the author stated that most positions are more than often filled with part-time faculty and rarely put on the tenure track, colleges like to use students as their

Tenure was instituted as a means to protect teachers from capricious firings without just cause. Tenure proponents point out that job security is one of a few benefits a teacher can count on and that the practice is important for recruitment and retention in a field where turnover is high. In a profession where salary is still largely determined by years on the job, tenure is defended as protecting more veteran teachers from losing their jobs to lower-paid, novice teachers, discussed Jacobs, S. (2016).

Establishing a more rigorous post-tenure review will encourage them to set goals, but it will also show the presidents of the universities what their goals are and what they are doing to achieve them. Provost den Boer stated that higher education is “one of the few industries where we don’t measure the quality of the product.” It is difficult to measure student success. It is difficult to measure university success. Success does not just come from numbers. There are many other aspects of campus life that students consider when choosing a school and only one of them is the reputation of the faculty. If a universities goal is to produce well rounded students, then only considering in-classroom performance is not a good measure. “Simply knowing the students (customers) are dissatisfied does not bring the school system any closer to improving the quality of instruction”

The increasing presence and responsibilities of university administrators place them as important agents in the competition for authority on faculty hiring practices. Administrators are in some ways positioned hierarchically above professors in terms of financial decision-making in the academic field, but professors are also typically given autonomy to conduct faculty searches as appropriate for their department. In cases like Brown University and many other large American universities, administrators may have final say over whether a faculty hiring can occur, but rarely have authority to select (or even veto) candidates. Students, undergraduate and graduate, are also agents, but are likely to have the least amount of power in this struggle. As such, in this particular analysis, the professorial class within the academic field is of particular

This prevents the university from providing and maintaining valuable services that could further their students’ education even more. Simple services such as tutoring, smaller classes, and updated equipment have become a struggle for a lot of universities to provide. Universities have made changes to compensate for the services that have been cut. Tenure plans haven’t helped the universities budget problem. A tenure plan is a plan when a professor is hired; they have about seven years to show they will be a proficient professor for the university. The professors do this by conducting research and publishing studies in their field. They are then brought before a committee to decide if he or she has been approved for tenure. If a teacher is not approved at a university, that spot is then vacant until they can find a new replacement. This process can take up to months to complete, which take valuable teaching time away from student. There are very few options that a university can take to minimize the damage of losing a member of their faculty. One option for a university is to hire an adjunct. An adjunct is a teacher who is temporarily hired to fill the spot of the professor until they can find a new replacement. Another option is to have other professors take turns filling in for the classes until they find a replacement because they are unable to afford to hire a new professor at that time. In a recent interview with Dr. Layne Heitz, assistant professor in Mathematics at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, Dr. Heitz said that not having a specialized teacher is not a good situation for the students or the university. Not having a professor who is qualified keeps students at a disadvantage and doesn’t allow them to get the full experience of the class. This, Dr. Heitz says, also makes students go to each other for

Think of it this way, experience is important. Tenure is one way to reward experience.