Editor’s note: This commentary is by Thomas Streeter, a professor at the University of Vermont and president of United Academics, the faculty union at UVM, and Linda Olson a professor at Castleton University and vice president of education for the American Federation of Teachers Vermont.
For academics, recent news of the elimination of tenure for most Vermont Law School faculty is alarming. But others may wonder, what’s the point of tenure, anyway? Why should faculty in higher education have lifetime job security in what is already a pretty comfortable job? Isn’t it only fair that if you don’t do a good job, you can be fired? Is tenure something that deserves to go the way of the horse and buggy?
In 1900, an economist named Edward Ross lost his job at Stanford University because Mrs. Leland Stanford didn’t like his views on immigrant labor and railroad monopolies. In response, in 1915 Arthur Lovejoy, a philosopher at Johns Hopkins, Vermont-born John Dewey, and others called a meeting to form an organization which would ensure academic freedom for faculty members. This resulted in the birth of the American Association of University Professors to promote the principle of academic freedom in universities in the U.S. In the 1930s, many more joined the organization, including the likes of Albert Einstein. The 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, endorsed jointly by AAUP and the American Association of Colleges and Universities, enshrined the basic system of hiring and promotion that governs practically all research universities and most colleges in the U.S., from Harvard to UVM to, until recently, Vermont Law School. This is the system of peer review, promotion and tenure that defines the life of academics throughout the country.
Lovejoy, Dewey and Einstein believed that better knowledge and social progress were achieved through disciplined free inquiry, and if professors can be fired simply because somebody powerful does not like their ideas, that independent free inquiry can be squelched and social progress hindered. Like us, the creators of the 1940 statement lived in a world in which some unashamedly operated as if the only thing that matters is whether or not an idea is personally gratifying or fits one or another ideology, as if truth, especially hard truths, could be ignored. Tenure creates a firewall against those pressures. It allows the hard questions to be asked, the unpopular ideas to be explored.
What about the marketplace? Why shouldn’t professors have to compete to survive commercially just like most people? The marketplace can create a dysfunctional race to the bottom (see, e.g., the University of Phoenix, which proved much more adept at extracting debt-financed tuition than actually graduating students). And the marketplace rewards popularity, not truth or wisdom. The science of global warming is essential to the survival of our species, but it is not popular. Higher education is one of those institutions where the marketplace isn’t the answer to everything.
Academic freedom is not exactly the same as free speech. In their roles as teachers and researchers, professors do not get to say whatever they want. To get tenure, professors’ ideas are typically subject to an intimidating gauntlet of discipline-centered “peer review” — thorough, careful vetting of publications and other professional work by qualified experts in their field. Peer review continues throughout the career of a tenured professor, influencing raises, promotions and more. Peer review is slow, sometimes comically quarrelsome, and often annoying. It is also the most reliable means for creating worthwhile new knowledge known to humanity. Tenure is not perfect. But it creates an island in the storm, a place where complex and unpopular ideas can be explored, debated and carefully vetted.
The 1940 statement is very clear that any revocation of tenure requires a declaration of financial exigency and full consultation with faculty. Leadership at VLS did not even try to conform. Instead, they egregiously violated academic freedom by forcing faculty to sign non-disclosure agreements or lose their jobs. When VLS originally created a tenure system many decades ago, it made a promise to its faculty and to the world, to be a haven for rigorous, unrestricted thought about the law. Current leadership has broken that promise.
The study of law, much less Vermont Law School’s specialty of environmental law, is not just a technical matter, it is not just memorizing a list of rules from a textbook. Done right, it involves exploration, debate, reflection and careful inquiry. Tenure creates a space where that can happen. Students value that space. Cuts may need to be made, but abolishing tenure is not the best way to make them; programs can be eliminated and salaries can be lowered without violating tenure. Abolishing tenure is like removing the roof of your house to save money – thereby exposing everything to the elements, threatening the entire institution.
We call on the leadership of Vermont Law School to restore tenure to its faculty and find ways to deal with budget problems according to the 1940 Statement of Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure.
