GSE's Project on Faculty Appointments Examines Tenure

By Catherine Walsh

Special to the Gazette

"Some people study bugs; I study tenure," jokes Richard P. Chait, a professor at the Graduate School of Education and director of the Project on Faculty Appointments at the School. "I view what I work on as an honorable object of inquiry -- not an article of religious faith."

In fact, Chait likens the Project's analysis of tenure to the work of a university religion department, as opposed to the work of a seminary. But that assessment provides little comfort to "orthodox" supporters of tenure, he says. "For some people, tenure is an issue not just of values to uphold, but of unshakable beliefs. For these 'believers,' our work is heresy."

A professor of education at the School since 1996, Chait believes that the findings of the Project will ultimately prove reassuring to tenure's strongest supporters.

"We want to explore modifications to traditional tenure that preserve the best of tenure and, at the same time, accommodate new realities," he says.

Part of an in-depth study of faculty employment practices funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Project on Faculty Appointments seeks to serve as a national resource for academic personnel policies, broadly understood. Project leaders, including Chait, Cathy Trower, and James Honan of the School, are investigating the different ways in which campuses hire, fire, and retain faculty.

The Project has three main aims: to build a national database of current faculty appointment practices; to research and explore new possibilities for academic personnel policies; and to educate the media, legislators, and the academy at large about the issues involved in faculty appointments.

More than a dozen members of the national media, including reporters from The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Associated Press, Reuters, The Boston Globe, and PBS Television, will attend a Project-sponsored conference in Cambridge on Oct. 8 and 9 on faculty tenure. Bill Kovach, curator of the Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, joined Chait in inviting top journalists to the event.

The Project will also host a conference in 1999 for legislators and other public officials. A conference for faculty members and campus administrators from around the country will complete the Project's organizing work in the fall of 2000.

Exploring the attitudes of junior faculty toward tenure was an eye-opening experience for Trower, who earned her Ph.D. under Chait's tutelage at the University of Maryland in College Park. As Chait's research assistant, she conducted a study of junior faculty practices at various campuses around the nation.

"Many junior faculty on tenure tracks were pretty ambivalent about whether tenure is worth it," Trower says. "Some were openly critical about the stress; more than a few resented it when tenure was held up as a 'green card,' as the only ticket in town."

The openness of junior faculty to nontenured positions that provide higher pay and other perks, such as more frequent sabbaticals, initially surprised her.

"But now I think this attitude reflects the culture of a younger generation," says Trower, who is 38. "We expect to be judged on our performance throughout our careers. We realize too that few guarantees exist any more of lifetime employment within one organization."

As part of her work on the Project, Trower recently put together a CD-ROM of 216 faculty handbooks as a resource for scholars examining practices around the country. Representatives of 10 colleges and universities will join her this year in considering what kind of additional material to collect for a comprehensive national database on faculty appointments.

In addition, Chait, Trower, Honan, and Project staff are working with administrators and faculty at seven campuses to explore new and modified approaches to faculty employment.

Honan credits Chait with "a terrific eye for the issues that matter" in higher education. "Dick is a very perceptive observer of the changes in higher education," he says. "He's very much grounded in the world of faculty, as well as the world of campus administrators."

Chait's self-described "backdoor" entry into tenure as a field of inquiry taught him that the best observations come from solid research. He laughs ruefully and recalls an article he wrote with a colleague, Andrew Ford, for the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1975.

"We posited that affirmative action, which had just taken hold on college campuses, would weaken or undo the tenure system," Chait says. Chait and Ford predicted that the demand for new minority faculty would put pressure on policies that kept senior faculty in place permanently. But to the extent that this resulted in challenges to tenure, the courts defended seniority. "We were dead wrong," Chait says.

But the topic had piqued his interest. Aided by a grant of $15,000, Chait and Ford studied alternatives to tenure and wrote a book in 1982 called Beyond Traditional Tenure: A Guide to Sound Policies and Practices.

The book generated "a fair amount of fuss," says Chait. "You don't have to write a great deal to become identified as a student of a subject, never mind an expert," he adds with a wry smile. "Thinking about alternatives to tenure is not a popular field."

In the 1980s, Chait shifted his research interest to how colleges, universities, and other nonprofit organizations govern themselves. After more than a decade of examining how boards of trustees function, he saw his interest in tenure come full-circle. "Like so many other product life cycles, tenure came back into discussion," he says. "With rising costs in higher education, the pressures on tenure are today more economic than political."

In 1995 Chait became one of two leaders of a study known as "New Pathways: Faculty Careers and Employment in the 21st Century." Sponsored by the American Association for Higher Education and funded by Pew and an anonymous donor, New Pathways sought an objective discussion of tenure. "We naively hoped to create an atmosphere for productive and civil exchanges," Chait says.

But he quickly discovered that tenure had become "the abortion issue of the academy."

In a 1997 Chronicle of Higher Education article, Chait examined a controversy marked by hardened convictions. "The often shrill debate situates tenure as either the bulwark of academic freedom and economic security or the bane of institutional flexibility and accountability," he wrote.

Chait argues in the article and elsewhere that choice, rather than conformity, must mark future decisions about tenure. Tenure is often justified as a guarantor of academic freedom. But more than one-half of college professors lack tenure today. Clearly, Chait argues, new ways must be found to protect academic freedom and to promote nontenured faculty careers. Academia, he warns, ignores the "new realities" of higher education at its peril.

"Economics has changed the very nature of higher education, making it in the eyes of many a product sold to consumers in an increasingly competitive marketplace," Chait says.

What was historically "an act of faith and a social good" before any other considerations, has become something more complex, not unlike medicine, he muses.

"What doctor who has been around for a while could have imagined 30 years ago that he or she would have to call an insurer to get permission to do a procedure?" asks Chait. "Similarly, few university departments with five professors mentoring 10 graduate students would have been as concerned about costs a generation ago as they are now."

Named an "agenda setter" by the Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this year, Chait takes a more humble view of his work. "I'm an analyst, not an advocate," he says. Sounds like what a good entomologist would say.