A (27:47)
So I decided as I got further and further into the literature on higher education and tenure in particular, that I needed to break apart these characterizations and assumptions because it turns out there are so many of them. So each one of the most popular mischaracterizations gets a chapter in the book, and each of the chapters are dedicated to the kind of incentive distortion that I think a lot of non academics and even some academics themselves ascribe to faculty, particularly tenured faculty. So the first kind of assumption is that the moment you get tenure, you become an ideological renegade. This is behind a lot of the more overtly political academic freedom destroying legislative measures and executive orders that we've been seeing not just for the last six months or nine months, but for several years now, right? There's this idea that tenure allows faculty to be irresponsibly ideological and to indoctrinate students and their peers because they have job security, because there's no consequence to them doing those things that may not be warranted by the research, may not be desirable in the context what have you, right? So in the chapter that I call Renegade, I specifically address this assumption. And it turns out that like so many things about tenure, it's an assumption that has almost no empirical basis, right? There are a few reasons why this is the case. The first is that anybody who's gone, who's achieved tenure and therefore presumably has the kind of job security that lets them go wild with their research and their teaching and their conference lectures and whatnot. Anyone who's achieved tenure has spent years jumping through hoops, kind of learning conventions and fitting themselves within those conventions, which means that they have learned to conform to a great degree. Now, we can be troubled about that push towards conformity. That's a separate set of concerns, right? But by definition, somebody who has learned to play by the rules of the game has gotten to tenure because of their ability to not be a renegade, right? What a lot of academic professional coaches see is that by the time somebody has jumped through all of those hoops and achieved tenure, they've kind of run out of steam a little bit, for lack of a better phrase. You know, there are actually quite a few studies documenting post tenure malaise or the mid career slump, because after pushing for decades in many cases to write all the articles, get all the grants, get the good reviews, get the good word of mouth, present at conferences in ways that gain you praise and approval. After doing all of that, professors who get tenure kind of wake up the next day and think, oh my goodness, what do I do with myself now? Right? That's the opposite of the ideological renegade who gets that email or that piece of paper and says, aha, now I can do anything I want, right? So that's just one of the assumptions about how tenure distorts faculty incentives that I deal with in the book. There are two more that I encountered regularly and therefore that also get their own chapters. One of them is this idea that because tenured faculty have really impressive degrees of job security, I will never argue against that. Because they have an impressive degree of job security, they feel free maybe not to engage in a kind of ideological renegade behavior, but to engage in bad behavior. We can define bad however we want. Maybe it's professional misconduct, maybe it's sexual misconduct, maybe it's non sexual workplace harassment, right? There are various ways that anyone who works outside the home can engage in bad behavior. And one of the assumptions that exists about tenure is that by virtue of giving professors job security, it encourages them, or at least enables them to engage in various types of bad behavior. So with respect to this assumption, on the one hand, yes, there is bad behavior in the academy, for sure, there are faculty who do bad things and they should be punished, and they often are punished. But what we do not know is whether those kinds of bad behavior are more common in academia, let alone whether they're more common in tenured Academia, which is a very small subset of the broader faculty population in the United States. We don't know whether these types of bad behaviors are more common in academia, in tenure stream or tenured academia, than they are in academic, other labor forces, in the general labor force, in the at will labor force, or in other just cause worker populations. We don't know any of that because there isn't data collection. There can't be on some level, again irrespective of the recent changes to federal administration. But we can't know this because what knowing that would require is a collection of all documented instances of professional misconduct, workplace harassment, sexual misconduct across industry sectors, such that we can compare them with academia as an industry. So a second assumption that I encounter regularly is that because tenure provides faculty with a really special degree of job security, it encourages them, or at least it enables them to engage in all kinds of bad behavior. Not the quote unquote bad behavior that we're talking about when it comes to ideologically renegade professors, but bad behavior in the sense of professional misconduct, workplace harassment, sexual misconduct, the kinds of bad things that people who work outside the home, around other people can do, whether they're academics or not. Right. And I, I want to preface this by saying that yes, there is no question that bad behavior happens in academia. Yes, when professors engage in those types of behavior, they too like anyone else who works with other human beings, deserve to be disciplined. And I think it is also worth acknowledging that sexual misconduct is definitely, unacceptably high within academia. I think over 70% of the individual tenured faculty terminations that exist in my data set, in over 70% of those incidents, the university employers said that the reason for terminating the employment relationship was because of sexual misconduct to some degree. That's too high. Right. But there are lots of things we don't know about the relationship between tenure and bad behavior, or even between academic employment and bad behavior. So the first thing to kind of think about is the fact that academia has disproportionately high levels of sexual misconduct in countries where there is no tenure. In fact, most countries don't have tenure. Tenure as we know it in the United States doesn't exist in most countries around the world, partly because the same baseline employment rule that I mentioned earlier, the at will rule, doesn't exist in any other country in the world. But the point I want to make here is that there are high rates of bad behavior, and specifically the sexual misconduct variety of bad behavior in academic environments involving faculty around the world. So we can say from this, that there is something maybe about the power dynamics or the interpersonal practices that academia, regardless of the country context, regardless of the institutional context, regardless of the discipline, there's something about academia that makes bad behavior more likely. And I have some thoughts about that. But we can't say that tenure is responsible for that because it's happening in places where there's no such thing. Right? I think another thing that really should give us pause before subscribing to the idea that tenure encourages bad behavior by faculty is that this is a fundamentally comparative claim to make and we do not have the data to make it. So saying that faculty engage in bad behaviors more than other types of workers, or tenured faculty engage in bad behaviors more than other types of workers, or even more than non tenured faculty, those require denominator information about the incidents that deserve punishment in tenure stream academia, in non tenure stream academia, in non academic workplaces. And then if we want to talk about how much tenure actually gets in the way of disciplining workers who engage in those types of bad behaviors, we also need the numerators, right? We need to be able to say, there were so many cases where some kind of discipline was warranted, and there were a smaller number of cases where discipline was actually meted out, and we do not have that kind of information. Even before the gutting of various types of federal data collection, we did not have that type of information. We certainly don't have it now. So both because we don't know it about the American context, because we don't have the data, and because we have reason to think it has nothing to do with tenure, because of the international comparative context, we cannot say that tenure encourages the kind of predatorial behavior that it is so often blamed for encouraging. The last kind of assumption about how tenure distorts faculty incentives that I try to counter in the book is that tenure incentivizes laziness. Quite simply, if you have job security, if you know that you can't be fired unless there is just cause to fire you, and in academia, because tenure is even more than ordinarily protective, it's not just any half bait cause, it is a good cause, right? So this assumption suggests that if you have that kind of confidence about your employment situation, if you have that kind of job security, why would you do anything? Why would you get up and try to craft a good classroom lecture? Why would you take that extra office hour meeting with students? Why would you write another article instead of, you know, going out and hanging out with your partner or Playing a game with your kids or going on a vacation, Right. Why would you do any of these things if it wasn't required to keep your job? Right. This gets me back to that point that I mentioned earlier, which is assuming that people only do things at work in order to keep their jobs for the sake of job security is assuming that people behave as hyper rational beings and as soon as there's no rational motivation to engage in work, they sit back on their heels and don't work. That's not how most people are. We know that almost everyone needs to feel a sense of purpose, to get up, to feel a connection to other people, to feel like they are meaningfully impacting the world around them. Whether that means their family, their neighborhood, their co workers, doesn't matter. Most of us need to feel that kind of purpose in our lives and we work in part in order to have that sense of purpose. Academics need and are driven by that sense of purpose to an unhealthy degree, right? So it seems bizarre to me to suggest that people who have spent years of their, frankly most potentially enjoyable parts of life, their young adulthood, studying, writing papers, going off to conferences and sitting in freezing hotel rooms so that they can be judged by other people. You know, it seems bizarre to me to suggest that these people are only motivated by the potential loss of their job. And as soon as that potential job loss is taken away, they have no motivation to do the work that they have spent their time lives trying to fight to do. And what do you know, the research that we have shows that that's just not how it works. There isn't a lot of empirical data collection on this because again, it's very difficult to do. You could take a point in time approach to studying how productive faculty are. And let's say for argument's sake that we measure productivity by publication output. That's a very narrow, myopic way of understanding academic productivity. But it's easier to measure things, right? So if you take a point in time approach, you might see that let's say a junior tenure stream faculty member or somebody who just received tenure is publishing up a storm. They're publishing like two articles a year or five articles a year, whatever it is, right? I mean, I'm in a social science or law field, so everything is pretty much single authored, which means I'm not producing 20 articles a year. But I know that that's true for a lot of bench and team sciences. And then if you take that same point in time and you look at somebody who's more senior on the same faculty, you might see that they're only producing one thing a year. Right? And based on that point in time analysis, you might draw the conclusion that as people get more senior in their jobs, they get lazier. But there are problems with that approach. One problem is simply that the nature of academic productivity tends to change over the course of a career cycle. In many fields, the arc of academic publication bends from articles to books, right? So it takes longer for most people to write books than to write articles. That means you produce fewer of them. That also means that if people tend to produce books more as they get more senior in their careers, they're going to produce fewer things that can be counted at any point in time. But it doesn't necessarily mean that they're less productive. Right. I think a different approach would be to take a longitudinal try at measuring faculty productivity. Right? You can say, here are 10 tenure stream faculty in one department, and we're going to follow them over 20 years to see the ebbs and flows in their productivity. Well, that would probably give us much more useful information, but it's really hard to do that kind of work. It takes an immense amount of infrastructure and research support in order to be able to track people for years at a time, which is what you would need to do. And so there aren't a lot of longitudinal studies. The little bit of empirical data that we have about faculty productivity, particularly before and after the granting of tenure, suggests one thing overwhelmingly. And that thing is that people who produce a lot before tenure produce a lot after tenure. People who don't produce so much before tenure don't produce so much after tenure. So essentially, once again, job security and that email or that piece of paper that you get is not what's motivating you. It wasn't motivating you to be a high producer before. And it's not going away now that you have tenure because you still have that motivation. So these three assumptions that I think are the most common assumptions about what tenure does to faculty incentives, that it turns them into ideological renegades, that it turns them into predatorial actors, that it turns, excuse me, that it turns them into slackers, none of these are empirically proven. Most of them actually are disproven by the empirical research we have. And most of them are logically unsupportable because they rest on either assumptions about human nature or about kind of contextually myopic details like what is happening in the United States without considering what's happening elsewhere where there is no tenure. For so many reasons, these assumptions about how tenure affects faculty incentives simply don't hold water.
