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Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast as you pro. There are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Michael Lamagna, and today I'm joined by the author of War on, published in 2025 by Cambridge University Press. For those following the conversations around higher education, tenure is always a topic of debate. These conversations about tenure are from within higher education, in state legislatures, and by the general public. Often the debate about tenure focuses on the necessity for academic freedom. But it's important to understand that tenure is not exclusively connected to academic freedom. Instead of tenure is part of a faculty member's contractual relationship with their institution. Joining me to discuss this book is author Deepa Das Acevedo, who is an associate professor of law at Emory University. Welcome to the podcast, Deepa.
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Thank you so much for having me, Michael. I'm excited to be here.
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Excellent. So, before we begin discussing your book War and Tenure, I was hoping you can tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your career path.
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Sure. So I am a dual credentialed anthropologist of law. Uh, I always wanted to go to law school. I got slightly detoured on the way there. I spent six years doing an anthropology PhD which was actually based in India. But then when I decided that I wanted to go into legal academia as opposed to anthropology or the social sciences, I developed a US based legal research agenda. And that body of work has largely focused on labor and employment issues. So for several years, I studied the gig economy. I studied worker relationships, classification, and legal issues as they apply to gig workers. And then a few years ago, I became really interested in tenure. Not surprising, anyone who is in this world is probably interested in tenure, but I became interested in it specifically as an employment practice because I was coming at it from the perspective of an employment law scholar and teacher.
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So I really like that connection, especially to the gig economy as we think about, you know, faculty status these days. So we could see what sparked your interest. So let's start out by discussing what is tenure?
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Yeah, that. I mean, this is the place where I think conversations really need to start because tenure is so often only discussed in connection with academic freedom. And it is actually a contractual feature that tells us something about how an employment contract works. So I'm going to maybe break this up into three sub points. And the first one of that is that tenure is a type of employment contract that is itself a variety of just cause employment. So just cause employment means pretty much what it is sounds like it means. It is a type of employment relationship where the employee is essentially telling the employer, you need to have a reasonable reason, a just cause, to terminate this employment relationship. So tenure is a subcategory of just cause employment. The reason that just cause employment matters so much is specific to the United States because we have a default rule or a baseline assumption about what employment relationships look like and how they should work. And that default rule is called the at will rule. The short definition of the at will rule that I make all of my employment law students recite in class is that under the at will rule, under relationships that are governed by the at will rule, either party can terminate the relationship for good reason, bad reason, no reason, anything except a Specifically, illegal reason with no notice and no payment in lieu of notice. Now, formally, the rule applies to both the employer and the employee, but in practice, it matters most for the employee in terms of their job security. So, for example, under the at will rule, an employee could be fired by her employer because she wore teal to the office and the employer really, really dislikes the color teal. Or because it's Thursday and the employer woke up feeling crummy that it's Thursday. Or and this one actually is from a case that I teach occasionally in employment law class because the employee roots for an employee, for a football team that the employer just likes. Okay, those are all bad reasons or not reasons at all to fire somebody, but they're not illegal reasons. And consequently, under the at will rule, those are all legally acceptable reasons to terminate the relationship. So tenure, like all types of just cause employment, says you need to have something more, you need to have a better reason to terminate this relationship. And lots of employees are hired and employed and maybe fired pursuant to just cause contracts. So, for example, federal employees, federal government workers, this is why they can sue now that they are being. Their employment is being terminated under problematic conditions. Right. They wouldn't be able to sue if they couldn't otherwise make some kind of argument about how their termination was illegal or discriminatory or something like that. Orchestra musicians are employed pursuant to just cause contracts. Anyone who is unionized is employed pursuant to a just cause contract. So tenure is definitely special in that it offers a heightened degree of job security. It is, even by just cause standards, a particularly protective form of contract. But it's not sui generis. It's not totally unique. It is along a spectrum of employment contracts that exist in the first place because we have this default rule that is so risky for employees.
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So when we think about tenure, there's this assumption that it ensures a faculty member has a job for life. Right? That's what we often hear. And that they cannot be fired. Is that actually the case based on this?
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This one makes my blood pressure shoot up. That is absolutely not the case. Okay, one way to think about this is in the name of the type of employment contract. We're talking about just cause. That means that if you have cause, you can terminate somebody. Right. I think, more importantly, though, beyond the fact that it is definitionally not true that you cannot fire somebody who has tenure, who has this particularly protective form of just cause employment, I think what I find troubling is that research, both mine and by other people, has shown that this isn't legally true on an individual basis, just cause allows a university employer to fire a faculty member who has provided adequate cause for termination. And if that option to terminate a really bad acting faculty member isn't used, that is a choice that the employer has made. It's also not descriptively true on either an individual or collective basis. So I got interested in this entire line of research because during the pandemic, I, like so many of us, was sitting and doom scrolling through stories about how departments or committees or entire colleges and universities were shutting down. They were firing all of their faculty, and many of those faculty were tenured. Certainly not all, certainly not most, but many of them were tenured. They were being fired, they were losing their jobs for reasons that had nothing to do with individual bad behavior. So both in terms of an employer's ability to terminate an individual professor who has tenure and the employers ability to terminate groups of tenured professors for no reason associated with their bad behavior, it is simply not true that faculty who are tenured have jobs for life. They can lose it because of something they did, and they can lose their job despite everything that they did. Right.
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I'm sure that's surprising to hear for many people. Now when a faculty member does lose their job, a tenured faculty member loses their job. You know, what sector of higher education is this typically happening in and why is that important to know?
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So there were two things that I found were really interesting in my research on tenured faculty terminations with respect to who actually loses their jobs. But I want to just backtrack for a second and preface this by saying that the data set that I put together, because even before the Department of Education was gutted, we had very little usable information tracking tenure stream faculty alone, across types of institutions, across geographic boundaries within the country. So I set out to kind of build this data set so that we could understand a little bit more about how tenure works as a form of job security and who loses their jobs despite having tenure, under what conditions they lose it, and so on. When I was building this data set and then I was thinking about these group terminations that occur in moments of deep financial and societal stress, like the pandemic era closures, that kind of precipitated my interest in this book, I did a little bit of compare and contrast data collection. So my data set focuses only on individual for cause terminations, meaning Joe Smith at, you know, Central State University was fired because Joe falsified research data. That's a cause that provides justification for termination of a just cause relationship. Right. But I also wanted to try and get a sense of how many tenured faculty lose their jobs through these collective terminations, these reductions in force. RIFs. Right. That proved to be too difficult to do, so I stopped doing it. But I came up with a fact that I think is really important and illustrative of the scale that we're talking about here. And that little small one sentence fact is that more tenured faculty have lost their jobs just over the last five years at 13 universities because of these rifts, then have lost their jobs at all universities in the last 20 years because they did something bad. So the scale of termination, of job loss that we're talking about when it comes to RIFs, which, remember, happen despite a tenured professor doing everything right, or maybe not, but it's not because they did something wrong. Right. The scale of job loss that we're talking about when it comes to rifs is magnitudes bigger than the job loss we're talking about because individual professors did something bad and were fired despite having 10. So with that kind of prefacing, I want to say that there were two things I found out that were interesting in terms of who individually gets fired despite having tenure because they did something wrong. Right. The first thing that I found is that overwhelmingly most tenured faculty terminations during this time period, this 20 year time period, roughly from 2000 to 2000 that I was looking at, most of those terminations happened at public universities. Now, why does that matter? It matters for at least two reasons. The first reason is that most of these legislative political attacks on higher education and specifically on tenure, and this is happening at the state level as well as the federal level, the most recent wave is federal in origin, but state level attacks on tenure have been going on for 20 years. So we shouldn't forget about that. All of these legislative attempts to gut higher education, in part by gutting the job security that tenure offers, only apply to public universities. But public universities are the ones where most individual terminations are already occurring. So if the argument coming from legislators is that it's too hard to fire tenured faculty, or universities face too many obstacles, or professors who have tenure have bad incentives and they do things as a result of the security that tenure offers them, well, that doesn't seem to be much of a problem, because those same universities, public universities, are precisely the institutions where most tenured faculty terminations are occurring. So you're kind of solving a problem that was not a problem to begin with. Right. The second reason that this first discovery of mine that Most tenured faculty terminations happen at public universities. The second reason that this is interesting, I think, is that public employees, which faculty at these institutions are right, public employees have, by virtue of working for some branch of the government, more rights in relation to their work than private sector employees do. Specifically, they have some speech rights at work, some free expression rights at work. And I will be the first to grant that those rights are minimal, being reduced, and nothing to write home about. But they are still greater than zero, which is what you have, for the most part, if you are a private sector employee, like, for instance, a tenured professor at a private university. So those are two reasons why this one discovery that most tenured faculty terminations occur at public universities, why that discovery is interesting. But then there's also another discovery that I had which I discuss in a. In a alternate chapter in the book. And this comes out of some recoding that I did for the incidents that are captured in my data set. So for most of the analysis that I do, I treat all terminations as equivalent. The job was lost, the person left their work, and I'm looking at other aspects, their demographics, their institutions, their disciplines, all of these kinds of things. Right. But for this one area of analysis, I decided to try and differentiate between terminations that were clearly involuntary firings, you know, and terminations that at least nominally were quits. They were people saying, I have gotten into a fight with my employer. It's not looking good, and I'm walking away. Right. Obviously, most of those quits, those voluntary terminations, aren't really voluntary in a full rich sense of the word. They're occurring under coerced conditions. And I'm not necessarily interested in parsing whether the coercion was warranted and the termination should have happened because the individual professor deserved to lose their job. We're not talking about the merits of the underlying situation and accusations here. Here. I'm just trying to figure out, well, there are some of these terminations that clearly the professor was kind of dragged kicking and screaming to the door right of the building. And then there are others where, as far as the Internet footprint, I and my RAs were amazing, were able to find. As far as that footprint was able to tell us, they didn't put up a fight at all. They just encountered accusations or disciplinary measures or the threat of termination, and then they left. So based on what we were able to find in terms of coverage and discussion of these terminations, we coded these incidents which we otherwise treated as similar or equivalent because they all ended in job Loss. We coded them as being either fireds or quits. And then that allowed me to go back and look at a lot of the other variables that had been coded for, including most interestingly, disciplinary affiliation, and think about some other insights that we could get from the data. So the insight here that I thought was really interesting is that there was no statistically significant difference between who was unwillingly fired and who voluntarily quit based on their disciplinary affiliation, based on what field their research and teaching was in. Right. Why is that interesting? It's interesting because there is a sense, I think within academia as well as outside it, but definitely outside it, that some fields simply have no practical value outside of the ivory tower. Right. And because of that assumption, which I thoroughly disagree with, but because of that assumption, there's a second assumption which is that people in certain disciplines couldn't get a job elsewhere outside of academia if they wanted to. So they are not only getting this position that is, you know, undeservingly secure, maybe even wrongly characterized as a job for life, Right. But they're getting that secure position in a field that wouldn't allow them to be employed if they were in the general labor force. So there's this has come up a lot, particularly in attacks on the humanities and the social sciences. Right? The idea that, well, if you're a complex scholar or if you're a philosopher, there's no job for you out there, but you get to live this cushy job inside academia. Right. The reason that the fireds versus quits analysis is particularly interesting when we kind of compare that or lay that over the disciplinary affiliation of each of those faculty who were terminated, is that disciplines which are kind of colloquially thought to have great general labor market power, you know, if you are a chemist or if you're an engineer or if you're, I don't know, an immunologist or something, there's a job out there for you. So you're choosing to be in academia. You have made a voluntary decision to stay in the academy instead of going out there and earning big bucks in the labor force. You know, those people did not voluntarily quit when they encountered trouble in their academic employment at a rate that was statistically significantly higher than people who are thought to have no alternative non academic job potential. Right? So I think what that all that tells us a few things in turn. And just to kind of sum all of that up, what I'm saying is that the data didn't suggest that, for instance, engineers were more likely to say, you know what, this is too Much trouble. I'm walking away. And philosophers were more likely to say, no, I'm not going to find anything else. I got to hang on for dear life. That is not what I saw. I did not see a statistically significant difference between those kinds of scholars when they encountered trouble with their academic employment. This matters because it speaks to a lot of other assumptions about incentives and practices and expectations that I think really color conversations about academia out there in the world. And I'll just focus on one of them, which is this idea that faculty behave as hyper rational individuals. This comes up over and over again in conversations about tenure. But let's think about how that would apply to this particular set of analysis about fireds versus quits and disciplinary affiliation, what that suggests. If you think that faculty are hyper rational, that they make decisions that will maximize their best interests with the least effort and the least expense and everything like that, then you would expect that somebody who has great job opportunities outside of academia, instead of staying to slog it out and fight with their employer and keep their job, they would just say, okay, I'm going to walk away. This is too much headache for me. Right. That's what we would expect somebody who behaves in a kind of classically rational way to do. But they don't do that. And that speaks to something that I think gets lost way too often in conversations about tenure, which is that faculty are not behaving more than any other type of worker and maybe less than other types of workers. And as classically rational actors, they're not thinking, well, okay, now I have job security, I can sit back and not work, or, well, okay, I have great options in the general labor market. This is getting too dicey for me. I'm going to walk away and find a job. In industry, we assume these things about how faculty behave, which I think we would not ascribe to many other types of workers. But university faculty are people too. They act in irrational ways. Maybe because they love their jobs enough that they want to stay and fight, even if they could earn more and have a similar quality of life by packing their bags and going elsewhere. 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That is such a great point. Now, as we think about conversations around tenure, there's an assumption, whether it's in the academy or outside, right? And I'm thinking at administrators or just the general public, that tenure influences a faculty member's behavior and that it leads to maybe misbehavior. Are those assumptions accurate?
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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.
- [47:04]
C
Yeah, that's such a great point. And so as we think about these faulty assumptions, and we think about, you know, the limited options that faculty have to take their labor elsewhere to earn a higher wage, you know, you make a great argument in your book, and you argue that tenure acknowledges and partly compensates for the high barrier of entry, the low financial reward and the challenging expectations, heavy personal sacrifices, and the auto depreciation associated with pursuing an academic career. So with all that said, and knowing that these assumptions are faulty, shouldn't we be strengthening tenure for faculty members?
- [47:43]
A
Yes, 110%, we should be. And again, I think there are a lot of arguments being made with increasing and warranted intensity right now about the need for strong tenure to protect academic freedom. I agree with all of those and support all of those. But I also think that we need strong tenure for reasons that simply have to do with labor dynamics and labor practices. I think that what has happened is we have gotten used to assuming what tenure means and how tenure affects individual faculty behavior. Those assumptions rarely hold water. Most of the time, if you sit down and think about it a little bit, you would realize why they cannot be true. And those assumptions, moreover, get in the way of us acknowledging some of the hardships that faculty really do experience. There's no question that this is a great job. I love what I do. I'm privileged to be able to do it. But the longer I do it, the more I become unable to find any other kind of work, the more I become vulnerable to and dependent on the academic ecosystem. Right. I have a law degree. When I finish my law degree, I could go out and practice. In fact, I had offers to practice, and I chose not to do that in order to stay in academia. But now there is no way I would get hired to practice as a lawyer. Right. That kind of depreciation of labor skills is a real downside to being in academia. It means that people who choose to dedicate their lives to the rewarding but also challenging work of teaching young people, of conducting research, of trying to think carefully and creatively through the problems that society is facing. These people are really taking a risk by choosing to do that work. They are opting out of the many other options that workers in the general labor market have. And so one of the things that tenure does is it provides a sense of security for people who choose to opt out in order to do those things that we all more or less want done.
- [50:20]
C
What A great point. Now, you often hear conversations around tenure talk about reform. Now, do you think reform is necessary? And if so, what are some ways that we can improve tenure?
- [50:32]
A
I think that there is always room for improvement. As much as higher education is under attack right now, and I do not want to minimize the severity or the breadth of those attacks. I think it is not useful or honest to say nothing should change right now because we are under attack. Now is the time to insist on the status quo ante. Right. But it certainly becomes trickier to chart a path forward when so many people who do not have higher education's interests at heart are trying to determine what that path should be. So it becomes trickier, but I don't think it becomes either not worthwhile or something that we should not do at all right now. There are a lot of different ways that we might consider improving tenure. And, you know, when I was trying to formulate some of these suggestions, because I personally really dislike it when people say things could be better, it's difficult. Somebody else solved this problem. You know, I wanted to come up with some ideas because I think is challenging and scary to suggest how things might be done differently. And I don't want to leave that work for someone else. So when I was trying to think of some of these ideas, I was very aware that no matter how many other faculty I speak to, no matter. No matter how many articles or books I read, how much I stay on top of the news, I have very limited perspective, right? I do not know the full range of experiences and constraints that affect people in academia. And so not all of these suggestions are going to work for all fields, for all institutions, what have you. But we could do a few things. One small thing that I think we could do is adjust the process and timeline. We, for the most part, apply to the collection and retention of tenure file letters. That was a mouthful. What I have in mind is the crush that a lot of tenured and, you know, associate and full professors face over the summer to suddenly read the entire body of work of one or more junior colleagues and say a lot of thoughtful, hopefully supportive, carefully argued things about that body of work on top of everything else that they're supposed to do. This is difficult, right? I've written a few tenure promotion letters myself this summer, and it was in addition to my plate that I had not scheduled into my summer. But you do it because you want to support junior colleagues, and maybe because, particularly if you're an interdisciplinary scholar or you do research in a new area, you are very Aware that there are not that many people at a similar, similar level of seniority who have the expertise necessary to evaluate that person's portfolio. So you feel doubly obligated to do it. Those letter requests usually go out sometime, hopefully in the late spring, early summer. Right. And they're due at the end of summer, usually or in early fall. I think that if we wanted to make things a little bit easier on both the junior faculty who need to put together portfolios and the senior faculty who need to essentially create those portfolios by writing those letters for so many different applicants, we could adjust the timeline, extend the timeline when a 10 year letter remains fresh. Because right now we tend to treat those letters as if they go stale within about six to nine months. Something less than an academic year. Right. It is definitely true that the portfolio being evaluated will change if we go beyond that time period. But in all likelihood it will only get stronger. So why can that letter not have a longer shelf life? That would allow for a little bit of a fairer burden for evaluators and allow a little bit more time for the applicant to build the portfolio. Because they wouldn't have to be sure that all of their potential letter writers will be available that summer that they are planning on going up for tenure. This is not just about improving tenure. It's about improving the processes that go into evaluating someone for tenure without decreasing the rigor of the analysis. Because after all, what you get, if you get tenure is a really valuable form of job security. So we want to make sure our analysis is careful. I think another thing that we could do to improve tenure is to acknowledge that the image of the tenured faculty or the tenure stream faculty that we might have had 20, 40, 50 years ago in at least one respect, cannot hold true anymore. And that image is of the teacher, scholar. All of us, for the most part, are evaluated if we're in the tenure stream according to three things. Teaching, research and service. Right. The exact kind of split that you're subject to, that the expectations placed on you are subject to, will vary from discipline to discipline and institution to institution. But these three things are generally the core of academic evaluations and especially tenure evaluations. That made sense when being a full time tenure stream faculty member involved teaching a couple of classes, maybe sitting in on a committee meeting where you talk for about an hour and then you adjourn and come back and consider things later and we're advising students meant, and I know this still happens, but like meeting them for coffee and talking over an idea for A paper or something. That is not the level of work that any of those roles involve right now. Why? Because there are so many more students. Because those students have different needs. Because we want to meet those needs. We want to respect those diversification of interests and aptitudes and backgrounds with attentive teaching. Why? Because we have so many more journals. Because we have grants. Because there are ever escalating credential thresholds for what a tenured or tenure stream faculty member should have produced by way of publication. So you need more articles and more books and more peer reviewed grants. And everything, everything has gone up to a level where each one of those roles, to be perfectly frank, is its own job. And certainly the teaching function and the research function are separately deserving of tenure. So we see a lot now that not a lot. We see with an encouraging degree of frequency that some universities are recognizing that teaching well, thoughtfully, creatively and adaptively is itself a full time job worthy of the job security that tenure provides. We have teaching tenure. Right. This isn't my invention. Lots of universities are experimenting with this and I think it's high time, I think that would improve tenure writ large. If we had teaching tenure, if we had research tenure, maybe there are institutions where the two can be reasonably and productively combined, but there are definitely institutions where the two can be reasonably and productively separated and both accorded tenure. Those are just two ways that we could reform tenure without decreasing the rigor of analysis that we associate with granting it. One is extending the shelf life of tenure letters to improve the experience for both applicants and referees. And the other is recognizing that the tasks that were once expected to be done by the same person now require different people. And each of those people needs job security in order to do those tasks.
- [59:34]
C
Well, those are excellent suggestions as a way of reforming tenure. I agree wholeheartedly. Well, Deepa, I know I've taken up a lot of your time and as we wrap up our conversation together, I'm wondering, now that the book is out, what are you working on next? Are you going to continue to explore tenure or are you taking your research in a new direction?
- [59:53]
A
Both. And so I am very increasingly interested in academia as an industry and as, to use my legal anthropology background, a semi autonomous social field within society writ large. But I'm now getting more interested in how academia and academics can engage better, more productively with the world outside. And this is an area of analysis that's really emerging. So it's not, I don't think that it has the same body of scholarship and that actually makes it very exciting. But it doesn't have the same body of scholarship behind it that higher education and tenure and faculty employment have. This area is public scholarship. So I have been doing a kind of institutional ethnography here at Emory, courtesy of a fellowship that is being hosted by our senior vice president for research, who is very committed, like many other administrators at Emory, to the idea that public scholarship and research impact are valuable and necessary functions for today's academic. I have been doing that little institutional ethnography for a while, so it's generating some really interesting insights that will probably take up a lot of my work going forward. But I see this as a continuation of the work on tenure, even if it's not specifically about employment conditions and job security.
- [61:40]
C
That's an excellent project, and I'm glad that your institution is supporting public scholarship. And hopefully that counts towards the tenure requirements as well.
- [61:49]
A
That is part of the analysis and the work that we're doing right now, actually.
- [61:56]
C
Well, Deepa, I want to thank you so much for joining us today. I really enjoyed our conversation.
- [62:02]
A
Thank you so much, Michael. It was really fun.
- [62:04]
C
Well, I'm your host, Michael Magna, and thank you for listening to the New Books Network.