What do people think of the tenure system in the sciences?

In my experience it seems to do more harm than good. The idea behind it is supposedly that it allows professors to express controversial ideas without fear of being fired simply for going against the mainstream. Having hung around universities in one capacity or another for a rather long time, it seems to me that the only people being “protected” by the tenure system are lazy and/or incompetent professors who are no longer able to maintain a functional research group for one reason or another (personality problems, inability to get funding, lack of management skills, or simple apathy), and so are no longer producing any sort of meaningful research. While these guys hang around the university wasting space and salary money, armies of promising post-docs with great references and strong publication records desperately scrounge for tenure-track jobs. Why can’t we just fire the incompetent people and hire someone more promising?

As for the supposed professors who need to be protected so that they can propose radical or controversial new theories…they don’t seem to exist. I don’t see ANY tenured professors publishing stuff that makes people say “Wow, that guy’s lucky he has tenure – there’s no way he could get away with saying that otherwise!” Granted, I don’t know all the tenured science professors. There are surely a few such professors out there in the wide world of academia. But assuming they exist at all, they appear to be a trivially small bunch who are being protected at the cost of the continued employment of genuinely incompetent professors who really ought to be fired.

I’m also somewhat uncomfortable with the basic idea behind the tenure system. In an academic setting, one’s opinions on scientific matters will often speak directly on their basic competency. If some tenured nut decides that he wants to start teaching his students that AIDS is really caused by demonic forces rather than a virus, or that the speed of light is 500 miles/hour, or some other equally-absurd thing, shouldn’t he be fired for incompetence?

 

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Tenure is something to reach for and get in and of itself: you're either tenured or you're not.

The process by which we give tenure to professors is solidly based- on observation of a successful rate- whatever that scale is.

Once you're tenured, you are given the oppourtunity to explore the depths of that field of study at length- archeology, for example: studying a site for a decade.

A University is defined by its tenured staff- the core of the University itself. (NYU is the way to go!) The higher the measurable quality of the tenured staff, the more highly regarded that University is... the higher the quality of education you will recieve... the more prestigious that diploma is.

The ultimate repository of knowledge for the well knowledged is in a University. After all, Indiana Jones was a tenured professor!

In the pursuit of life and knowledge, 90% of all college students go there for that paper diploma. 10% go just to learn- the diploma is a bonus. How many diplomas did Galileo or Jefferson have??

 

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I believe people should be allowed to express their opinions,especially if doesn't involve the society directly.For social issues,I do believe that a modest amount of political correctness helps.But nonetheless,opinions should be heard.

 

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Funny- because I believe that if you let intellectuals come to a rational collective opinion, they will collectively decide to advance or fail, like Atlas.

 

Then why are there so many professors who get tenure only to have their research group melt down a few years or decades later? Just because someone is a productive professor now, at 30 years old, it doesn't mean that he's still going to be productive when he's 40 or 50 or 60. And if he stops being productive, he should be fired and replaces, just like with almost any other job.

Or to stop writing research grants, supervising your grad students, and showing up for your lectures.

Of course. But there's nothing about the tenure system per se that's necessary for all that. If you eliminated tenure, universities would still be judged by the quality of their professors.

 

Tenure isn't necessary but intellectuals want to always have their jobs no matter how wrong they are with their thinking.

 

An unintended consequence of tenure is the retention of inferior teachers & researchers.

 

I have seen that, many many times - every war since WWII universities that receive government research grants have come under pressure to fire professors who objected to something about that war, for example.

In the current debate over GM food, tenure is the only protection available for researchers who make things inconvenient for Monsanto, Cargill, et al.

In the current climate change debate, only tenure protects American professors whose publications inconvenience such important sources of funding and political influence as Exxon, Chevron, et al.

And this protection is not as firmly proof against power's whims as may seem: Ward Churchill, for example.

The careless or imprudent granting of tenure creates problems, naturally (as with Ward Churchill) - but that is no objection to the institution itself.

That is not an "unintended consequence", but a predicted and considered cost of the system. It is a major consideration in the granting of tenure (maybe not the "teaching" part). There is no perfect system.

 

Yeah, the problematic thing about the tenure process is that almost nobody gets tenure without first proving themselves capable of pulling in grant money from exactly the sorts of powerful interests that tenure is supposed to ensure independence from in the first place. When it actually works as advertized, it's the exception instead of the rule.

 

Because they resemble oysters. The oyster, in the free swimming stage, has a brain and uses it to evaluate potential locations to settle down for life (nice looking rock, etc.). After attached to its life long spot, it no longer needs or uses it brain, which slowly disappears entirely.

Rather than tenure, they should get from the university a life annuity equal to their social security (or twice that?) that starts if they are discharged. That should give them confidence to speak their mind (and help preserve it).

 

There might be some justification for tenure at the university level, but why in the hell is it extended to those who teach at elementary schools, middle school, and even high school? What controversial research is done by Kindergarten teachers?

 

From what I have seen, the practice has as many pros as cons. I have seen good professors denied tenure because they did not "fit in" and pathetic ones given it because they got their names on sufficient publications through a quid pro quo program of social networking among tenured professors, providing their laboratories and grants as support systems in exchange for getting their names on enough publications, regardless of actual contributions to make the grade for tenure track.

 

That isn't exactly "tenure" (even though it's often called such) so much as really cushy union contracts that make it progressively more and more difficult to fire teachers as they gain seniority. The difference being that actual tenure is a status granted by the institution itself for its own reasons, rather than some agreement with a labor union. It's not a way of protecting controversial teaching or research (since there isn't any to speak of) from outside influence, so much as a way of protecting middle-aged teachers from competition from younger college graduates.

 

It maybe should be said that the "real" actual contributions for tenure are exactly grant funds and publications. The university (and department) wants primarily to say that they're pulling in money and putting out papers. Whether any of them ever has any real impact on anything is secondary - those are the only short-term objective measures of performance, and so that tends to be all they care about. If somebody can get grants and publish papers in a field without doing worthwhile work, all that means is that that field is crap and there's little reason for a university to deprive itself of funds and publications waiting for it to improve.

 

You'd be surprised how much in-house work is worthless but still gets renewed funding year after year. But its not so much criminal as apathetic. Older PIs arerun out of steam and exploit young post grads for patents and ideas. The grad students are just there for grunt work and have to comply with whatever direction their projects take even if it deviates from the original proposal - they have no control about how their work is utilised or who gets credit for it and most of the good ones put in work for a lot more projects than they get credited for. Its a burn out factory

 

No I wouldn't.

That's the life sciences for you. Go into engineering or some other field where a PhD project is tractable in individual terms if you don't want to be sucked into a machine :]

 

Quite a bit of worthwhile research is being done in the current US university system - more than in the corporate world, where the disadvantages of tenure (and unions, in this area) have been avoided - and much of it by tenured professors.

Teaching, now, is another story. Not so much that tenured profs do bad jobs, although that happens, but that almost no one gets tenure for teaching performance in most schools, so that the untenured with intellectual ambitions can seldom afford to devote any significant time to developing as teachers.

I have known exactly one very high ability PhD student in a hard science to devote serious effort to learning to teach. He had to fight the department and go against his adviser to do it.

Some profs I have known seem to have developed as teachers after receiving tenure, when no longer under research performance pressure, and that might count as a benefit of it. Keeping professorships untenured and insecure would continue to discourage such development.

 

I recently met up with a bunch of guys from the University I used to work at. It was good to see some familiar faces still around, but also disappointing that a lot of of the under productive dead wood was still taking a salary. It's not like the latter were being controversial, or challenging mainstream physics, or generally doing much, but rather pursuing personal interests where the thrust of the Dept was another direction.

 

If I knew all the things then that I know now, I would have majored in English literature

 

That situation should be protected, in my opinion. The dead wood is overhead, and unavoidable by institutional means - probably, the best you can do is keep it from gumming up the genuine work, keep those guys out of the way (which aligns with their preferences as well, yes?).

Consider who will be making the actual hiring and firing decisions in a tenure free world - who will be the actual determiner of whether the interests pursued by this or that prof are aligned with the "thrust of the department", personal as opposed to socially (politically? economically?) valuable, consistent with the goals and objectives of the university, etc.

It won't be the competent, cutting edge, productive researchers in any given field. They're busy.