The new issue of the AAUP's magazine, Academe is out, and in it is a forum on tenure and its discontents. It's an interesting forum, not least because it begins with two strongly worded cautionary paragraphs from NYU professor Andrew Ross:

Speaking recently on a New York University panel about academic labor, I took a question from a respected, tenured colleague who suggested it might be time to reconsider tenure. We shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge the stultifying impact it can have on intellectual and institutional life, she observed, and we should debate whether, on balance, it is worth preserving. A surge of AAUP fundamentalism coursed through my body, and I had to fight to stem it. I'd be happy to have that conversation, I replied politely, just as long as there were no senior administrators in the room. Later that day, during a different NYU conference about academic freedom, former AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen observed, with regret, that tenure probably had no future in this country, and he suggested that the best way of preserving academic freedom in the long run might be to "decouple" it from tenure and make it a legal, or constitutional, right. Three days before, Inside Higher Ed had run a story about how some "tenured radicals" (among them Brown University's Claire Potter, another respected colleague [sic--Potter teaches at Wesleyan]) were publicly calling for the reassessment of tenure as gold standard. The article quoted AAUP president Cary Nelson's retort that this position was "insane."

One might be forgiven for concluding that someone had put something in the academic watercooler that week. In reality, however, it is not rare these days to hear this kind of open, semipublic questioning of tenure coming from progressive quarters. Nor is it uncommon to hear incredulous rearguard responses. With the tenured ranks shrinking daily, there is no ducking this kind of dialogue. Nor, if truth be told, should we be afraid of administrators listening in; they probably do need to hear the whole discussion. In that respect, this issue of Academe is especially timely.

His conclusion resonates with points I have made here many times:

.. we cannot abstract academic freedom--the fruit of tenure--from the social conditions under which it is exercised and which make it possible. That would be the thinnest kind of laissez-faire thinking--what, in other circumstances, we might be tempted to describe as rights without responsibilities. In saying this, I am not suggesting that we attach conditions to the exercise of academic freedom--I am, as much as anyone, a fundamentalist when it comes to upholding these rights. But such beliefs should impel us to reflect on the cost, to others, by which these rights are maintained. A workplace in which the rights of a shrinking minority are secured by the precarious labor of disenfranchised parttimers, deprofessionalized graduate teachers, and a panoply of subcontracted service workers--blue collar, pink collar, white collar, and no collar--is not a morally sustainable environment.

During the 1990s, a great many schools implemented post-tenure review hurriedly, without clearly defined goals, workable procedures, or mechanisms for review. Those policies were asked to accomplish tremendous--and potentially conflicting--goals having to do with faculty enhancement and development, on the one hand, and individual and institutional accountability, on the other. In a very real sense, the future of higher education as we know it--certainly the future of tenure--depends on the success of post-tenure review. And yet, with rare exceptions, schools are not doing the essential work of studying how their policies are implemented; of determining whether, and on what terms, they are effective; and of revising both their policies and their procedures when and as needed. They should be doing all these things as a matter of course; their failure to do so shows how problematic accountability actually is.

The little information we do have about post-tenure review suggests that the system quite readily and regularly suffers in terms of conceptualization and implementation. Take Virginia. State law requires all public colleges and universities to conduct post-tenure review. And yet a 2004 evaluation at Virginia's sixteen public campuses found that two institutions had not conducted a single post-tenure review during the previous five years, a finding that raised questions about whether these institutions were in compliance with the law and with their own policies. Then there is Colorado, which found in the wake of the Ward Churchill affair that its post-tenure review policy, which had been in effect since 1997, had utterly failed to achieve both its developmental and its consequential goals. As then-president Hank Brown wrote, post-tenure review "was particularly problematic. Accountability for faculty performance was lacking, documentation of individual faculty strengths and weaknesses was insufficient, and there was no meaningful system of incentives and sanctions." Colorado has since committed to regularly assessing its post-tenure review policy and practice.

A 1997 study of post-tenure review at the University of Hawaii at Manoa found similar problems with a policy that had been in effect--and had gone unexamined--since 1987. Adopted to "head off legislative interest in university personnel issues pertaining to tenured faculty," Hawaii's policy was poorly written and badly implemented. The study found that post-tenure review neither revitalized faculty nor removed those who were irremediable; it offered no rewards and imposed no sanctions; and while it succeeded in keeping legislators appeased, it did not actually help improve either individual careers or institutional functioning. "The lessons learned from this study of the University of Hawaii at Manoa not only serve as a wake-up call to the campus to improve the process," the authors concluded, "but also provide evidence to other institutions that post-tenure review policies and procedures require periodic reevaluation by both faculty and central administration in order to ensure that faculty enjoy fulfilling lifetime careers while sustaining their institutions' vitality and public accountability."

Taken together, the findings in Virginia, Colorado, and Hawaii suggest that compliance and consistency are perennial issues, and that failure to institute systematic outcomes assessment for post-tenure review has quite predictably resulted in the institutionalization of problems. These studies provide a telling context for an astonishing fact: according to a 1999 poll conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, less than 6 percent of faculty members strongly agree that "post-tenure review has impacted faculty performance."

The findings also suggest that post-tenure review has been relatively ineffective as either an incentive system or a disciplinary tool. Without adequate resources and support, post-tenure review cannot offer meaningful rewards to outstanding faculty; without strongly framed provisions for handling persistently underperforming faculty, and without equally strong disciplinary and dismissal policies to support those provisions, post-tenure review cannot realize its role as a mechanism of accountability. All it can be under such conditions is a ritualistic exercise in rubberstamping, what the Hawaii study calls "virtual" review. And while a largely inconsequential process may result from what the AAUP recommends, it is not what faculty members want. As the Hawaii study found, faculty were eager for their "toothless" post-tenure review process to incorporate both "carrots" and "sticks."

Existing information about posttenure review suggests that the academy has responded to public calls for accountability largely with form, rather than substance. For a time, perhaps, the cosmetic adoption of a pro forma post-tenure review process worked. Legislators were satisfied, and ominous discussions about abolishing tenure were kept at bay. But today, as the AAUP and others have discovered, public faith in tenure is strikingly low. Post-tenure review has not been taken seriously by those charged with implementing it, and as a result, the policies that were hastily put into place years ago have for the most part been allowed to languish unexamined, unsupported, and unimproved. Post-tenure review has not restored public confidence in academic accountability. And while that fact should be no surprise, it should be cause for concern.

It is time to review post-tenure review. Institutions need to set clear, consistent criteria for what post-tenure review ought to do and measure whether colleges and universities live up to those criteria. From state to state, from college to university, from public institution to private, it is time to find out what schools are doing in the name of post-tenure review, and to identify--through real experience--what does and does not work. How helpful it would be for institutions to share how policy translates into practice. And how vital it is to know whether schools are successfully balancing the prerogatives of development and accountability. Only then will it be possible to say that the tenure system has begun to honor the AAUP’s foundational definition of academic freedom as a set of "duties correlative with rights."