Conversing about Tenure with the Board of Regents

Henry Gonshak
English
Montana Tech-UM

This past January, I participated, along with a group of other academics representing various units in the Montana University System, in what we called "A Conversation on Tenure"--a presentation delivered in Helena to the Regents as part of a regular BOR meeting. (I was asked to take part because I'm currently chair of Montana Tech's Faculty Senate.) When I first learned that Deputy Commissioner of Higher Education, Joyce Scott, was organizing this event, my immediate response (one shared, I suspect, by many MUS professors) was to feel distinctly nervous. Why, I wondered, was the BOR suddenly so interested in "conversing" about tenure? Was this really just an elaborate ploy to give the BOR a chance to chip away at that most cherished of academic privileges? Or, in the most apocalyptic scenario I could devise, was the BOR, in fact, seeking to abolish tenure all-together?

If any MP readers shared my anxieties, relax. Now that the "Conversation on Tenure" is over, I think I can state with some certainty that the Regents have no interest in destroying--or even seriously eroding--tenure any time soon. In response to our presentation, the BOR most likely will issue a few recommendations, but they almost surely will involve tinkering with, rather than overhauling, the process (probably by making post-tenure review more uniform and rigorously enforced throughout the system--a good idea, in my opinion).

When I was corresponding later with Ray Ford, UM Faculty Senate Chair and one of the main organizers of the "conversation," he mentioned that a Missoula colleague had snidely dismissed the event as a "lovefest" between the faculty involved and the Regents. It's true that the deliberate intent of we academics who put this presentation together was to defend tenure not in the ways we normally support it among ourselves, but rather in a manner that the BOR was likely to understand and appreciate. Given that strategy, it's hardly surprising that a colleague would accuse us of pandering. And it's surely an important question whether tenure can, in fact, be defended in terms that both the MUS professorate and the BOR can embrace, or if such an effort is inherently contradictory. For a vital truth revealed to me by the "Conversation on Tenure" (as well as my term as Faculty Senate Chair) is that the MUS professorate and the BOR are, by and large, two quite distinct cultures, products of very different backgrounds based upon very different sets of values and beliefs (as I'll discuss). To some extent, the "Conversation on Tenure" disclosed the pitfalls inherent in any attempt by professors to bridge that gulf. On the other hand, if MUS profs are genuinely interested not merely in rhetorically displaying our immense learning and erudition, but rather in working productively with the Regents to further our own interests (as well as the interests of the MUS in general), then I think the "Conversation on Tenure," despite its flaws, provides something of a model for how that unglamourous but crucial process might proceed.

The presenters included three representatives from the University of Montana, two from MSU, one from MSU-Billings and two from Tech. As far as I can tell, the absence of participants from Western and Northern was due more to disinterest on the part of the faculty from those campuses than to any plot to exclude them (though I think some more effort could have been expended by the event's organizers to enlist the participation of those schools). Still, although Tech and MSU-Billings were aboard, this was clearly an event, like most Board of Regents' meetings, dominated (albeit benignly) by Bozeman and Missoula. The general format included eight presentations, which cumulatively surveyed the progress of a generic Professor X as he/she passed through the normal stages of a MUS academic career--from being hired at the assistant professor level to attaining emeritus status. I was asked to speak on promotion to full professor, being deemed a logical candidate since I'd personally endured this process last Spring.

I'm not sure who coined the term "conversation" for the title of our presentation, but, as soon became clear, this label wasn't idly chosen. From the start, Deputy CHE Scott stressed that if there was one thing the BOR couldn't abide, it was being lectured at by arrogant, long-winded academics. In sharp contrast, the presenters at our "conversation" were required to speak with haiku-like concision. Not only were we allowed to talk for no more than five minutes, but Scott actually brought a bell to the meeting, which she threatened to ring if any windy academic among us exceeded his or her time limit.

The brevity of our presentations was intended not only to ensure that the assembled Regents wouldn't lapse into coma, but also to provide time for them to respond with comments and questions, in the hope of generating "conversation". But I also strongly suspect that the term "conversation" was chosen because of the word's customarily benign and informal connotations. The event's planners seemed bent on not having the presentation devolve into a heated debate between the professors and the Regents--as it might have otherwise, given the contentious nature of the issues involved. I'm almost surprised we didn't call it a "Chat on Tenure"--though perhaps that would've been seen as taking cheery informality a bit too far.

Admittedly, the desire for casualness may have been somewhat in conflict with our equally fervent aim to organize an event that was glitzily "high-tech" in the manner of the standard corporate boardroom presentation. To this end, we amplified our talks with dense graphs, statistical tables and "flow charts"--beamed onto a screen behind the speaker via a "power-point" computer system. (Admittedly, since I'm an antediluvian English prof mired in computer illiteracy, I just eyeballed the audience and gave my presentation sans visual aids. Had some scamp been broadcasting hard-core porn behind me, I wouldn't have known.) While, as I've said, the event's conversational nonchalance and techno-wizardry were somewhat at odds, both approaches had a shared aim--to craft a presentation that was, to use the apt cliche, "user-friendly". We wanted to give the Regents things to look at other than mere talking heads, and to offer the kinds of "business-like" materials with which they were familiar.

This zeal for "user-friendliness," with its allied aversion to conflict, was built into the content, as well as the format, of the presentation. When I first learned of the event, I assumed that our defense of tenure would be based on the necessity of institutionally protecting academic freedom. I'd studied enough of the history of American higher education to know the dreadful conditions that had plagued college campuses in the dark days before the creation of tenure, when professors were routinely fired by administrators (frequently at the behest of local politicians and other community leaders) not just for professing radical views, usually of a leftwing bent, but often merely for expressing any sort of nonconformity whatsoever, even outside the classroom. And I'd read and written enough about the threat of "political correctness" in the contemporary university to know that, without faculty tenure protections, internal P.C. pressures could have a chilling effect on free inquiry and open discourse on many college campuses. Moreover, five years ago I'd experienced first-hand the crucial role played by tenure in safeguarding academic freedom, when I'd proposed a "Gay Studies" course at Montana Tech, only to be publicly accused by a local fundamentalist pastor of seeking to promote a "radical homosexual agenda" and to "turn" students gay. During the ensuing community furor, I'd worried about many things, but never about losing my job, since I knew that this was a text-book case of precisely what tenure had been created to protect.

However, I soon discovered that the main organizers of the "Conversation on Tenure" had little interest in making academic freedom a central theme. In his prefacing talk, UM Faculty Senate Chair Ray Ford summarized our approach when he explained that the presentation would focus on "the process, not the principles" of tenure. When I'd asked Ford beforehand why, exactly, we wouldn't be focusing on "principles," such as academic freedom, he'd explained that, "If we can show the Regents that the process of tenure is working well, then there's no need to get into principles." Clearly, this emphasis had the backing of our Commissioner of Higher Education, Richard Crofts. In his introduction to the booklet we produced (and distributed beforehand to the BOR), summarizing our "conversation," Crofts states: "While generally viewed by the public in terms of employment security for faculty, the value of tenure is far broader. Initially conceived at the beginning of this century to protect faculty freedom of speech--academic freedom or the right to responsibly present controversial information--the value of tenure has shifted to protect the mission of the college or university as much as it protects the individual." Amplifying Crofts' point in his own presentation, MSU Faculty Senate Chair and Professor John Amend raised the question, "What does tenure accomplish today?", and then listed a series of "accomplishments," which, while noting "protects academic freedom," included that benefit as just one among five others, most of which had ostensibly little to do with faculty free speech in the classroom: "provides advising for new faculty; protects institutional development; guarantees continuity in institution's programs; protects the integrity of the institution's mission; assures the institution's competitiveness for quality faculty." In sum, this list amounts to an argument that tenure promotes institutional stability and growth, since it ensures that highly qualified profs will remain employed at the institution, and that such profs will be happy and secure enough on the job that they'll work vigorously and imaginatively for the college--by mentoring junior faculty, and by creating new programs and then sticking around to guide those programs' developments. Moreover, Amend's reference to "[assuring] the institution's competitiveness for quality faculty" contains a veiled threat that if the MUS does ditch tenure, goods profs will start flocking en masse to rival states.

I assume many MP readers will be aghast at our defending tenure to the Regents in these terms. Admittedly, there is little difference between this case for tenure and the argument, say, for rewarding seniority at the corporate headquarters of IBM or General Motors; in both instances, the underlying rationale is that creating conditions conducive to "employee retention," free of the specter of imminent termination, is good not only for individual employees but also for the business as a whole. But is such an implicit parallel necessarily outrageous? After all, the Regents are largely business people (as I'll discuss); our defense of tenure was thus couched in a language which they'd not only easily grasp, but also perhaps adduce as evidence that academe might be a less alien world than they'd previously assumed.

Moreover, the organizational stability that blooms when employees enjoy job-security is, indeed, a good thing for all institutions, universities and corporations alike. One of my many complaints with the MUS's current funding model--whereby units make enrollment projections, and then must return funds to the state if those projections are not met--is that this model has proven in practice, unsurprisingly, to be a formula for institutional anarchy. When units fall short of their projections (as they invariably do, since there's no incentive to project low), they must respond to resulting budget deficits by various, increasingly drastic measures--raising teaching loads, increasing class sizes, denying pay raises, in the worst cases cutting faculty--all of which shatter institutional stability, penalizing both students and faculty. When the MUS is plagued by a funding system that breeds institutional chaos, perhaps MUS academics who stress how tenure promotes institutional stability aren't making such an ill-advised argument.

But before I succumb to any hobgoblins of foolish consistency, a few qualifications are in order. While the academic tenure/corporate seniority parallel drawn by the "conversation" was, I think, both reasonable and tactically astute, I'm nonetheless a bit uneasy with the comparison, given the dubious trend in academe toward a more "business-oriented" model of public higher education--premised on a fallacious view of "student as consumer," and exacerbated by the increasing academic reliance, as state funds dwindle, on corporate and industry support (invariably, with strings attached). Moreover, I do wish the "Conversation on Tenure" had focused a bit more on academic freedom. Even had the BOR dismissed such talk as a lot of ivory-towered blather (which was clearly the fear), I still think that would have been a risk worth taking, given the centrality of academic freedom to the university's raison d'être--unfettered intellectual inquiry. Finally, it's not hard to take Crofts' argument that tenure today "has shifted to protect the mission of the college...as much as it protects the individual," and read it as suggesting that tenure's protecting a college's mission is more important than its protecting individual faculty (whether that was the CHE's intention or not). The "conversation's" organizers could, I think, have done a better job clarifying that no such privileging of institutions over individuals was intended.

At times, moreover, the "Conversation on Tenure" did slip into defending tenure's value to an academic institution in terms implicitly at odds with any genuine defense of academic freedom. For example, after listing tenure's "accomplishments," John Amend concluded that, "Tenure was originally conceived to protect a faculty member's obligation to responsibly and honestly present controversial information.... However, it has evolved into one of the most effective tools the Regents have to guide a university or college's direction, and to protect the institution's mission from misguided internal or external efforts to shift its objectives.... The quickest way to change a departmental or institutional direction is to fire or penalize the faculty who are carrying out the current Regents-approved mission. Tenure, based on Regent-approved goals, will protect the integrity of the institution's mission." In other words, according to Amend faculty are tenured primarily because they are seen as upholding their institution's "Regents approved mission"; therefore, staffing colleges and universities with instructors tenured on this basis will ensure that the institution as a whole won't veer off this mandated course.

Even if Amend had dutifully included academic freedom in his earlier list of tenure's accomplishments, the implicit logic of his argument above directly conflicts with any real defense of academic freedom, since here tenure is defined as rewarding not professorial freethinking but rather its polar opposite, loyal conformity--in this case to the institution's "mission," which, since it's labeled "Regents-approved," is clearly seen as authorized (or at least firmly guided) from above. What if a faculty member disapproves of this collegiate mission? By such reasoning, wouldn't that be grounds for denying tenure? There seems no place in this schema for instructors who serve as campus gadflies in the venerable Socratic tradition, proffering contrarian views in fruitful tension with the college's professed mission in order to generate that lively "marketplace of ideas" which tenure was originally created to protect. This is, indeed, a vision of tenured prof as "company man".

While, in general, I wish the "Conversation on Tenure" had been more honest about potential tensions between defending tenure as supporting institutional stability and defending tenure as supporting academic freedom for faculty, I don't find these two goals intrinsically at odds. In fact, one might argue that, just as democracies that grant citizens free speech tend to be more politically and socially stable than do dictatorships which repressively stifle their peoples, so robust academic freedom actually ensures, rather than threatens, institutional stability in higher education. A muzzled faculty, after all, is a faculty sure to be disgruntled and so ripe for subversion, while an unmuzzled one is more likely to be contentedly productive. I wish, though, we'd made this argument in Helena, which would have upheld our basic claims without marginalizing the issue of academic freedom.

As I've suggested, while I don't believe this is official policy, Regents members (all appointed by the governor) tend to be prominent members of Montana's professional community, in particular the business world. (Clearly, there's also long been an effort when choosing BOR members to consider geographical diversity. Of late, there's been some attempt as well to account for ethnic and gender diversity; the current BOR, e.g., includes several female appointees and one Native American representative.)

When I first became chair of Tech's Faculty Senate and began regularly attending BOR meetings, the Regents' composition shocked me, since I'd assumed the board would be staffed exclusively by professional educators. I still find myself occasionally suspecting that the reason this isn't the case bears some relation to a knee-jerk antipathy among Montana politicians, especially conservatives (an antipathy clearly shared by the general public), against the so-called "Education Establishment"--caricatured as a bunch of impractical eggheads who surely can't be trusted to run their own affairs. No doubt such suspicions have a grain of truth.

Still, as my tenure as Senate chair has progressed, I've come to see that the appointment criteria does have some at least potential virtues. Since public higher education is an institution designed to serve the people of the state, there is surely a place for a body representing the taxpayers (who fund the system, after all), one meant to provide some degree of citizen oversight. Moreover, since one of the primary roles of the BOR is to handle the MUS's purse strings, perhaps it makes sense to entrust these financial duties to a group composed largely of people with successful business careers. Admittedly, the appointing of BOR members has often functioned, to varying degrees, as a form of political patronage. But even that clearly problematic practice isn't necessarily all bad, since Regents members with high-level political connections are likely to have the political clout needed to be successful MUS advocates to the legislature.

I think the value of the BOR, as it's currently constituted, became increasingly clear to many MUS professors and administrators when, several years back, there was an initiative on the ballot (backed by Governor Racicot) to replace both the BOR and the CHE with a Department of Higher Education simply incorporated into the governor's administration. Suddenly, even long-term critics of the BOR began to see how the body functioned as a vital buffer between the MUS and both the governor and the legislature, dispersing control of public higher education among a variety of mutually checking and balancing institutions.

What's crucial, however, is that a "citizen" board recognize that it lacks expertise in the daily running of academic institutions, and that, therefore, the BOR ought not overstep its bounds by trying to micromanage university business, in or out of the classroom. As for faculty, we must realize that, since most Regents are not professional educators, it is our job as part of a larger dialogue between the MUS and the BOR to explain the details of how institutions of higher learning operate. The "Conversation on Tenure" attempted to do precisely that.

Within these admittedly modest parameters, the event was a clear success. After we finished, several Regents showered us with compliments, praising the warm collegiality of the session, and thanking us for the information we'd provided about the workings of the tenure process, which they said would prove useful when they were called upon to defend tenure to their constituencies among Montana taxpayers. Possibly, if we'd staged a more highbrow, confrontationally principled defense of tenure the BOR might have responded less genially. Perhaps, roused to defensive anger, they'd even have sought to retaliate against us smug elitists by seeking to give tenure the ax!

True, my own presentation, on promotion to full professor, was rather less chummy than those of my colleagues, since I did raise a volatile topic otherwise absent from the discussion--namely, the MUS's system's current fiscal crisis (in my view caused largely, as I've said, by the system's absurd funding model). At Montana Tech, e.g., failure to meet enrollment projections has spawned a $460,000 budget deficit over the next two years. As a result, I stated in Helena, Tech profs applying now for full professorship are faced with a dismal Catch-22; on the one hand, they must meet higher standards for scholarly or research activity than was demanded in the past, but, on the other hand, because of the college's financial woes, they're also saddled with higher teaching loads and larger class sizes, giving them less time to actually do scholarship or research. I didn't feel that the Regents were offended by my frankness; if anything, I sensed (yes, perhaps a bit wishfully) that they found a least a modicum of blunt candor refreshing. In retrospect, I do think we could have talked more about the potentially destructive effects of the MUS's current fiscal crisis on the tenure process--in particular, the key issue of whether financial woes may make campuses less likely to tenure even qualified applicants--without self-defeatingly alienating the Regents.

Nonetheless, I think our basic tactic of savvy Realpolitick was correct. Of course, balancing the inevitable tension between pragmatism and principles is a never-ending struggle. By no means am I advocating that MUS profs, in dealing with the system's top-level administrators, adopt a policy of utterly amoral Machiavellianism. But I don't see this matter as "either/or." Rather, I think that, ideally, pragmatism can be placed at the service of principles. The main result, after all, of the "Conversation on Tenure" was that the MUS tenure system--which bestows academic freedom protections to the professorate--has been spared, at least for now, from any disastrous meddling by the Regents. If that's not an example of pragmatism at the service of higher principles, I don't know what is.


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