Teaching Without Tenure: Policies and Practices for a New Era (review)

Abstract

Higher education is in the midst of a great transformation. The modernist ideal of the university and its ivory towers bound by tradition and isolated from the fickle world of boom and bust has died an unfortunate death. What has emerged from the ashes is a new university that no longer wonders and winces from afar but is at the center of the information economy, subject to the ebb and flow of supply and demand, sensitive to the new ideals of customer service, and ultimately forced to shed its anachronistic ways to mirror the corporate world to which it feeds workers. As universities become more like corporations, the industry of higher education must appropriate many of the labor practices that characterize the ever changing economy. At the heart of this shift taking place in the division of labor in higher education is what many perceive to be a threat to the staple of tenure. The tenure system, legitimated by the American Association of University Professors in 1940, has afforded those who have satisfied the requirements set forth in the standard six-year probationary period, an insurance of long-term employment not rivaled in any other profession. Significant changes in the larger economy in addition to demographic shifts in the professoriate as well as in the student body have prompted universities and colleges to recruit instructional staff that will not ride the tenure-track. Teaching Without Tenure explores this new development in depth and raises many interesting questions about the future of the division of labor in higher education.