Tenure

Abstract

where arbitrary definitions may prevail. Here the context would be as practical and concrete as possible. When in the course of the tenure can didate's career should the question be asked, and by whom? Clearly, it should be asked initially at the point of hiring. Depending on the nature of the institution and the opening, the parameters of the question may be specified in advance, or they may be subject to negotiation. Much of the value of the question will be lost if it is not raised and renegotiated at least once during the candidate's pre-tenure years, although it should probably be frozen at some point before the actual tenure dossier is assembled to avoid con fusing the issues of need and merit. Nor is there any a priori reason why the length of the track leading to tenure should be fixed. There needs to be an agreed end point to avoid dithering. But a new tenure standard might result in more instances of shorter time to tenure and even some long-term, but less-than-lifetime, con tracts. Like all questions that go to the critical issue of academic quality, the one posed here needs to be asked, and answered, in the first instance by faculty. The appro priate faculty body in most cases will be the academic department, which is often subject to review by a campuswide facul ty body. The more interesting situation arises where the candidate is being re cruited for a special program within a de partment or reporting directly to a dean or chief academic officer, or where the candidate's interests shift before the tenure decision, in part perhaps as a result of changes in the institution itself. Here there may have to be a specially constituted faculty committee to ask and answer the question, again subject to campuswide review. Even where the locus of decision would not shift under this arrangement, the reformulated ques tion should produce some different answers?answers that would take fuller account of the pace of change in the institution. Could a process that defined tenure more precisely?and therefore in a more limited way for some aspirants?accom modate the slow pace of institutional change and the understandable resistance of bodies of tenured faculty, who might see their own contractual rights threat ened by changes for the rising generation of scholars? Would a precondition for a modified tenure policy be the breakdown of a rigid department structure, fully vest ed with budgetary and degree-granting authority? Or would new ways to define tenure themselves open up departmental structures? The short answer is that you never know until you try, and one way to try is through local experiments at institu tions where the tenured faculty is both secure enough and open-minded enough to make the attempt. It may be that the whole idea is either too radical or not radical enough to deal with the disjunction between the existing tenure system and institutional needs in an accelerating academic universe. The idea may be too radical to satisfy the tra ditionalism that tends to characterize fac ulties generally. It may not be radical enough because it would not deal with rigidities in the existing body of tenured faculty. In either event, a few experiments could suggest whether the approach had enough potential usefulness to be worth replicating further.