Harvard Conference Offers No New Insights
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.
Tenure, an institution as hallowed as
universities themselves, has been subject to a torrent of criticism in
recent years, forcing academics to decide whether it is a college’s
hallmark of academic excellence or the bane of its existence.
That’s how administrators and observers of university life saw it
at a day-long conference at Harvard University on October 9, where
defenders of tenure espoused its virtues as the seat and the symbol of
true academic freedom.
But its detractors criticized the current forms of tenure for being
not only costly to increasingly expensive institutions of higher
learning but also for fostering intellectual laziness among faculty.
Lifetime employment, they say, robs schools of much needed discretion
and prevents them from ejecting dead weight.
The truth may lie somewhere between the poles.
“We have a system that is not perfect, without question, a system
that is subject to challenge,” said Irwin Polishook, a defender of
tenure who is president of the Professional Staff Congress at the City
University of New York.
The conference — sponsored by the Project on Faculty Appointments
at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a three-year initiative
supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts — was designed to inform
journalists, primarily, about tenure and some of the pressing
employment-related issues in the academy. It opened with a lively
debate between two defenders and two detractors of tenure.
