Opinion | It should be easier to fire tenured faculty members (2024)

Academia is one of the few fields where employees can be granted tenure, or immunity to arbitrary removal. Tenure generally acts as a safeguard against outside influence on faculty research and also allows professors to engage in niche research areas or long-term studies that lack an immediate payoff. Though the tenure system incentivizes loyalty to an institution that in turn provides students with a more stable learning environment, it can also cause the quality of teaching to decline because of less job competition. Tenure succeeds in protecting academic freedom, enabling professors to publish controversial findings without threat to their livelihoods; however, it fails in promoting good teaching and should be modified to address such.

Tenure came out of the Labor Movementin the U.S., which saw widespread unionization of the workforce in a variety of fields in the late 19th and 20th centuries. While members of the emerging industrial workforce were concerned with safe working conditions and fair pay, the nation’s teachers and professors wanted protections from censorship and interference from third parties. In 1910, New Jersey became the first state to pass legislation preventing colleges from firing professors without just cause, according to Time Magazine.

In 1915, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)was founded and has refined tenure by issuing statements on the practice over the years. Tenure was largely codified by the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Many of the standards established by this statement remain in effect today, such as the maximum probationary period, or the amount of time before a professor hired on tenure track can be considered for it, set at seven years.

Now, in colleges and universities across the U.S., professors are oftentimes hired as assistant professors on tenure tracks. After a given probationary period, they become a candidate for promotion to associate professor, and upon approval by various parties that can include the department, college or school, university president and the board of visitors, tenure is granted to them. Subsequent promotion to full professorship requires further contributions to research and education and additional rounds of approval.

Few other occupations have the potential to tenure. One prominent example includes federal judges who are appointed to lifetime positionsby the president, which enables them to issue rulings unswayed by public opinion. Academia is perhaps the largest field that enjoys the privilege, however, as federal judges make up a far smaller share of the workforce with only 870 positionsacross the Supreme Court, nine courts of appeals and 94 district courts. On the other hand, there were 325,675 tenured professorsin 2021, with another 138,067 on track to earning tenure, according to the Chronicle for Higher Education. Like federal judges, who are not completely safe from removal with the possibility of impeachment, tenured professors can still be fired in extreme circ*mstances.

Federal judges’ sole responsibility is to issue fair rulings. The responsibilities of a professor, on the other hand, are twofold: research and teaching. While tenure promotes good research, it doesn’t necessarily promote good teaching. The practice incentivizes professors to concentrate on their research, which may or may not have any practical application, and gives them the opportunity to slack off in the classroom. Though many professors enjoy teaching — and wouldn’t have made it through their probationary period if they hadn’t — the system allows for this possibility, which is ultimately a disservice to students.

Guidelines for promotion and tenure application at JMU are outlined in the faculty handbook, and individual departments have their own department-specific guidelinesas well. Ultimately, the board of visitors of any given public university in Virginia has final authority to approve promotions and grant tenure to professors. At JMU, of the 1,047 professors it employs, 639 are tenured — including professors and associate professors, and 159 are on a tenure track.

Every year, all faculty members at JMU are subject to performance evaluations. If a tenured faculty member’s evaluations from two of the past three years reveal that their performance has been unsatisfactory, their academic unit head will recommend remediation. The evaluations must then be reviewed themselves by the academic unit personnel advisory committee, which submits their review to the dean. From there, the dean makes the determination whether the professor will be required to go through remediation. According to the faculty handbook, the remediation plan must be developed by Feb. 1 of the year after a tenured professor’s second unsatisfactory evaluation, and the faculty member will have the remainder of that semester and an additional year to complete the plan.

Endless rounds of bureaucratic paper shuffling and over five years later, beginning with the first year the professor received an unsatisfactory evaluation, the professor may receive sanctions such as a reduction of their salary or dismissal if the provost still deems their performance as unsatisfactory. This means up to 12 semester’s worth of students may be subject to poor teaching before a tenured professor can be removed.

When asked if academic tenure made students’ educational experience better or worse, the majority of respondents to a Breeze Instagram poll indicated that it worsened the experience (69% of 48 respondents). Respondents were split over whether the practice was fair, with 51% of 51 saying it was. One user justified their response by saying, “Just because they’ve been around long doesn’t mean they are good at their jobs” while another suggested that “faculty work well over 40 hours per week to produce high-quality education & research.”

The tenure system shouldn’t be completely abandoned, however. Academic freedom is vital to the development of better technology, medicine and a better society overall. It also allows professors to even criticize the government, such as in 2015, when a professor at Virginia Tech was crucial in discovering high levels of leadin the water supply in Flint, Michigan, and challenged local and state authorities. Tenure should be adjusted, though, so that it’s easier for tenured faculty members to be fired for poor performance in the classroom.

There are too many hoops to jump through in JMU’s procedure for addressing unsatisfactory performance of tenured faculty in particular. By making the threat of dismissal more immediate for tenured professors, students would be at lower risk of a negative educational experience.