Bye, Bye Tenure?

I'm really curious as to what Stanley Kurtz could be thinking here about the need for "a serious campaign to eliminate academic tenure" starting with "a fairly conservative-leaning legislature, in a state with its own university system." Suppose we started with Texas, a conservative state with a major public university. And suppose the University of Texas abolished tenure because National Review writers and the Texas state legislature wanted to subject Longhorn professors to more direct political supervision. What would happen?

Texas would just rapidly become a much, much worse university -- one with huge problems recruiting faculty and students. Even your more talented conservative and conservative-sympathetic professors wouldn't want to teach there. The school would rapidly become a backwater, and this would have potentially devastating effects on the local economy.

Comments

You've had some funny typos before, but "Stanley Kurtz ... thinking" is a real howler. Proofread more carefully in the future, please.

Posted by ostap | July 30, 2007 4:43 PM

So is this an argument against doing away with tenure at UT? Hard to tell. I mean, maybe Regent needs a southwestern campus.

Posted by strannix | July 30, 2007 4:44 PM

I'm against abolishing tenure -- after all, there's no reason why it should be easier to fire a full professor than a DMV clerk. That said, would abolishing tenure really hurt UT that much? MD Anderson is part of the UT system, right? Would its cancer center all of a sudden not be world class if tenure goes away?

Posted by Fred | July 30, 2007 4:48 PM

Would its cancer center all of a sudden not be world class if tenure goes away?

Do you mean, before or after the newly appointed dean fires all the professors who won't sign onto a statement of belief in Intelligent Design?

Posted by Anderson | July 30, 2007 4:54 PM

No! No! Don't you see, Matt? Eliminating tenure and allowing the free market to operate freely would cause professors to become more competitive, and the quality of education would improve while the cost would go down!

Or something like that!

Posted by James Gary | July 30, 2007 4:56 PM

It would be pretty difficult for a university without tenure to compete in the free market that conservatives claim to admire in other contexts. Furthermore, this would spill over into fields far removed from the humanities professors that reactionaries hate so much. This feature alone ensures that tenure will persist among higher ranked universities.

Add in the likelihood of professors getting fired on explicitly political grounds, and having "conservative legislatures" dictate hiring practices, and you'd drive quality people away across the ideological spectrum. This may well be a feature for reactionaries, as it would enhance their proportional share of the jobs. The rest of us would view such an outcome as suboptimal.

Posted by Marc | July 30, 2007 4:56 PM

The answer is simple Matt, they don't care about the quality of the education. In fact the worst the education in public universities, the more valuable the Ivy League sheepskin will be for their kids and grandkids.

Posted by Rob | July 30, 2007 4:59 PM

I'll grant there are problems with tenure--some folks coast. But do you really think that allowing bureaucrats without the pertinent academic background or even folks with degrees in education making personnel decisions in say philosophy or political science or the arts won't have an affect upon academic institutions? On what students are exposed to? Think the Bush Adminstration and the way its politicized just about everything. Think the way health care decisions get made. Think every child left behind. Think abstinence only education.

Posted by jeri | July 30, 2007 5:00 PM

Makes perfect sense to me. Conservatives don't like education: never have, never will. Witness the massive anti-intellectual bent of their base.

Whether it's defunding public education through charter schools or ending tenure at the university level, the ultimate goal is to restrict access to the rich and privileged. Further reducing social mobility is merely a pleasant side-effect.

Posted by faux facsimile | July 30, 2007 5:00 PM

Embedded in the essay is a call for a public-relations campaign spearheaded by various conservative groups to convince everyone that eliminating tenure is the #1 priority.

What's funny is the nature of the complaint Kurtz has. Academics with problems about tenure will say that tenure protects the unproductive. Those who, when non-tenured, would lose their jobs because they aren't bringing in money, are able to stay on at universities long past the point at which they are an asset to the department. By contrast, Kurtz wants to eliminate tenure to get rid of the productive faculty that he doesn't like.

One of the great ironies of the Ward Churchill tempest is that he would still have a job today had he simply stopped publishing once he was granted tenure.

I should also add that in the science, many, many academics do function as Kurtz would prefer-- with long term contracts. As long as they bring in grant money, universities are happy to let them keep an office and give them a title like "research scientist." These scientists are happy because they get to be at a top rated institution they enjoy hanging around at and get to surround themselves with good students and faculty, even though they wouldn't be able to get a faculty appointment there. Tenure is one of the few pieces of leverage that 2nd-tier universities have to offer in order to attract top-flight researchers. I, myself, knew a research scientist at Cal-Tech who accepted a position as a professor at Drexel, not because he was fired from Cal-Tech, but the stability of a hard-money position and tenure was an offer he couldn't refuse.

So, yes, Fred-- plenty of researchers can be lured from all over the country to come to UT with the promise of tenure. Without it, they figure, "I like my current city, and I'm close to my friends and family. Why pick up and leave just to get a non-tenured position at UT?" Presumably, of course, UT has dozens of non-tenured researchers in the cancer center already, anyway, of course. But they're at a competitive disadvantage when trying to attract faculty if they can't offer tenure to people they want to attract.

Posted by Tyro | July 30, 2007 5:01 PM

Here's what I don't understand about Kurtz's argument: if you really believe that the hiring practices at universities are controlled by leftist strongmen, wouldn't you expect the first victims of a firing spree to be...conservative professors? Maybe Kurtz believes you could institute the changes in such a way that administrators would have all the authority - but this is even more unlikely than eliminating tenure itself.

Posted by jesse | July 30, 2007 5:03 PM

And there is always the alternative of much higher pay--how much is tenure worth in dollars per year? I'd guess, at the top end, it's probably double; however, at junior levels, it wouildn't cost much--you'd just have university staffed with those just unable to get a job anywhere else who would leave as soon as they became marketable, unless you offered to double the competition's payrate.

Similarly, how much is it worth to the Texas legislature to be rid of those infernal liberals? My guess is very little until two or three of their favorites left for the greener pastures of high pay AND tenure.

And, Fred, why not make the professors civil servents and subject to the same standards as DMV clerks?

Posted by zaleriana | July 30, 2007 5:03 PM

If they bailed on tenure here in Colorado, I'd most certainly head into the private sector or require a huge pay raise in compensation to stay on faculty.

For the majority of faculty in the non-kook departments (i.e. "studies" departments and their ilk), tenure is a reward for displaying your ability to be a contributing scholar in your discipline, not an idealogical gatekeeper. Publish in the top journals (i.e. bust your ass establishing yourself for your first 6 years), be a good teacher and be a good colleague. I've never received a signal that my chances at tenure depend on anything other than those 3 criteria, and ultimately the publishing in top peer-reviewed journals is the biggest threshold.

The effect on the sciences and other fields where the private sector is more lucrative (in strictly dollar terms) would be disastrous. In their desire to hold up Ward Churchill as an example of all that's wrong with tenure, I don't think Kurtz or Bauerlein are thinking this one through entirely (shocking, I know).

Posted by TheF79 | July 30, 2007 5:06 PM

There are many, many reasons why tenure needs to be preserved, the most important being the reason the tenure exists in the first place, to protect professors' freedom to voice unpopular opinions. (Of course, that's precisely why Kurtz wants to do away with it.)

Theres a less obvious one that I think needs to be spelled out, though. Professors make significantly less than professions that require as much education as they do, lawyers and doctors. Part of the incentive to spend 4 years in undergrad, perhaps 2 more in a masters and then at least 6 years in a doctoral program is the job security.

Posted by Freddie | July 30, 2007 5:07 PM

Ummm...is higher ed in the US really in need of radical reform? I mean, isn't our university system, as a whole, stronger than that in any other country? Can any country other than the US boast more than 2 schools capable of cracking our top 30? I know that even succesful education systems can be tweaked in a positive direction but our junior college and 4 year college systems seem to be doing just fine. Unless, of course, this is just a reform designed to change the ideological composition of campus faculty. Couldn't be that brazen though could it?

Posted by Citizen (World) | July 30, 2007 5:08 PM

"MD Anderson is part of the UT system, right? Would its cancer center all of a sudden not be world class if tenure goes away?"

Medical academia appears to be abandoning tenure already. It has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the economics of medical education and research.

Posted by Bill Gardner | July 30, 2007 5:11 PM

Ok, let's first say nobody really cares about the academics at UT, if you gave them the choice of sweeping the Nobel Prizes or winning back to back Football Championships - we all know what the answer is going to be.

The top level college professorship is such a sweet deal, they'll still do it tenure or not. It's a buyers market. The only people who'll leave UT is to move up the pecking order.

This country doesn't have a shortage of college professors.

Posted by Dervin | July 30, 2007 5:12 PM

Ummm...is higher ed in the US really in need of radical reform? I mean, isn't our university system, as a whole, stronger than that in any other country?

Our higher education system is without doubt the best in the world. And it's not close.

Posted by Freddie | July 30, 2007 5:13 PM

I'm in favor of keeping tenure (I'm not going to get into why right now) but there may be a serious flaw in Matt's analysis of how eliminating tenure at, say, UT would fail: The demand for academic jobs _vastly_ outstrips the supply of such jobs. That demand is severe enough that it's my impression that large quantities of highly qualified applicants never land an academic job. Even if UT dropped to the bottom of every job seeker's wishlist, there would still be more than enough qualified people to fill the positions, and those people would probably be practically indistinguisghable from the faculty that would have been recruited under the tenure system.

The prospective students don't care about tenure, they care about getting good faculty, and the basic quality of the faculty wouldn't change. There might be a small chilling effect on freedom of political speech by professors in the classroom, but I suspect the incidence of important political speech in the classroom is vastly over-reported by the conservative movement. I can't remember a single incident of professors making political speeches when I was an undergrad at Brandeis and Dartmouth, and if they did it was trivial stuff that had no impact on me. That small chilling effect, while unfortunate, wouldn't have a real impact on the prestige of the school or the quality of the education.

Bear in mind as well that Tenure is the most important for the mediocre professors -- the great professors aren't going to lose their jobs anyway, and the definition of mediocre professors is that they are roughly interchangeable. You don't really risk losing access to great professors because those professors don't require the protection of the tenure system anyway.

The danger of abolishing tenure is to the individual faculty members and to the academic disciplines as wholes once the loss of tenure becomes widespread.

Posted by Galen | July 30, 2007 5:13 PM

Our higher education system is without doubt the best in the world. And it's not close.

It also skews leftie/Dem/Northern, even among the hards, so bug not a feature.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 30, 2007 5:18 PM

The top level college professorship is such a sweet deal, they'll still do it tenure or not.

College professorships are a sweet deal because they have tenure. Top level universities already have plenty of people milling around without tenure.

Harvard, effectively, didn't offer tenure to incoming faculty. The idea was that you stayed for 7 years, left, and then maybe 10 years later, if you had become top in your field, they'd call you up and invite you to come back as tenured faculty. For the most part, of course, this wouldn't happen. But they could do that, because it was Harvard (less so, today, because professors have working spouses who can't just pick up their lives to come to Harvard and no one wants to tell his or her spouse, "yes, i got a faculty position, but we will have to move in 7 years, so don't get too comfortable.")

I suppose, though, if Harvard and Berkeley and UT eliminated tenure, they could probably get away with it. However, if University of Southwestern Texas and University of Oklahoma eliminated tenure, their departments would get devastated. Why, obviously, would anyone go to those universities if there was no promise of tenure? They could be perfectly happy as a "research scientist" over at UT or Northwestern.

Posted by Tyro | July 30, 2007 5:21 PM

UT has a top-flight business school. If they abolished tenure, I guarantee you would see 95% of the faculty leave.

Posted by walt | July 30, 2007 5:25 PM

The University of Texas has already demonstrated its ability to purge itself of tenured lefty faculty. Even those who are doing Nobel prize-winning work. (See Hermann Muller.)

Of course, that was awhile ago. It couldn't happen again, I'm sure.

Posted by Tom Ames | July 30, 2007 5:27 PM

Let's see, the academic labor market is a) oversupplied and b) inflexible. That seems a pretty good prospect for introducing a) competition and b) flexibility.

Posted by bjk | July 30, 2007 5:30 PM

Seems to me the only way you could eliminate tenure is by doing it across the board, not just at one school.

Posted by Bill | July 30, 2007 5:33 PM

Ok, let's first say nobody really cares about the academics at UT, if you gave them the choice of sweeping the Nobel Prizes or winning back to back Football Championships - we all know what the answer is going to be.

Interestingly, this is not true. The UT system is one of the better-funded state university system and has become more so in recent years while many coastal states have been cutting back on public higher ed. A few years back, Texas was aggressively recruiting faculty from the University of Massachusetts with offers of big raises and better-funded departments.

The Texas legislature knows perfectly well the economic benefit of strong public universities, even if their yahoo supporters on the Right do not.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | July 30, 2007 5:33 PM

"their desire to hold up Ward Churchill as an example of all that's wrong with tenure"

Ward Churchill had tenure, and got fired anyway. Is tht really the right's notion of all that's wrong with tenure?

Posted by rea | July 30, 2007 5:35 PM

UT-Austin's McCombs school of business is a top-20 b-school. The academic crown jewel of Texas is M.D. Anderson, which is arguably the best cancer research center in America.

Since we all seem to agree that the U.S. has the best higher education in the world, perhaps it's worth remembering what the late Milton Friedman had to say about this. He said that the difference in quality between our universities and our k-12 schools was because of the greater competition between public and private schools at the university level, versus the dominance of public education at the k-12 level. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Posted by Fred | July 30, 2007 5:36 PM

The people who would really get screwed by an untenured faculty are the grad students. Like it or not, grad students still operate in the archaic system of mentoring, hazing, subservience, and dependency. (Yes, most grad students are becoming more professionalized, in response to the cost of education, but structurally, their position remains what it was forty years ago.) So if the professors who are supposed to serve as advisors and directors keep gadding off to follow the next big contract---or worse, keep getting fired---the grad students are pretty much stuck in a program without the kind of support they need.

Posted by Jackmormon | July 30, 2007 5:38 PM

Texas would just rapidly become a much, much worse university -- one with huge problems recruiting faculty and students.

Hmmm. Is this true? I'm not sure? You might have a more difficult time attracting the better professors, but you would also have an easier time firing the worst professors. Does the former outweigh the latter? Perhaps, on net, you have in increase in quality? I don't know. Why does Matthew think he does?

Posted by Al | July 30, 2007 5:41 PM

I agree about how doing away with tenure would be bad. As for the effects a declining university would have on the economy, that's a little more debatable: http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/22/growth

Posted by noumenalself | July 30, 2007 5:49 PM

This also wouldn't work unless you convinced Europe to get rid of tenure at the same time.

I bet further that if you got rid of tenure, you'd find very quickly that something equivalent would have arisen to take its place.

Posted by grumpy realist | July 30, 2007 5:50 PM

Bouncing this around a little more in my head as I procrastinate, I think this would be a consequence of abolishing tenure: better-paid and better-treated grad students; higher-paid entry-level professors. Doesn't the tenure system prompt everyone below that level in academia to eat more sh*t than they would otherwise?

Posted by Fred | July 30, 2007 6:04 PM

Al:

Does the former outweigh the latter? Perhaps, on net, you have in increase in quality? I don't know. Why does Matthew think he does?

I'm guessing he's basing it on the experience of mankind through all recorded history.

Posted by grh | July 30, 2007 6:12 PM

Academic spouse here (and one who just took a 50% pay cut to move where the PhD was offered a tenure-track job--which, in turn, will make up about 50% of that pay cut).

First, at research institutions like UT, whether or not there are tenured professors will not affect the day-to-day teaching in the slightest, at least in 80+ of classes. That teaching is done by grad students and visiting adjunct lecturers, and it will continue to be done by them regardless of what senior faculty members you get in there (i.e., tenured or not). If anything, the quality of the teaching will drop as the more capable adjuncts (who now go to UT in the hopes that they'll be an "inside" candidate should a job open up) start going to different schools where that chance exists.

Second, there is simply no comparison between tenure-track and non-tenure-track jobs for applicants. The former are the Holy Grail. If you get one, you jump at the opportunity and move there immediately--as my wife's diss advisor told her, don't even bother going on the market if you aren't willing to move your family across the country at great financial hardship in the unlikely even that a t-t job opens up. Non-tenure-track jobs, on the other hand, are relatively easy to get. In the big city we just moved from, there was one open in her (not incredibly popular) field at virtually every school with more than 1000 students, and multiple openings at some places--with pay that exceeds some of the t-t jobs. But nobody wants them. The average time at those positions is about 2.5 years, and you are treated like dirt, which in turn kills your research--and makes a permanent position impossible to get.

Seriously, I have a hard time thinking about what non-t-t job you would take over a t-t job. Maybe a three year contract at a top tier Ivy (they don't work adjuncts quite as hard) vs. a t-t at a non-big-name Catholic school (notorious sweatshops). But even that is a bit iffy, and I know plenty of people who chose the latter over the former (well, only one actual person--she picked t-t at St. Joe's over a multiyear contract at Princeton).

The reason? If you get tenure, it really is the best possible job in the world. You teach approximately six months out of the year (when sabbaticals are considered), the publishing requirements are nonexistent (though most do continue to publish), and you really can only be fired for actual wrongdoing. If a big research school like UT cut tenure, I guarantee you that it would see a drastic exodus of the best senior faculty, as well as a number of the adjunct faculty who are hoping for an inside spot. And when the new class of job applicants apply, you'll see jobs there drop in order of preference behind tenure-track jobs (anywhere), possible-inside-job, and even better-standard-of-living jobs.

Posted by Joe | July 30, 2007 6:12 PM

Focusing just on law faculty, what is wrong with term limits - like 3-5-7-9-11-13 years? Parties negotiate what term they want. Requiring the prof to take tenure as opposed to a term limit is probably suboptimal. With auction pricing, or baseball arbitration, TX could avoid driving away good faculty.

It could also help to have written performance metrics - such as articles/books/blogs/briefs/websites that folks actually read and cite, meaningful interdisciplinary work, meaningful work from a cross-national perspective.

If a prof wants a contract to spend x hears in TX, plus x years abroad, plus x years visiting elsewhere in the US, plus x% of his/her time in private ventures, in lieu of tenure, why insist on what was done at Oxford in the 1700's?

Profs who expect they will do their best academic work in their first 13-15 years after law school may want to program themselves for some other activity thereafter (such as bench work, law office, politics, government office, in house counsel, etc.). Why should TX object to making that work?

Posted by cfw | July 30, 2007 6:14 PM

"Focusing just on law faculty"

Law is an aberration (maybe with medicine). Most law profs could go into private practice and triple their (already substantial as far as academics go) salaries. Heck, a lot of them have a private practice on the side. Thus, career stability is much less important than humanities/social sciences/arts/etc. who don't have the attractive alternatives.

But even still, I find it difficult to believe that anyone would pick a term contract over lifetime tenure, unless the money increase was really good (and thus, UT would probably WANT to give a t-t position instead, given the cost would be dramatically lower). You have to remember, given that tenured faculty frequently move schools or otherwise leave academia, the cost to the university of giving tenure (i.e., there is a X% chance the person will stay long enough so they aren't productive) is much less than the cost of, well, paying enough to make a non-t-t position attractive.

Posted by Joe | July 30, 2007 6:27 PM

A few anecdotes: I have a few friends who had to choose between a post-doc at a top-five department and a tenure-track job at second-tier departments; all went for the tenure-track job. Another friend spent years in a top-five department on soft money; he ended up going to a second-tier department as a chaired professor. I was offered a soft money position at a top-20 department a couple of years ago (I'm in a second-tier department, at a guess somewhere between 25 and 50), but it would have cost them a lot more than 50% of my current salary to make the move worthwhile.

A general observation: One of the benefits of having tenure is the freedom to take certain risks that wouldn't be attractive otherwise. Writing a book, for example; switching research areas; pursuing ideas that may take a few years before progress is apparent, ideas that may not pan out at all. Long-term contracts might address this issue, but I'd have to think very hard about whether, even on a ten-year contract, it would be worth risking a couple of years of reduced productivity on an idea that might not work out in the end.

Posted by RSA | July 30, 2007 6:46 PM

The people who would really get screwed by an untenured faculty are the grad students.

Just to switch sides for a moment, one of the problems with academia is that there are too many Ph.D.s coming onto the market. As a consequence, if a lack of tenure made graduate school a more difficult if not intolerable proposition, fewer people would do it, thus creating less competition for the limited number of academic jobs available.

(yes, it would make more sense to figure out a way to reduce the number of graduate students and postdocs within the structure of the tenure system, but that's a different matter)

Quick question though, for those, like Kurtz, saying we should get rid of tenure: what, exactly is the problem, in your minds, with tenure?

Posted by Tyro | July 30, 2007 7:01 PM

Given the political clout that UT has in the Texas Legislature, and the sanity and effectiveness of the legislators on the relevant committees--Scott Hochberg (D) and Lois Kolkhorst (R) come to mind--I seriously doubt Kurtz's little fantasy is likely to happen for UT.

Posted by Kenneth Fair | July 30, 2007 7:26 PM

OK so I'm clearly biased, being a tenured Prof. at a top-tier institution, but Kurtz is clueless.

Kurtz's problem with tenure stems from folks like Ward Churchill. There are many conservatives who have managed to convince themselves that academia is swimming with Ward Churchill clones. I have no idea where this notion comes from, but it's ridiculous.

In any case, Matt's absolutely right about the impact on UT. Even if the changes were grandfathered in as Kurtz suggests, they would have a very difficult time recruiting new top-notch faculty. Many of the top institutions raid faculty from other schools. Without tenure, that would be next to impossible.

Posted by ProfD | July 30, 2007 7:37 PM

As a spouse of a tenure-track academic, I can definitely say that we wouldn't have moved to where we are now if tenure had not been a possibility. They would have had to pay her about 250% of what they offered her for us to have otherwise considered the move, which took us far away from family, friends, and familiar cultural surroundings.
So, my spouse's students surely would have missed out on a great prof with a unique perspective if tenure hadn't entered the consideration.
I just want to put out my story as evidence of one of the benefits of tenure: the security it offers definitely helps to spread people around. With spread of people comes spreading of new ideas.
That in itself could be considered progressive, which may point to another reason why some conservatives don't like it. In the end, what are conservatives "conserving" anyway?

Posted by Aaron G. | July 30, 2007 7:44 PM

Just to switch sides for a moment, one of the problems with academia is that there are too many Ph.D.s coming onto the market. As a consequence, if a lack of tenure made graduate school a more difficult if not intolerable proposition, fewer people would do it, thus creating less competition for the limited number of academic jobs available.

As someone who sat out the dot-com boom in vain and ultimately fruitless pursuit of a PhD, thank you for saying that. Something has to be done to reduce the numbers of wide-eyed innocents chasing pipe dreams; I didn't realize until I was well into my program that I would be lucky to find work anywhere, let alone in the big city I longed for.

I still believe in tenure, though. Grad school and the following years--it can be years of fellowships and lectureships to get a tenure-track job, and tenure generally requires six years of work--are grueling. Tenure is the one and only carrot, and its removal would mean people would have to actively compete in a tiny field for literally their entire professional lives. No way could academia attract the best talent without it. Tenure is what makes academia worth the sacrifice of your youth.

Posted by Mike B. | July 30, 2007 7:52 PM

Quick question though, for those, like Kurtz, saying we should get rid of tenure: what, exactly is the problem, in your minds, with tenure?

Good question. I'd also like to know why the proposed alternative always seem to be limited-duration contracts rather than making professors regular salaried employees. I wonder when Kurtz's contract comes up, and by what criteria his bosses will decide to renew or not renew it?

Posted by RSA | July 30, 2007 7:56 PM

I may be wrong but I think that UT has no tenure for several years already, as duly legislated in Austin, and quasi-tenured faculty have a review every 6 years or so.

However, from what I have heard, the job security at UT is still OK, so UT does not differ a lot from other universities. Of course, this is partly because UT administrator have no interest in purging "deadwood" and getting the ill effects that Matt wrote about.

An equivalent of Trotsky's dilemma: can one build Communism in one country?

Posted by piotr | July 30, 2007 8:08 PM

Tyro - If you have fewer graduate students you would either need to increase the number of undergraduates they teach (discussion sections of 50?) or
curtail undergraduate enrollment.

Posted by kamiya | July 30, 2007 8:11 PM

A general observation: One of the benefits of having tenure is the freedom to take certain risks that wouldn't be attractive otherwise. Writing a book, for example; switching research areas; pursuing ideas that may take a few years before progress is apparent, ideas that may not pan out at all.

Hel-LO! Welcome to the 21st C, oldster! "Politically useful short-term results at rock-bottom cost" is the new universal conserva-corporo-socio-governmental paradigm!

A exception to this paradigm is the Iraq war, which, truly perceptive minds realize, will require further decades of committment, trillions of taxpayer money, and no congressional oversight at all to accomplish its nebulous goal.

Posted by James Gary | July 30, 2007 8:14 PM

Joe, I would object to St. Joe's being characterized as a Catholic sweatshop, as they give their non-tenure-track full-timers a 3/3 load, which is very reasonable in the market. (At least when I was there 5 years ago). So it probably wasn't a bad move to turn down the multi-year contract.

Posted by Marcel | July 30, 2007 8:43 PM

I remember seeing a list of fairly prestigious private schools without tenure.

I know BYU was on the list. they seem to be doing alright.

it would be an interesting experiment for a large public institution to undertake. who knows? matt could be wrong.

Posted by thehova | July 30, 2007 8:49 PM

yeah, Is there any truth behind the non-prestigious Catholic sweatshop statement?

I never felt like any professor at my non-prestigious catholic school were overworked or unhappy.

Posted by thehova | July 30, 2007 8:52 PM

"Texas would just rapidly become a much, much worse university -- one with huge problems recruiting faculty and students. Even your more talented conservative and conservative-sympathetic professors wouldn't want to teach there. The school would rapidly become a backwater, and this would have potentially devastating effects on the local economy."

Yes sir (and it is this kind of smart rapid response for which the blogs should be thanked).

There is one caveat though: you can end (or at least increasingly weaken) tenure without ending tenure. Someone has probably made this point upthread (don't know haven't read it) but the last time I checked (not too many years ago) we were within a few years of more than half of American professors being adjunct.

This isn't an issue being widely covered by the news media but more than a few of these people are earning wildly substandard wages (as in low five figure incomes) with few or no benefits and no job security.

Posted by Linus | July 30, 2007 9:11 PM

I'm finishing up a postdoc in astronomy at a top university, and one thing that does not hold any water (at least in the sciences) is that tenured faculty get lazy, stop publishing, etc, etc. The tenured prof position is largely self-selecting: only those people who love their work enough to spend 12 hrs a day every day on research, teaching, admin grunt work, etc, have any hope of getting tenure. If you don't like that (like me) you tend to leave academia. Those that get tenure continue their workaholic schedules because they're, well, workaholics. Once they're retired they still come into the department most days and continue to do research. You just can't keep them away. Take away tenure, and many of them would choose other jobs that gave them similar freedom.

Posted by rlm | July 30, 2007 9:17 PM

I remember seeing a list of fairly prestigious private schools without tenure. I know BYU was on the list.

BYU was advertising tenure-track positions in the last job cycle.

Posted by RSA | July 30, 2007 9:25 PM

hmmm, my fault. i guess byu does have tenure.

"This isn't an issue being widely covered by the news media but more than a few of these people are earning wildly substandard wages (as in low five figure incomes) with few or no benefits and no job security."

its a shame that to much valuable resources (both human and financial capital) get sucked up by our university system. yes, its the best in the world, but at a cost. Too many people avoid k-12 for academia because of the prestige and status.

Posted by thehova | July 30, 2007 10:25 PM

I know this is silly, but I have to respond to the comment upthread who said UT wouldn't care if it never hired another decent professor so long as we win the NCAA football championship. Steven Weinberg was our first million-dollar hire. He is not a football coach. Not to say that Mack Brown is going to miss any meals on his salary, but Weinberg actually makes more money.

Posted by Karen | July 30, 2007 10:41 PM

First, of course, Kurtz is a ridiculous figure as a commentator on higher education.

Second: Any one university can abolish tenure-- provided it raises salaries enough. There are centers and institutes and hiring units without the ability to grant tenure scattered through the academy, and they operate on long-term contracts with higher salaries than equivalent-rank professorships.

Kurtz [sarcasm] oddly [/sarcasm] fails to note this: his Republican state legislature would immediately face a much higher bill for faculty salaries, or else lose its law, business, economics, engineering, and hard science faculty very, very quickly. The ability to fire a few lefty ethnic studies professors will be purchased at an unattractively high price from the perspective of the legislators.

Posted by Jacob T. Levy | July 30, 2007 10:41 PM

If I were a snide person I would point out that the University of Texas at Austin, which for a while hoped to become the Harvard of the South, is in fact that home base, through its center for advanced studies, whatever it's called, of spoon-bending science.

Also they are the main locus, outsida maybe some skool in outer southern Italy, of the zero-field energy, or some such horseshit, theory of interplanetary travel. All you otta do is travel up to Austin and the Second Law of Thermodynamics is repealed.

It's a pity.

Way back when, in Spindletop days, you had these good ol' boys who suddenly came into the money, and they knew damn well that education was The Thing. They set up a unitary State education system (and didn't use it to censor the schoolbooks, as is the fashion under "conservatism") and had a big fat rake from the oil revenues to set up what looked like becoming a good university.

Here's the nut: just as the war is run by chicken hawks, so supposedly pro-business "conservatism" is run by little whiners who have never run a business.

Texas had, and has, potential. So does its university.

May the Good Lord protect both of them from their loud shouters.

Posted by David Lloyd-Jones | July 30, 2007 11:21 PM

Tenure protects realist professors. Larry Summers can be fired from being president at Harvard, but Steven Pinker can't be fired from being a professor at Harvard, even though they say exactly the same things on the issue of sex differences in math skills at the far right edge of the bell curve.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 31, 2007 12:22 AM

Two words: Rusell Targ.

Posted by David Lloyd-Jones | July 31, 2007 1:04 AM

I love that he cites a poll claiming 82% of Americans want to modify or eliminate tenure, because -- while I haven't bullshit-checked it and it wouldn't surprise me if he was counting people who thought public-school teachers should have to wait a year longer before they get tenure in that 82% -- this is a sign that it's working.

If people want to get rid of tenure, that means it's protecting people who say and think unpopular things, just as it's supposed to. I'll concede him some groupthink-related problems with its administration, but we all know he isn't interested in actually preventing the enforcement of conformity -- he just wants to enforce his.

(We do, however, really need to work up a pithy and appropriate contemptuous rejoinder to nonsense about the "marketplace of ideas". Ideas are not kumquats.)

Posted by kb | July 31, 2007 1:07 AM

Bye bye tenure. Right. Because Stanley Kurtz brings it up, it's on the fcukin horizon. Right.

Posted by live | July 31, 2007 2:18 AM

Conservatives hate history. They depend on widespread ignorance of history to get elected, cut their own taxes and otherwise funnel themselves wealth and power.

They've figured out that the History Department is nothing without its tenured faculty. Eliminate tenure, and History will dwindle to that which could be drowned in a bathtub.

Posted by Jalmari | July 31, 2007 3:11 AM

Can any country other than the US boast more than 2 schools capable of cracking our top 30?

Yes; Britain has Oxford, Cambridge, UCL and Imperial College, for a start. None of which accept bribes for admission. Sorry, "donations".

Posted by ajay | July 31, 2007 5:07 AM

Posted by rlm | July 30, 2007 9:17 PM:"The tenured prof position is largely self-selecting: only those people who love their work enough to spend 12 hrs a day every day on research, teaching, admin grunt work, etc, have any hope of getting tenure."

Well I am not sure of that. Only those who can really put themselves through the wringer before they get tenure, get tenure. But at a University I may have had some link with, about a third of the staff published, another third published once in a while, a third did nothing at all. That was no uncommon.

Posted by rlm | July 30, 2007 9:17 PM:"If you don't like that (like me) you tend to leave academia."

If you don't like working 12 hours a day, why would you quit to work in a job where you'll get fired if you don't work 12 hours a day?

Posted by Jacob T. Levy | July 30, 2007 10:41 PM:"Kurtz [sarcasm] oddly [/sarcasm] fails to note this: his Republican state legislature would immediately face a much higher bill for faculty salaries, or else lose its law, business, economics, engineering, and hard science faculty very, very quickly. The ability to fire a few lefty ethnic studies professors will be purchased at an unattractively high price from the perspective of the legislators."

As a general rule, those members who can get jobs elsewhere do unless they are paid more. So let us assume what you say is true - there is a trade off between higher pay and security. What sort of person choose a job where he can't get fired over one where he gets paid more? A lazy one perhaps? Those lefty ethnic studies professors have no where else to go. They have no market power. If they don't work for a University, what are they going to do? Open basket weaving shops? Their salaries will not rise. The engineers might or they might not. The truth is that most of the people who have tenure have no ideas worth firing them for. And when they do have "dangerous" ideas, they usually get fired anyway. Ask Larry Summers.

Posted by kb | July 31, 2007 1:07 AM:"If people want to get rid of tenure, that means it's protecting people who say and think unpopular things, just as it's supposed to."

Sorry but who is saying and thinking unpopular things? The closest I came come to is Alan Dershowitz who probably ought to be fired. Academia is the most conformist and intolerant sector of the economy that I know of. Look at something like Race and IQ. I do not accept there is a link between Race and IQ but Britain and Australia have both recently, essentially, sacked two tenured professors for saying there was a link. That is as unpopular as you can get and yet there is no protection at all.

Posted by Jalmari | July 31, 2007 3:11 AM:"Conservatives hate history. They depend on widespread ignorance of history to get elected, cut their own taxes and otherwise funnel themselves wealth and power."

As an insult that is interesting but as a statement of fact that is absurd. Conservatives, by definition, are about preserving the past and hence history. History as an academic discipline has come to hate Conservatives as it has become more and more fashionably left wing. But that is a different argument.

Posted by ajay | July 31, 2007 5:07 AM:"Yes; Britain has Oxford, Cambridge, UCL and Imperial College, for a start. None of which accept bribes for admission. Sorry, "donations"."

You mean "formally" accept bribes. It does not hurt in the real world for Oxford or Cambridge to know who your Father is although it is no guarantee. However I doubt that either will be able to maintain their position for long because they are so poor.

Posted by HeiGou | July 31, 2007 6:39 AM

What sort of person choose a job where he can't get fired over one where he gets paid more? A lazy one perhaps?

Or one with a strong preference for geographic stability-- maybe one in a two-career couple that's found a stable place for both, maybe one with children who cares about not uprooting children every few years.

Or one who wants to embark on an Andrew Wiles-like long-term research project that won't have year-by-year publication payoffs, but will have a major payoff at the end.

Or one who knows that professors in the humanities and social sciences are vulnerable to popular-press or blogospheric witch hunts, only sometimes predictably so.

Or one who wants the ability to argue freely with deans or department chairs about matters of departmental/ university direction or policy.

Or one who wants to try something that's intellectually experimental, which may face an obstacle of a few years before peer-review starts to think it's legitimate, and doesn't want to get downsized in the interim by some dean noticing that a senior professor makes twice what an adjunct makes.

or...

Posted by Jacob T. Levy | July 31, 2007 9:21 AM

"Conservatives, by definition, are about preserving the past and hence history."

Huh. You better tell all the current conservatives about that.

Posted by uh.... | July 31, 2007 9:32 AM

Tyro: In many fields, the number of PhD students has shrunk in the past 10 years. Humanities programs in particular are smaller than they were in the mid-90s because they realized that they were producing too many people who would never, ever be able to find tenure-track jobs. So I do think that the academic marketplace is responding, albeit slowly, to the realities of the job market.

Of course there will always be more English PhDs than tenure-track professorships, but the isn't as large as it was even just a few years ago.

Posted by dckatiebug | July 31, 2007 9:36 AM

HeiGou, there's another reason people go into academia other than tenure, but which goes hand-in-hand with tenure-- independence. Most of mmy experience is in the sciences, though this biases my perspective, but professors remain professors instead of going into industry because they get to do what they want, when they want. They work 12 hour days because they're working on stuff that they really want to work on, not stuff they are told to work on. Of course, without the tenure system, they'd worry about their ability to pursue projects they're interested in that might not pan out immediately.

Jacob nails the crux of the problem-- I suppose if conservatives wanted to get rid of tenure to get rid of a few professors whose publications did not adhere do the dictats of The Party, then they could do that. However, the lack of tenure would cause a bunch of people to look at the salary vs. security tradeoff and decide, without tenure, that maybe trading some of their independence in exchange for both money and marginally more security outside of academia might make it worth it. As someone pointed out above-- when it came down to a choice of a non-tenure position at a prestigious intitution vs. a tenure-track position at a lesser-known institution, people chose the tenure-track position every time.

Independence is worth a lot to researchers. It's why they went into research in the first place. Tenure enables this culture of independence, and that's why peoplelike Kurtz are so hostile to it.

Posted by Tyro | July 31, 2007 9:48 AM

Nowadays someone with a math or stats PhD can enter the private market, work on Wall Street as a Quant and make $150,000+ to start. Universities use tenure to compete with that, and allowing professors the right to pursue work that they are passionate in. Also, a lot of colleges are, lets face it, in the middle of nowhere. Nobody with talent and an advanced degree would move to Tuscaloosa, Alabama or Norman, Oklahoma for a (relatively) low paying job beholden to a wingnut legislature.

There are significant free market reasons for tenure. Why does Kurtz hate the Glorious and Omnipotent Free Market? Besides that, America's universities are still on the rapidly diminishing list of things America is best in the world at. Our states and our country takes pride in the greatness of our universities. Why does Kurtz hate America?

Posted by Joshua | July 31, 2007 10:11 AM

'If I were a snide person I would point out that the University of Texas at Austin, which for a while hoped to become the Harvard of the South, is in fact that home base, through its center for advanced studies, whatever it's called, of spoon-bending science.'

You'd be surprised at the number of 'pseudoscience' and other 'off the wall' research is going on prestigious universities. Princeton only just recently closed down its telekinesis institute. Of course, these are the types of things that also get the anti-tenure crowd crowing. Never mind the fact that this stuff represents less than 1% of all research.

I am surprised that conservatives haven't offered up the real solution they want; tenure for science, business, law faculty and no tenure for liberal arts faculty.

Posted by Ricky | July 31, 2007 10:12 AM

HeiGou: You mean "formally" accept bribes. It does not hurt in the real world for Oxford or Cambridge to know who your Father is although it is no guarantee. However I doubt that either will be able to maintain their position for long because they are so poor.

Oxford and Cambridge admissions boards don't even ask who your father is. You can't just make things up and expect us to take them seriously; at least do us the credit of forging some evidence or something.

Posted by ajay | July 31, 2007 10:48 AM

If tenure is abolished, then strong unions are an absolute necessity. Without unions, a worker can be fired for no cause at all in the US. And without tenure or unions, academics would be in the exact same boat. At least a unionized professoriate would have recourse to a requirement that firing is only for just cause.

Of course, given the class pretensions of some in academia, I can just hear them throwing their hands up in horror at the thought of being union members. But I think that push come to shove, enough would see the absolute importance of some sort of guarantee against politically-motivated or capricious dismissals.

Posted by UG | July 31, 2007 11:17 AM

Rob: "The answer is simple Matt, they don't care about the quality of the education. In fact the worst the education in public universities, the more valuable the Ivy League sheepskin will be for their kids and grandkids."

Every so often (daily?) Matt posts something which makes me realize that he's really a 24-year old with an education which has rather large and strange gaps.

Right-wingers hate tenure because it keeps them from doing periodic purges of everybody who doesn't toe the line. Not just some Ward Churchill, but the whole lot of reality-based peole who actually know history, economics, logic, law, etc. Tenure keeps them from putting in a nice commissar system, like they've tried to do in the executive branch.

Posted by Barry | July 31, 2007 11:18 AM

Ricky: "I am surprised that conservatives haven't offered up the real solution they want; tenure for science, business, law faculty and no tenure for liberal arts faculty. "

Because, in the end, anybody who respects reality, and is not bendable through fear of losing a job, is their enemy.

Posted by Barry | July 31, 2007 11:19 AM

I can just hear them throwing their hands up in horror at the thought of being union members.

I thought that faculty unionization was almost universal. I might be wrong, of course, but certainly many, many faculty members at schools both public and private are union members through the United Federation of College Teachers, the American Association of University Professors, and (perhaps) others.

Posted by Tyro | July 31, 2007 11:34 AM

He said that the difference in quality between our universities and our k-12 schools was because of the greater competition between public and private schools at the university level, versus the dominance of public education at the k-12 level

Also, massive endowments. Did Uncle Milt talk about those at all? Or did he just enjoy the bennies?

If there's a problem with tenure, it's basically one that will be addressed over time, or -- slightly less euphemistically -- through natural wastage.

Stepping back, Kurtz simply has no idea of the internal politics of academia, whether it's within faculties or across disciplines. He made his choice to work outside the confines of the academy -- sorry, the Hoover Institute really doesn't count -- and now stands outside, pissing in.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | July 31, 2007 11:35 AM

I thought that faculty unionization was almost universal. I might be wrong, of course, but certainly many, many faculty members at schools both public and private are union members through the United Federation of College Teachers, the American Association of University Professors, and (perhaps) others.

There are some faculties (at public colleges) that are actually unionized, but in the Yeshiva Decision in 1980 the US Supreme Court ruled that faculty at private institutions were actually managers, not workers, and so did not have collective bargaining rights.

The AAUP, the one group I am familiar with, is definitely not a typical union in the sense that the SEIU is.

What would be needed if tenure were abolished would be a real union that would fight for the rights of academics. And SEIU might be the right group to organize under for academics. For now the Yeshiva decision has really put the lid on unionization. But if tenure disappears I think that whole issue would have to be revisited in some way.

Posted by UG | July 31, 2007 11:57 AM

Posted by Tyro | July 31, 2007 9:48 AM:"there's another reason people go into academia other than tenure, but which goes hand-in-hand with tenure-- independence. Most of mmy experience is in the sciences, though this biases my perspective, but professors remain professors instead of going into industry because they get to do what they want, when they want."

Sure. And a lot of really good science comes out of Universities. In fact most of it probably. However does tenure have anything to do with that? Probably not. I can't really see a good University kicking a science professor out without very good reason. It is not as if his science is going to be so controversial that he'll be sackable. The last real case I can think of was Cold Fusion. Pons and Fleishman didn't stay with the University of Utah. They went to work for Toyota in France and I'm not sure they have worked since. That example could go either way I suppose.

Posted by Tyro | July 31, 2007 9:48 AM:"I suppose if conservatives wanted to get rid of tenure to get rid of a few professors whose publications did not adhere do the dictats of The Party, then they could do that. However, the lack of tenure would cause a bunch of people to look at the salary vs. security tradeoff and decide, without tenure, that maybe trading some of their independence in exchange for both money and marginally more security outside of academia might make it worth it. As someone pointed out above-- when it came down to a choice of a non-tenure position at a prestigious intitution vs. a tenure-track position at a lesser-known institution, people chose the tenure-track position every time."

I don't think the question is getting rid of people who do not toe the Party line - a threat much stronger from the Left than the Right of course. Rather it is a question of Dead Wood and people who should never have been given jobs in the first place - like Ward Churchill. Liberal Arts professors have nothing to trade with. They have no other jobs to go to. I do not accept that everyone will choose a tenure-track at a lesser known institution considering I threw in a tenured job at such an institution for a non-tenure position at a much more prestigious one. I am not, I admit, typical, but I think others would have too.

Posted by ajay | July 31, 2007 10:48 AM :"Oxford and Cambridge admissions boards don't even ask who your father is. You can't just make things up and expect us to take them seriously; at least do us the credit of forging some evidence or something."

Oxford and Cambridge do not have "boards". It varies across subjects of course, but basically the Subject Tutor in each College admits students. To various degrees they have to get that passed the Department - and most of the sciences have moved to Departmental admissions. They do not ask who your Father is and I did not say they did. I said it can help if they know. As it can. I can trivially list a few colleges where prior parental donations are highly correlated with subsequent admissions. This was openly the system until fairly recently. Certainly living memory. It has not entirely died away even now.

So I'd save your insults for a thread you have a living chance of making a valid point about.

Posted by HeiGou | July 31, 2007 12:15 PM

He said that the difference in quality between our universities and our k-12 schools was because of the greater competition between public and private schools at the university level, versus the dominance of public education at the k-12 level

Aside from the massive endowments pseudonymous mentioned, there's also an issue that hardcore free marketeers don't seem to care much about: markets aren't designed such that everyone can "afford" a "product". That is, I'm not aware of any universities, public or private, that won't kick out failing students; the same can't be said about public schooling for a failing fourth grader, in general.

Posted by RSA | July 31, 2007 12:29 PM

Kurtz doesn't seem to know enough history. Maybe reading why tenure came about in the first place would enlighten him. (And he should definitely read about the confrontations between the university of Paris and the Pope in the medieval period.)

Or maybe he likes the idea of the king being able to put political pressure on the universities to fire people who profess ideas the king doesn't like.

Stanley Kurtz, what a wanker....

Posted by grumpy realist | July 31, 2007 12:43 PM

I'm late to the party, but... I wonder if the property-rights folks would be up in arms about what would "clearly" be a "taking" of a "property right" without due process.... Sauces and geese and ganders, and gored oxes....

Posted by Marc in Denver | July 31, 2007 3:37 PM

"However I doubt that either [Oxford or Cambridge] will be able to maintain their position for long because they are so poor."

I've gotta admire your courage in betting against 700+ years of history, but go ahead.

I'd say Oxbridge are gonna be the primary beneficiaries of it being harder for foreign grad students to get visas to study in the US.

'It varies across subjects of course, but basically the Subject Tutor in each College admits students. '

Only for undergrad: postgrads are admitted by department, and then get a collegiate affiliation.

Your point about family affiliation being significant is BS, frankly. Even in the colleges stuffed to the gills with public schoolboys. There's no "legacy admissions" as per US universities. The closest would be the formal adn informal relationships between certain public schools and certain of the Oxbridge colleges (like, Eton has two guaranteed places in King's College Cambridge as Eton founded King's).

"I can trivially list a few colleges where prior parental donations are highly correlated with subsequent admissions."

Do so.

"This was openly the system until fairly recently. Certainly living memory."

Was that before or after they abolished having to wear gowns in the town?

Posted by Sock Puppet of the Great Satan | July 31, 2007 4:23 PM

Marc in Denver, i bet that it would be phased in to only new hires (which could create problems itself).

Posted by thehova | July 31, 2007 4:24 PM

Just to clarify, the AAUP is in part a conventional union, representing many public university faculty in collective bargaining agreements. It is also in part a non-union professional association that adjudicates academic freedom violations and engages in lobbying.

Posted by Jacob T. Levy | July 31, 2007 5:46 PM

Was that before or after they abolished having to wear gowns in the town?

Now HeiGou is going to bullshit about the times he skipped over the wall to beat the curfew. Are there family traditions at particular colleges? Sure. Does that get you a place? Uh, no. And as someone who looked after candidates over several years of interviews, I remember the ones who didn't get in.

(Also, undergraduate admissions are generally decided by more than one person, postgraduate admissions by the faculty, and the exorbitant cost of top-league US graduate degrees is increasingly sending students across the pond.)

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | July 31, 2007 6:56 PM

A funny issue that no one has brought up is that conservatives willfully misunderstand how tenure works. They pretend that college professors accidentally fall into the job of Tenured Professor and then can't be fired even though they're manifestly incompetent. The other arguments in this thread bring to mind two reality-based counter-arguments:

1. The surplus of PhD-holders creates intense competition to even get on the tenure-track. People who complete a PhD are typically highly intelligent, highly motivated workers who have an extremely strong understanding of their field (I know, you can all point to at least one professor/PhD who comes off as an idiot, but let's say that 99% of them are really with it). Out of this select group, only about half come up with a tenure-track job within a year of graduation. Assistant Professors are not selected at random - they are the people who are the best in their field through years and years of production and testing.

2. Furthermore, once one is on the tenure track, the requirements for tenure are quite strict (administrative work, publications, teaching record). Anyone who spends a year at a college hears the story of the beloved young professor who doesn't get tenure and has to move to a new university. Getting tenure is stressful and difficult, and people who are incompetent don't typically survive the process.

If someone thrives through the challenges of college, grad school, post-docs, assistant professorship, and tenure review, why would we expect them to suddenly fail once they can no longer be fired? A tenured professor is a person that universities have demonstrated a clear and consistent desire to retain. How would it be in a university's interest to leave a top employee's contract status uncertain and give them encouragement to job-hop, go to the private sector, or retire early? The tenure system is not an unearned benefit - it's a merit-based way for universities to commit to and hold on to their best people.

As a side note, I hope to stop hearing moaning and groaning about the job market for PhDs in the very near future. Doesn't anyone read about a field before committing to a 5+ year program with minimal compensation? Doesn't anyone have a reliable advisor in their field? Colleges "admit" too many PhD candidates because admitting a PhD student is a lot like hiring a perpetual-free-cash machine. They have no intention of hiring most of these PhD candidates back after graduation as anything more than an adjunct. The college can pay a PhD candidate $20k a year to teach classes full of students who are paying $40k a year to live in a 10x10 room with some other rich slob, eat garbage food, and once in a while hear a lecture from some lazy old guy whose name starts with "Professor". I'm surprised colleges even bother with adjuncts when there are so many PhD applicants out there - if I ran a college I'd just keep churning through the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed newbies who think that there's a magical 6-figure job in reading Chaucer or looking at stars waiting at the end of the tunnel, after they make it through a few more years of freshman writing classes or astronomy labs.

Posted by cgaros | August 1, 2007 12:50 AM

Posted by Sock Puppet of the Great Satan | July 31, 2007 4:23 PM:"I've gotta admire your courage in betting against 700+ years of history, but go ahead."

Sorry but for which of those 700+ years was Oxford and Cambridge world leaders? I would suggest that their reputation is fairly modern as such things go.

Posted by Sock Puppet of the Great Satan | July 31, 2007 4:23 PM:"I'd say Oxbridge are gonna be the primary beneficiaries of it being harder for foreign grad students to get visas to study in the US."

Except American Universities fund their grad students. British ones rarely do or at least not to the same extent. So they are going to have to find around $40,000 a year just to pay the fees much less living expenses. We'll see.

Posted by Sock Puppet of the Great Satan | July 31, 2007 4:23 PM:"Only for undergrad: postgrads are admitted by department, and then get a collegiate affiliation."

I am sure that Harvard takes an awful lot of legacy post-grads. Nice to see we are in agreement.

Posted by Sock Puppet of the Great Satan | July 31, 2007 4:23 PM:"Your point about family affiliation being significant is BS, frankly. Even in the colleges stuffed to the gills with public schoolboys. There's no "legacy admissions" as per US universities. The closest would be the formal adn informal relationships between certain public schools and certain of the Oxbridge colleges (like, Eton has two guaranteed places in King's College Cambridge as Eton founded King's)."

No it isn't. I agree there is no formal legacy admissions programs any more. There are certainly still strong ties with certain schools. On the other hand it is also clear that rich men give minor sums of money to colleges and in some of those colleges, their offspring have been known to get favorable admissions decisions. This is simply not deniable and I suggest you ask someone who works in the system.

Posted by HeiGou | August 1, 2007 6:48 AM

HeiGou - just saying "it is clear" and "simply not deniable" that something happens isn't evidence. You're accusing the Oxford and Cambridge admissions systems of being corrupt. Provide examples.

Incidentally, British universities may not fund grad students to quite the same extent, but the British government, through the various research councils, funds a good many graduate studentships - fees and living expenses. (Nor do many UK graduate studentships cost $40,000 a year. Not even close.)

As for Oxford's reputation being "fairly recent as these things go": well, not really. William of Ockham? John Duns Scotus? Or, in fiction, Chaucer's Clerke of Oxenford? Pretty sure Oxford would have been ranked highly in the Middle Ages. (Not that there was quite so much competition then.) If you've got an example of a period when Oxford could have fairly been described as a second-class university, let's hear it.

Posted by ajay | August 1, 2007 7:14 AM

"I'm late to the party, but... I wonder if the property-rights folks would be up in arms about what would "clearly" be a "taking" of a "property right" without due process.... Sauces and geese and ganders, and gored oxes...."

Posted by Marc in Denver

They'd have no problem whatsoever: (a) they'd deny it's a property taking, (b) it's a group they hate.

Posted by Barry | August 1, 2007 1:52 PM

HeiGou: "Sure. And a lot of really good science comes out of Universities. In fact most of it probably. However does tenure have anything to do with that? Probably not. I can't really see a good University kicking a science professor out without very good reason. It is not as if his science is going to be so controversial that he'll be sackable."

Anybody who asserts such craziness, after the Bush/creationist/supply side econowhore/science commissar experience that we've seen for the past six years is simply a liar.

Posted by Barry | August 1, 2007 2:00 PM

'This is simply not deniable and I suggest you ask someone who works in the system.'

I see: it's not deniable, but you can't give examples, which college, which year, which subject the student in question studied. Hardly convincing.

'As for Oxford's reputation being "fairly recent as these things go": well, not really. William of Ockham? John Duns Scotus? Or, in fiction, Chaucer's Clerke of Oxenford? Pretty sure Oxford would have been ranked highly in the Middle Ages.'

Holding up the Cantabrigian end, I guess HeiGou would also consider Newton a bit recent too. Or Marlowe.

Which is a bit rich, considering Emmanuel College in Cambridge has a plague up noting one of its alumni founded a wee college for teaching the colonials (as they had an unfortunate habit of dropping dead from smallpox when they came to the mother country). Said alumnus? John Harvard.

Posted by Sock Puppet of the Great Satan | August 1, 2007 4:40 PM