Academic Tenure is Patronage
Does It Work?
One way to think of academic tenure is as a kind of patronage. For few strings attached, thinkers are free to produce creative work. What thinkers wouldn’t love tenure, assuming they were able to obtain it for themselves? Tenure isn’t simply a protection from McCarthyism (I doubt it is); but more practically, it is a guardrail against market forces. Academics should be free to focus on their dreams, not on what sells.
Many who tend to like the free market dislike tenure; they see it as a form of rent seeking, which it also can be. Yet if you think of tenure as a form of patronage, it’s not so different than the venture capital model.
Most academics with tenure don’t produce work that has outsized value (assuming we could measure it); but for every 99 who abscond into oblivion, one becomes a star. Great research universities with innovative scholars are a sign of cultural health—and, even on purely economic grounds, one can argue that academics add value, even if it’s difficult to capture. If Harvard produces even one world-historical thinker in a generation, perhaps the inefficiencies produced by tenure are worth it.
I see a few procedural problems with tenure, though.
The process by which talent is selected is 1) somewhat arbitrary and 2) dependent on peer selection. The result is that people who are good at politics will outcompete people who are naively focused on the work alone. A second issue is that work which fits a consensus will win out over work which is field-defying. Despite a reputation for being politically liberal, academia has a psychologically conservative bias.
The people who decide who gets tenure tend to be risk-averse, since they themselves got tenure by being risk-averse.
The people who decide who gets tenure are more likely to weight—and are mandated to weight—past accomplishment over future potential. Yet patronage is most effective as an investment in potential, rather than as an achievement award.
One can make a handful of criticisms of tenure from other directions. For example, that research and publishing excellence have little to do with teaching excellence, or the ability to prepare students for the world, etc. For me, these are red herrings.
The question shouldn’t be whether one is for or against tenure, but is tenure a good and effective form of patronage? If it is not, can it be fixed? What form of patronage should be employed in lieu of it, or in supplementation to it? And most importantly, who should decide who deserves it?
My own view is that tenure can be great, but should be awarded more broadly. It is old school of universities to think that producing research papers and attending conferences is the sole or primary way that thinkers and scholars can benefit society. Incentives should change, reflecting a new world.
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substack tenure?