This post is the first of three adapted from Steven M. Cahn’s forthcoming book Professors as Teachers. In this work, he suggests how departments and colleges can do more to emphasize the importance of success in the classroom. The material is used with the permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.
The book from which these excerpts are taken is Professors as Teachers, a title that is ironic, for too many professors view themselves primarily not as teachers but as researchers. Indeed, their lack of concern for pedagogic responsibilities may burden colleagues and harm students. I recognize, of course, that some faculty members give teaching their all. The problem, however, is that by every account these instructors are the minority.
How can the system be changed so that success in the classroom will be promoted and receive greater emphasis? Presenting proposals to that end is my focus. In the excerpts to be reprinted in this three-part series, I shall concentrate on the tenure system, but before turning to that critical subject, I shall outline some of the book’s other themes.
Graduate school is where individuals become oriented to professorial life, thus that educational setting is the appropriate place to begin. I urge that all graduate students seeking to be recommended for a faculty position should complete a departmental practicum in which they practice with immediate feedback the elements of effective instruction. For many years I offered such a credit-baring course in the Philosophy Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, and I described it in a post titled “Learning to Teach” that appeared on the APA Blog.
While offering such a course would be a major step in enhancing teaching, also needed are adjustments in departmental policies regarding faculty appointments. Too often, when a department invites candidates for campus visits, these occasions consist of little more than a scholarly presentation, including a series of technical questions and answers, lunch with all interested members of the department at which a candidate’s research program is explored, a quick chat with a dean, and farewells.
What should occur is quite different. Each candidate should be asked not only to give a research paper but also to prepare a talk on an elementary topic, organized and presented as if the audience were introductory students. In this test of pedagogic skills, the key questions are: Did the candidate speak at an appropriate pace, motivate interest in the issue, organize the subject, and ensure that the audience understood what was being said? If the answers are in the negative, the talk is a failure.
When a decision is made on whom to appoint, the quality of teaching should be taken seriously. The wrong attitude would be expressed by members of a department who defend their choice as follows: “Smith is a terrific scholar who in time will become more adept at teaching.” This judgment is no more convincing than saying, “Jones is a terrific teacher who in time will become more adept at scholarship.” Neither remark is plausible and should not carry the day.
Another suggestion for enhancing the role of teaching is to supplement any system of student evaluation of teaching with peer review. Granted, students are a convenient source for easily verifiable matters such as whether teachers hold class regularly, speak at an understandable pace, encourage class participation, maintain interest, return examinations without delay, provide detailed comments on term papers, appear at announced office hours, and so on. Students, however, are not in a position to know whether faculty are knowledgeable or their presentations reliable.
Furthermore, evaluating an instructor primarily on the basis of student opinion is not only inappropriate but also dangerous. As Charles Frankel observed, “Teaching is a professional relationship, not a popularity contest. To invite students to participate in the selection or promotion of their teachers… exposes the teacher to intimidation.” No professor should be put in a position in which advantage is gained by granting students favors in exchange for their support.
Corporate executives judge other corporate executives to decide promotions in the company, and attorneys judge other attorneys to decide partnerships in the law firm. Likewise, professors should judge other professors to decide matters such as reappointment, promotion, and tenure. If an incompetent is lecturing at a university, the ones at fault are not the students but the other professors. They are responsible for systematically observing classes and gaining insight into what is occurring. Faculty rightfully claim authority in the academic sphere. When the time comes for evaluating teaching, they should not abandon their duty.
Yet none of the suggestions I make would fundamentally change academic culture unless the quality of teaching plays a crucial role in tenure decisions. But what is the argument for maintaining the tenure system, how are tenure decisions presently made, and what adjustments are needed for quality of teaching to be given the weight it deserves?
When thinking about the centrality of tenure to faculty life, I always return to an image related by Andrew Oldenquist. He recalled that at his school, The Ohio State University, an art professor had placed in his studio window a small blue neon sign he had made that flashed “tenure.” Oldenquist speculated, “Perhaps it counted as conceptual art; perhaps it won him tenure. I never knew.” Regardless, the sign serves as a striking reminder of an aspect of academic life that professors especially treasure. Those who possess tenure hold lifetime appointments, revocable only in rare instances of gross incompetence or moral turpitude. Yet reference to this prerogative invariably gives rise to the same questions: Why should anyone receive permanent job security? Doesn’t tenure pamper the indolent and protect the incompetent?
Academic tenure is not as singular as often supposed. In most organizations of university size, employees, whether at lower ranks or in middle management, are rarely dismissed for cause. Due to poor performance they may be passed over for promotion, given lateral transfers, or occasionally demoted, but rarely are they discharged. While plant closings or fiscal crises may precipitate worker layoffs, tenured professors, too, face the loss of their positions if a department is phased out or a school closes.
Even the mechanics of the tenure system are hardly unique. Consider large law firms, which routinely recruit new associates with the understanding that after several years they will either be offered some variety of permanent positions or required to depart. Colleges make similar arrangements with beginning faculty members.
Despite such analogies, however, tenure undoubtedly provides professors an unusual degree of latitude and security. They are privileged to explore any area of interest and proceed in whatever manner they wish. No one may dictate to them that certain subjects are taboo, that certain methods of inquiry are illegitimate, or that certain conclusions are unacceptable.
Tenure thus guarantees academic freedom, the right of all qualified persons to discover, teach, and publish the truth as they see it within their fields of endeavor. Where academic freedom is secure, students enter classrooms with the assurance that instructors are espousing their own beliefs, not mouthing some orthodoxy they have been programmed to repeat.
Although widely seen as valuable, academic freedom is threatened whenever anyone seeks to stifle free inquiry in the name of some cause that supposedly demands everyone’s unthinking allegiance. Some, for example, have sought to have a school adopt an official stance on issues unrelated to its educational mission. Free inquiry, however, is impeded when certain opinions are officially declared false and others true. Colleges and universities are not established to inform the public where a majority of the faculty stands on any issue, whether mathematics, scientific, or political. Whether an argument for the existence of God is sound, or our government’s foreign policy misguided, are matters for discussion, not decree.
Maintaining free inquiry requires that all points of view be entitled to a hearing. Unfortunately, some both inside and outside academia have occasionally attempted to interfere with the presentation of a campus speaker whose views they find unpalatable. So long as the lecturer remains civil, however, no one at the school, whether professors, students, or administrators, should block any individual from expressing ideas. No matter how noxious they may be, the greater danger lies in stifling them, for when one person’s opinion is silenced, no one else’s may be uttered in safety.
But might academic freedom be preserved without tenure, perhaps by some form of multi-year contracts? The problem besetting any alternative scheme is that it could too easily be misused, opening faculty members to attack because of their opinions.
A key feature of the tenure system is that those who hold tenure in a department decide whether it should be granted to others. Thus those who judge are not facing a conflict of interest, because their own tenure is not at stake. In any system of multi-year contracts, however, the question arises: Who should decide whether a contract ought to be renewed? If the decision is placed in the hands of other tenured professors, they would be voting while realizing that their own contracts would eventually come up for renewal. The result would be a conflict of interest. After all, if I support you, will you support me? Worse, the decision might be made by administrators with an axe to grind, favoring professors who have supported administrative initiatives. Such a system would produce an atmosphere of suspicion and recrimination, antithetical to independent thinking.
Unquestionably, the tenure system has dangers, but none as great as those that would attend its abandonment. To adapt a remark about democracy offered by Winston Churchill, tenure may be the worst system ever devised, except for all the others.
To defend the tenure system in principle, however, is not to applaud all the ways it has been implemented. Without doubt, many departments have supported candidates too liberally. Instead of individuals being required to demonstrate why they deserve tenure, a department has been expected to demonstrate why they don’t. In court, a person ought to be presumed not guilty until the evidence shows otherwise, but in matters of special skill you ought not be supposed qualified until so proven. A school’s failure to observe this guideline results in a faculty encumbered with deadwood, and more than a few departments suffer from this unfortunate phenomenon.
Yet tenure decisions can present difficult problems and have been known to cause hostilities that last for decades. Unpleasant as events may become, though, faculty members need to act conscientiously because the future of their departments may be at stake. Even a single ill-advised decision may lead to years of disruption and possibly decay, bringing tenure itself into disrepute and thereby threatening that academic freedom the system is intended to preserve. In short, wise choices are a blessing, foolish ones a blight.
In the next excerpt, I shall discuss the appropriate criteria for tenure decisions.
Steven M. Cahn
Steven M Cahn is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Among the recent books he has authored are Teaching Philosophy: A Guide (Routledge, 2018); Inside Academia: Professors, Politics, and Policies (Rutgers, 2019); Navigating Academic Life: How the System Works (Routledge, 2021); Professors as Teachers (Wipf and Stock, 2022), and, most recently, From Student to Scholar: A Candid Guide to Becoming a Professor, Second Edition (Wipf and Stock, 2024).
