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3 TENURE: Academe's Peculiar Institution Andrew Oldenquist Does everyone already have tenure? About fifteen years ago at my university an art professor made a small blue neon sign that said simply "tenure" in script and placed it in his studio window. Perhaps it counted as conceptual art; perhaps it won him tenure; I never knew. His art highlighted what professorsbelieve is uniquely and profoundly important to their careers and their profession. The really dramatic thing about tenure is not just that it gives one security for life but that the alternative is immediate one year's notice of banishment. Is tenure unique to the academic world, or is it universal, found under different names nearly everywhere? If it is an institution found only in colleges and universities, how does one justify it? And iftenure is justified, how should it be decided? John Silber, James O'Toole, and others have maintained that there is just as much "tenure" outside as inside the academic world. O'Toole, in the course of advocating the abolition of tenure, says it would be absurd to think colleges and universities would fire professors at will if tenure were abolished.1 It would not be done in the academic world for the same reasons that it is not done in business. In corporations and in government, he says, people who are incompetent in one job are moved laterally to another or are more closely supervised, sometimes demoted, but hardly ever fired. Hence they have tenure in all but name. No company and no university, O'Toole says, wishes to acquire a reputation for ruthlessly firing personnel. John Silber argues that rough equivalents of tenure are universal, because people in every business, government agency, or social entity of any kind need and desire a sense of continuity and predictability in their social environment. Hence, Silber says, the main reason for tenure is neither academic freedom nor simple job protection. He sees Tenure I 57 tenure everywhere in one form or another as the expression of a necessary and universal need for continuity and social stability.2 I think it is untrue that there is anything like the degree of (unspoken ) tenure in the world of business that there is in colleges and universities. Silber is right about the need for continuity and community . The miniature societies people are constantly joining are an expression of our innate sociality, of our need for social identities. But the need for continuity and predictabilityin industry does not prevent industry from dismissing people who would be retained under a tenure system. Silber's argument cannot change the fact that business and industry let go a considerably greater proportion of their experienced people than do universities; it can only provide an additional explanation (besides the economic one) why industry is not as ruthless as we can imagine it to be, and an additional explanation why universities value tenure. Anyone with a goodly number of nonuniversity friends knows of people in their thirties to fifties-engineers, entrepreneurs, middlelevel managers, state and federal employees-who lost their jobs and had to send out dozens of resumes and go wherever in the country a new job was f01llnd. This happens fairly often, not just when a company fails or the employee is found incompetent, but it almost never happens to tenured professors. Indeed, it is inconceivable to professors how matter-of-factly people outside academia look for new jobs and cope with periods of unemployment, even in middle age. The typical academic's feelings about life without tenure are not unlike the feelings of terror and insecurity with which Soviet citizens view the American practice of job hunting after college or having to buy one's own medical insurance ("Whatis insurance?" a Muscovite philosopher once asked me). In the ruthless extreme of business, which might also be called utopian meritocracy, employees are constantly compared to others waiting for their jobs and replaced the instant someone better is found. Professional athletes and coaches are subject to this continual testing; winningis theonly criterionand the suggestion thata National Football League team should be loyal to a running back who is inferior to another available running back would be laughed at. The same may be true of first-chair players in a symphony orchestra and some corporate chief executive officers. The system ofpure meritocracy changes by degree through various kinds of jobs to workplaces where loyalty and community clearly outweigh getting the best person available. One often hears, as an...

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