Yesterday, on my Facebook I posted a quote from a recent article by Lamar Alexander published on Newsweek. Among other things, he points out that tenure system in American universities is not working. Here’s what he wrote:
Within academic departments, tenure, combined with age-discrimination laws, make faculty turnover—critical for a university to remain current in changing times—difficult. Instead of protecting speech and encouraging diversity and innovative thinking, the tenure system often stifles them: aspiring professors must win the approval of established colleagues for tenure, encouraging likemindedness and sometimes inhibiting the free flow of ideas.
To this post, my former colleague at Case, Susan Helper whom I respect a lot, posted the following comments:
tenure may discourage some small innovations, but also protects the development of big, unpopular ideas (imho!). As Dick Boland has said, every academic should, at least once in their career, do something they would have not been able to do without tenure!
To this I responded:
I totally agree with Dick. The challenge is that human mind is habitual. It is very hard to break away from the pattern of behavior that you acquired while you are working very hard to get tenured.