Though one of the original ideas behind tenure intended to provide job protection for professors and teachers based on their worthiness to their academic institution, in the modern age questions can be raised (and no so easily answered) as to the system’s effectiveness. What can happen when an individual is awarded tenure?

And why do teachers and professors need additional protection from an arbitrary termination? Job protection exists in no other arena except government. Many are motivated to be awarded tenure, but once awarded tenure and guaranteed job security, what happens to initiative, competition, and efficiency?

Job retention should be solely aligned to a performance or production-based measure for the life of a career. Currently, if an individual is awarded tenure, performance can be thrown out the window. It is very costly to terminate the unproductive tenured individual. In no way does the promotion and tenure system fulfill the academic institution’s educational mission beyond the theory that the best professors should be retained. What happens when the tenured professor views teaching as a burden?

A tenured professor can be asked to take on more of a teaching capacity by a department head, for example, and he can respond “No thank you” and that’s that. Where, in any other mode of business life, can an individual say “No” or be insubordinate to a superior and not risk termination?

Yes, a professor can be under immense pressure. But when tenure is awarded, the pressure to produce can be simply discarded. A tenured professor is not obligated to obtain external funding; a tenured professor can choose to stubbornly conduct research in areas not readily translational or meaningful; a tenured professor can refuse to teach; and an unproductive tenured professor cannot be easily terminated. The litigation involved is automatically cost-prohibitive. A tenured professor essentially has “a job for life”. About the only way an organization can remove a tenured professor is to pressure him into accepting a buy-out, or early retirement. Once again, however, a tenured professor may refuse without repercussion.

The clique-ish nature of elitist attitudes is present early in student life. Wealthy families ensure that their children attend prestigious programs in prestigious institutions, often through corrupted admission policies, whether or not the student’s work is worthy. Upon the completion of post-graduate work and and postdoctoral appointment, the pathway to tenure can be difficult and competitive; but if an individual attains tenure, he becomes virtually an untouchable entity and part of a prestigious, academic club. Because of the effort and time put in to obtaining the award of tenure, many become unproductive if only out of the exhaustion involved in the selling of one’s soul.

Thus, a privilege-based system like tenure has its consequences: individuals who strive but fail to be awarded tenure are forcefully cast off to reside from the unenviable “outside”. The system does not, by logic, reward talent; the talent pool is watered down with individuals who play it safe and take the middle road. The system of promotion and tenure digresses to a politicized system that feeds on its own idiosyncrasies — on a whim, worthy and earnest individuals get sacrificed.

This is how the elitism is created. A tenured professor no longer needs to be productive, no longer needs to educate students, no longer has to conduct research or publish in any other research area beyond his own interest.

Because promotion and tenure has created a privilege-based environment, the vicious politics applied to maintain the standard can make for the worst possible forms of human behavior. It is curious at this point in time whether or not promotion and tenure should be discarded and discontinued altogether.

There are many educators and researchers in the country who would have no problem competing in a more equitable, performance-based system; and though promotion and tenure was originally created to establish such a system, over time, the system has become impertinent in its current ego-inflated, high-stakes form.

“Job-for-life” should not be the end-all goal unless we want to promote the worst in human behavior: laziness, stubbornness, and selfishness. People have the right, no doubt, to behave in whatever lawful manner they choose. It does not follow, however, that this behavior be mandated or awarded with “job-for-life” status.