Document Type
Article
Abstract
Part of the very identity of the American university is its insulation from society—a crucial contributor, at least in some instances, toward facilitating the search for knowledge and the disruption of established orthodoxies. Yet American higher education does not exist and cannot function separately from societal pressures. This is most obviously true in the context of public institutions that directly rely on state governmental entities for financial support and that may be subject to some mechanisms of control by governmental actors or their appointees. But it is also obviously true in the context of private institutions that may rely on various forms of governmental support, and that are no less subject to the pressures of applicant, student, and alumni preferences—especially if the latter may impact potential financial gifts. Higher educational institutions are thus subject to a duality in their institutional self-image, and they are subject to a continual, uneasy tension between competing pressures to stand apart from and to be more prominent within broader society. My goal in this Article is to illuminate one crucial aspect of this duality by focusing on a topic that is a core part of internal university practices, but that also carries with it a host of broader consequences. Namely, I examine the employment practices regarding tenured faculty members. More precisely, my focus is on the absence of sufficient accountability mechanisms for professional incompetence by tenured faculty members, and I critically assess this concern with an eye toward its potential consequences for the health and vitality of higher educational institutions. Tenure is the most distinctive facet of American higher education compared to other employment contexts. The conventional defenses of tenured employment for faculty members generally focus on the systemic benefits that ensue from it toward the creation and dissemination of knowledge and the laudable goal of seeking to incentivize talented individuals to forego potentially more lucrative careers for the academy. I am persuaded by these arguments. However, I would also assert that tenured employment for faculty numbers in practice has functioned to eliminate sufficient accountability for this privileged subset of the academic community—a striking aberration within the context of American employment that would probably be recognized immediately by nearly anyone who was not a tenured faculty member. In this Article, I highlight the specific cultural and institutional elements that preclude greater accountability for tenured faculty members and offer some plausible pathways of reform that might be capable of both preserving academic freedom protections while also increasing the opportunity for holding tenured faculty members accountable for unprofessional and/or incompetent performance. I proceed as follows: in Section II, I address the conventional arguments about academic freedom which supply the strongest, most principled support for shielding academics from adverse employment consequences. In Section III, however, I discuss the problem posed by professionally incompetent tenured faculty in American higher education and the present-day challenges that especially necessitate some form of remediation. In Section IV, I detail the precise ways in which the scholarly, teaching, and institutional citizenship or service obligations of tenured faculty members may escape appropriate scrutiny and remediation due to various cultural and institutional factors. Finally, in Section V, I offer some suggestions on potential reforms that may provide for greater accountability for the performance of tenured faculty members, while also preserving the academic freedom benefits commonly linked to tenure.
Recommended Citation
Stuart Chinn,
Reconciling Tenure and Faculty Accountability,
128
W. Va. L. Rev.
57
(2025).
Available at:
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/wvlr/vol128/iss1/5