Is it Time to Look at the Issue of Tenure in Higher Education?

Is it Time to Look at the Issue of Tenure in Higher Education?

We are finally seeing some reforms in higher education, but what about tenure? How can we expect real change if there are so many radical faculty members who are basically untouchable?

Ellen Ginsberg Simon writes at Substack:

At Columbia as well as at the vast majority of the universities under investigation, the majority of the administration has not turned over significantly. Yes, the Columbia and Harvard presidents fell from grace as did President Spanier, and both schools are functioning under interim presidents, as was Penn State during much of our monitorship. The bulk of leadership, however, remains static at Columbia as well as at its sister universities.

Without the benefit of a clean house, without recognition that certain leaders contributed to a culture of harassment and discrimination, and without penalizing leadership and staff for their complicity in turning a blind eye to their institutions’ failings, Jewish students, faculty, and staff will be no safer.

The agreement hammers home the fact that decisions about faculty and staff hiring/firing will not be impacted by government intervention. Yet, the unwillingness and inability to prevent tenured faculty from discriminating against and harassing students, to curb the teaching of falsehoods that promote hate, and to penalize faculty and staff who openly, physically stood in the way of Jewish students seeking to attend their classes indicates a serious flaw in the ability of the settlement to move the needle meaningfully.

For those of us invested in seeing our universities healed through this process, the inviolability of tenure remains a core, untouched issue.

There is no provision aimed at managing what I term the Tenure Problem. Joseph Massad – the avowed anti-Zionist who publicly celebrated the October 7th attack – is still on tap to teach a course about Zionism in the fall. How serious could Columbia’s dedication to its goal to snuff out antisemitism be if it cannot rectify this most egregious nonsense? Even more easily removed, untenured faculty who forced students to take classes in the encampment, gave As to those who attended the encampments, and otherwise ostracized their Jewish students remain untouched, and no measures within the agreement appear primed to ameliorate this major source of antisemitism on campus.

I have no ready answer to the Tenure Problem other than the need to dismantle it entirely as a feature of American higher education. The inviolability of tenure is a core cause of the systemic crisis that permeates every higher education institution, rendering faculty effectively untouchable unless they sexually assault someone. Faculty must be held to account like contractual employees in any other industry. As these settlement agreements are not designed to solve one of the root causes of campus antisemitism, their mission is flawed and potentially doomed from the outset.

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