Interesting Article In Chronicle Today: Tenure’s Broken Promise

I read this article in the Chronicle today (It’s a good read, I highly recommend it)

https://www.chronicle.com/article/tenures-broken-promise?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_2098641_nl_Academe-Today_date_20210315&cid=at&source=ams&sourceId=4792666&cid2=gen_login_refresh

[Unfortunately it is behind the Chronicle’s pay wall, ugh. ]

It is just a very quotable piece. This line blew me away. ““I defend a system,” she says, “I don’t agree with.””

The article mostly follows one professor whose department (thus job) was cut and unsurprisingly talks a lot about tenure. The farther I get into being a professor and the chair of my department, the more this scares me. If I were to lose my job now what could I do? [I think I would try to find a job as a consultant in Higher Education, having worked as a management consultant and written about (and worked in) Higher Education.] The number of options available to me now is significantly less than it was when I started down this road and I expect it will be more and more limited. And if there are to be a number of faculty losing their jobs in the coming five years, there will be a lot of people to compete over the finite number of available jobs. It is scary, so I am not gonna think about it tonight.

I do think this discussion is a “lagging” discussion, meaning this is all dealing with the effects and not the causes. Check out this blog post from last year. We still have to speed up the innovation cycle in Higher Education.