Tuesday, August 24, 2010

The Train Has Left

There is probably no more cantankerous, anger-producing, intractable problem in the history of the College than the issue of the "tenure quota" beginning in 1972 and lasting for at least a decade.

In many ways, it is the defining issue of that decade setting the tone of the College community and extending from the faculty to the Board to the President to the Chancellor.

Ironically, if you ask any of the younger faculty -- those that have been appointed in the last ten years or so -- about the tenure quota they will all say that they have no idea what is being asked. It simply has disappeared as an issue; most have no idea about the struggle that obsessed us as a College for so long.

If you find an older faculty and ask about the quota, they will tell you that it was a device invented by the first President to make sure the administration had "managerial flexibility". That phrase is almost never heard these days.

I have been going through the relevant documents recently and the history of the tenure quota here is complex and sometimes unclear. It is, however, essential for us to understand how this became a dominant issue, who were the players and what caused it to disappear.

To understand how the tenure quota became such a defining issue we have to understand higher education in New Jersey in the late 1960s.

At that time, the six State colleges were really teacher training schools. They tended to duplicate each other's curricula and, as it finally came to everyone's attention, a high proportion of their faculties had tenure. Over all, in September, 1971, 63% of the faculty across the State had tenure; this rate climbed to 71% in early 1972 but was expected to drop back to 65% in 1972 because new faculty were hired to meet increased enrollment. One State college had a 75% tenured faculty.

The other causal issue was the fact that, by State statute, faculty in New Jersey State colleges were tenured in three years. This may, on the surface, seem an advantage. From the faculty's standpoint, the College has to commit to a young teacher at the end of three years so the waiting and stress of defending one's teaching and research is over quickly. From the administrator's standpoint, if the faculty member shows no aberrant behavior in that three year period, the college can make the commitment and move on. It would seem like everyone wins.

This might work for experienced teachers -- those at the rank of Associate or Full Professor -- who will have a verifiable record. But what about Assistant Professors who have minimum teaching experience? How valid is a judgment made about teaching after three years?

The concatenation of a short probationary period and high proportion of tenured faculty certainly caused State officials to wonder whether a tenure quota might not solve both problems at one blow.

Stockton's founding falls between these issues.

The President, Richard Bjork, in January of 1971, wrote a document Adminstrative Working Paper IV: Faculty and Staff Evaluation outlining a Promotion and Tenure Policy for the college. In this document, Bjork lists the various State laws and regulations that defined tenure and the probation period including Title18a:60, Chapter 271, Public Law 1967 which defined the probationary period as three years.

Interestingly, no mention is made of tenure quotas. Also, of equal interest, a Report of the Faculty Committee on Administrative Working Paper IV (the document written by Bjork) does not mention tenure quotas once. At this point (1971) neither the administration nor the faculty considered tenure quotas worth mentioning. Things were about to change dramatically.

That change came in the form of a report on Tenure At the State Colleges of New Jersey (June, 1972) ordered by the then Chancellor of Higher Education, Ralph Dungan. This 34 page report covers the tenure situation in the State colleges, what the Department of Higher Education had tried to do about the short probationary period, what other reports had recommended about tenure quotas and, finally, what the report recommended.

Briefly, this report stated that a tenure quota of 60% should be instituted at the State colleges. To insure compliance, each college was to submit an annual report to the Department of Higher Education.
Coincidentally, the AFT was elected as bargaining agent in February of 1973 -- just between Bjork's document on Promotion and Tenure and the DHE report on tenure quotas. These three facts shaped the firestorm that followed.

When the NY Times ran an article on October 22, 1972, the bargaining agent was the Association of New Jersey College Faculties -- and NJEA affiliate. It attacked the quota plan as being against State law and the US Constitution. They also saw Chancellor Dungan as overruling local boards. Montclair's president resigned over the issue and the reporter states that Stockton's faculty was especially "infuriated".

And so the issue was joined. Four months later the bargaining agent elected -- with incredibly strong Stockton support -- became the AFT. From that point on the tenure quota was the center issue for the Union because to lose the fight would have meant that the Union could not protect its members and if that had ever happened it would have lost all credibility.

Tenure quotas appeal to administrators in times when education is expanding. If a college isn't hiring many new faculty, quotas are not impressive or needed. But, when Stockton doubled its faculty in two years after its founding, quotas made sense to administrators who feared that if the faculty ever achieved 100% tenure, change would have become impossible. At a place like Stockton -- which prided itself on constant change -- full tenure would have been anathema.

On the other hand, Stockton's faculty was uniquely young in the State system so it saw the quota as a direct attack on being here, teaching, doing research and becoming a successful academicians.

Once these lines were drawn there was no turning back to the excitement of the earliest days and to a communality of purpose.

Indeed, Bjork wrote and presented testimony before The New Jersey Assembly Education Committee in November, 1976. In his short statement he argues fully against tenure. By then, the issue was already beginning to fade -- though it wasn't a dead issue until at least a decade or more -- and Bjork's speech is an elegant rear-guard action. As they say: the train had left the station (see Rob's remark about his speech below).

With 40 years hindsight one is forced to wonder if all of the anger, effort, talk, arguing, planning and writing was not wasted. Other issues of power sharing, faculty governance, tight budgets and benefits occupied the Union -- and rightfully so. Once the halcyon days of the Founding had passed, the College had to survive in a radically different world from 1971 as the new kid on the block. It had to compete for funds, for faculty, for lines, for students and for the excellence it had so long assumed.

No one talks -- or writes -- about tenure quotas today; this is true, at least, in my hearing. Concomitantly, no one becomes much excited about any issue either. As I said: the train has left.

Logical -- and Wrong

It seems evident that the first President of Stockton, Richard Bjork, was very interested in doing away with tenure, or, if that was not possible, imposing a quota so that the negative effects of permanent employment status, as he saw them, would be limited as much as possible.

Two of President Bjork’s key advisors were also very much interested in reevaluating the institution of tenure in higher educaion. Richard P. Chait and Andrew T. Ford argued in a Chronicle of Higher Education article that tenure would most likely disappear in the academy because it was both no longer necessary and an impediment in the way of constructive change.

It was no longer necessary, they felt, because of the rise of unionism. Every protection that tenure provided – with regard to academic freedom in particular – could be secured through employment rights. If tenure had been established to secure such freedom then it had now been made superfluous by the union’s grievance procedure. Moreover, the process of attaining tenure might even provide its own barrier to academic freedom, with young faculty needing to tow the line in order to gain acceptance from their tenured colleagues. The more that unionism became established in the academic landscape, the more likely it was that tenure would go by the wayside. If the union needed to protect all its members, the tenured, the untenured, and those not in tenure-track positions, it would find itself obliged to question tenure privileges that placed many members beyond their control.

With regard to being an impediment to change, tenure was by its nature a source of inflexibility. The more a faculty was tenured-up, so to speak, the less it would be responsive to change. In the past this meant that new trends, new ideas, and new technologies faced stiff resistance, and this was definitely an inconvenience. But by 1973 there were more pressing concerns. In order to provide redress for past discrimination colleges were required to hire more minorities and women. If there were no lines available because faculty were all tenured moving towards a diverse faculty would be extremely tough. Not only this, owing to past discrimination, or the life experiences of those who were previously excluded, the requirements for tenure themselves were problematic. Stringent requirements bolstered the status quo; and tenure decisions were made at about the time that many women were taking time away from the labor market to have and raise children -- past discriminations would therefore not be overcome. Tenure, Chait and Ford argued, was not really an appropriate institution for the academic landscape that seemed to be emerging in the 1970s.

As Ken Tompkins wrote to me after reading the Chait and Ford piece, “it is a good example of something that is logical – and wrong!” Ken is exactly right. The argument of the article is well developed and fundamentally very persuasive. So persuasive, indeed, that one puts it down (or turns away from the screen) and wonders why it is that one is now, in 2010, working in an institution that still enshrines tenure. This cannot be, surely! But while logical, the argument is fundamentally flawed – perhaps because its understanding of history is somewhat cockeyed, but perhaps more because it doesn’t seem to comprehend the psychology (or recognize that it might need to consider this) of those who they believed would oppose the continuation of tenure.

Regarding history: unions have never freely given up rights that any of their members have attained. Moreover, they are and have always been founded around their strongest members. They don’t give things back or make concessions to management because the rights of one portion of their members interfere with the rights of others. The AFL was based around crafts; these unions comprised the aristocrats of labor – the closest thing to tenured faculty that existed in the industrial landscape. In order to protect positions, they needed to reach out to the unorganized, lest their position might have been undercut by the rise of new industrial organizations. While the CIO did later form around organizations that endeavored to cover the whole workplace, across trades and work classifications, it did not displace the AFL.

The unions that formed in colleges and universities brought together members who were already tenured or who were aspiring to that status. The notion that they would find this status problematic and something they ought not to have because it was unfair to others in the academic workforce, is a little absurd really. The primary goal of the union would be to protect the right of tenure for its members and to ensure that no infringements, like quotas, were established by management. Other issues that might relate to the protection of untenured and transient labor would always remain secondary, because these concerned issues with people who were not fully established, long-term members. There is nothing sinister about this, it is just a fact that unions and their leaders were going to perform in ways that they always had done, and there was no reason to expect otherwise.

Re psychology: people who have been discriminated against seldom want to replace the system from which they have been excluded. Women and minorities didn’t look at the institution of tenure and say that it negatively impacted them in some way and therefore needed to be replaced. Rather they noted that they wanted to be represented in the ranks of the tenured on a more equal basis. So, while affirmative action might cause some stresses in colleges and universities, it would almost never be the case that this would be made grounds for replacing the system of tenure; and those who were endeavoring to break into the ranks of academe would never be leading the charge to achieve such a goal.

So Chait and Ford were very logical, and they clearly believed that they were in the vanguard of change, but they also were fundamentally wrong – so much so that they had retreated from almost all their positions by the time they wrote Beyond Traditional Tenure in 1982. They were obviously also very influential in terms of the development of Bjork’s own thinking on this subject. In November 1976, Bjork went before the New Jersey Assembly Education Committee, to speak about academic tenure in public schools. In his presentation he came out strongly against tenure. “No reasonable claim can be made,” he exclaims, “that the extent of tenuring today is essential to, or even helpful to, risk taking and free inquiry.” He continues:

In an effort to provide a condition of special freedom for a select few, education has developed a protective shield for the many who work under its umbrella. Critics have made it clear that this shield probably protects the less competent more than it does the exceptionally competent. I agree that such may well be the case. But what concerns me more is that the shield of tenure protects its holders form the refreshment of criticism while permitting the tenured the irresponsibility of whatever criticisms or ideas they believe worth uttering.

This argument had been part of the Chait and Ford case made against tenure regarding flexibility and the need of institutions to have the ability to change.

Added to this, Bjork referred to the employment aspects of tenure, along the lines developed by his two assistants:

In public education, tenure is not the sole instrument of protection for the work and person of teachers. Tenure is one layer. Added to tenre are protective layers of employy-employer agreements, civil service regulations, civil rights regulations, statutes, and court decisions which accord individuals property rights in their positions. The suggestion that the individual is not well protected in a job from the ravages of a vindictive group and/or an arbitrary or capricious manager can only find sustenance by reference to the isolated and often bizarre.

Bjork ended with a flourish: “Those who are truly seeking are seldom fettered by their critics, rather they are stimulated. Education as a crucial arena of free inquiry needs several protective layers removed and tenure is among those layers.”

But if that were the case, Bjork and others who agreed with him would still find those protective layers difficult to remove. Tenure was something that the union fought for bitterly, even at a new college (perhaps especially at a new college) like Stockton. Those creating a new college may have believed that it would be easy to move against tenure; those who stood in their way knew that they needed to be extremely vigilant on that score.

So, if eradication of tenure would be difficult to achieve in its entirety, perhaps its negative effects could be limited in other ways. Back in 1973 Bjork and Stockton’s Board of Trustees had already established for the college a relatively strict tenure quota. For Bjork, conforming to this quota would remain of fundamental importance to the healthy development of his fledgling college.