Applications of organizational theory to U.S.

higher education Kirk Greenwood

Part I: Reinventing academic freedom amid prescriptivist advancement, Center Valley, PA
tenure, and promotion policies and faculty precarization* September, 2021

The “1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure” promulgated by the American

Association of University Professors enumerates protections for faculty members engaged in potentially

unpopular or controversial research, teaching, or public discourse based on the principles that “[i]nstitutions

of higher education are conducted for the common good” and that the scholarly enterprise which occurs at

these institutions and furthers this “common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free

expression” (AAUP, 1970, p. 14). The “1940 Statement,” and its subsequent emendations and reindorsements

(AAUP, 1970, p. 14), established guidelines for conferring the perquisites of tenure upon eligible faculty

members, including “full freedom in research and in the publication of the results,” “freedom in the classroom

in discussing their subject,” and freedom from “institutional censorship or discipline” when they “speak or

write as citizens,” as “members of a learned profession,” or as “officers of an educational institution” (AAUP,

1970, p. 14). This series of AAUP advisory statements institutionalized tenure as the predominant means of

“protect[ing] academic freedom by securing the employment of U.S. college faculty” from arbitrary or

politically motivated dismissal by administrators, boards, or politicians who disagreed with their research

findings or public statements (Bess & Dee, 2012, p. 34).

The premise underlying faculty tenure protections is that the advancement of scientific and humanistic

knowledge requires researchers and scholars to “explore new ways of thinking rather than simply pursue old

ideas,” even—or perhaps especially—when novel formulations are “initially seen as ideologically or

conceptually deviant” (Bess & Dee, 2012, p. 35). In the realm of scientific research, today’s unorthodox

thinking has the potential to become tomorrow’s breakthrough and future commonsense. Together, the

tenure system and principle of academic freedom it upholds preserve faculty members’ status as self-

regulating knowledge workers accountable generally to “ideas and the pursuit of knowledge” and particularly

*A response to Bess, J. L. & Dee, J. R. (2008). Understanding college and university organization: Theories for effective policy and practice (Vol. I –
The state of the system), Chapter 2: Colleges and universities as complex organizations, Section 8: Tenure and academic freedom
to their specialized “intellectual passions and their disciplines” (Mangum, 2021, p. 26), rather than to the

constraints of institutional bureaucracy and managerialism. In her contribution to a series “The Future of

Tenure” published by The Chronicle of Higher Education, computer scientist Lynn Andrea Stein (2021) observes

that “tenure protects a faculty member’s academic freedom to pursue an intellectual agenda that might be

misaligned with the institution’s perception of its own interests” (p. 22). According to Stein (2021), tenure

affords established researchers professional autonomy from the institutions they are affiliated with, a

situation which “can sometimes decouple the interests of the institution and the interests of the faculty

member” (p. 22). As an institutionalized “mechanism for lifetime employment,” tenure imbues faculty

members with the confidence that “academic freedom is permitted and that personal expression of belief will

not be cause for dismissal” in cases in which their publicly expressed scholarly and political commitments

conflict with an institution’s concern for its public image (Bess & Dee, 2012, p. 35).

In addition to having long been a bulwark against impingement by local institutional authorities on the

production of knowledge, tenure has become in the (post-)Trump era of U.S. history a necessary defense

against an emboldened conservative political constituency, characterized by a rabid anti-intellectualism, which

questions the norms and values of academe and characterizes those who have committed their lives to

uncovering truth through the application of rigorous method as out-of-touch, if not sinisterly motivated,

‘elites.’ In a sociopolitical climate where terms like ‘truthiness,’ ‘alternative facts,’ and ‘fake news’ circulate

with alacrity, the commitment of academics to the production of knowledge through logically valid,

empirically verifiable methods has resumed its “collision course with popular beliefs, familiar practices, and

legislators” (Mangum, 2021, p. 26).

Deciding whether the tenure system continues to serve its historic function as a guarantor of academic

freedom entails deep consideration. A principal concern is that the multiplication of intra- and extramural

challenges to the tenure system has led to its retrenchment. Citing research by sociologist Joseph
Hermanowicz (2011) on changes to U.S. higher education and their impact on the professoriate, historian John

R. Thelin (2021) observes in his Chronicle contribution that “since 1970 the overall trend for professorial

privileges and protections had been downward” (p. 18). According to Thelin (2021), “[t]enured (and tenure-

track) positions refer to a small and shrinking percentage of faculty members nationwide” (p. 18). In 2018-19,

only 45 percent of faculty members at institutions that offered tenure had achieved this coveted distinction, a

decrease of 11 percent from early 1990s (Dever & Justice, 2021, p. 11). Furthermore, the percentage of faculty

members with full-time contracts, tenured or not, has declined sharply over the last 50 years, from nearly 80

percent of the professoriate in the early 1970s, to less than 55 percent in 2018-19 (Dever & Justice, 2021, p.

11). Thelin (2021) faults fiscally hawkish administrators for eliminating tenure-line positions vacated by retiring

faculty members and replacing them with all manner of cheaper “permutations ranging from adjuncts to

clinical faculty members to special-title series or lecturerships” (p. 18).

Such nontenureable employment arrangements reduce institutional personnel costs since part-time

faculty and those ineligible for tenure receive “far lower salaries” than their tenured and tenure-track

colleagues; they may “not be eligible for fringe benefits such as medical insurance, life insurance, and

sabbatical leaves;” and they are classed as contingent workers who may be dismissed by their institutions at

will (Bess & Dee, 2012, p. 30). Echoing Thelin’s (2021) concern with the structural changes to the academic

labor market, literary scholar William Deresiewicz (2021) declares that the “biggest problem with tenure as it

currently exists is that there’s not enough of it to go around” (p. 12). Deresiewicz (2021) asserts that replacing

tenured positions with their attendant professional prestige and relative job security with underpaid,

nominally renewable fixed-term instructional appointments has amounted to an “immoral adjunctification of

academic labor [that] is rotting the profession from within” (p. 12). Given that a preponderance of the

academic labor force “approaching three-quarters of instructional faculty” are subject to fixed-term

appointments that can induce economic uncertainty, if not precarity, physicist and former university president
David John Helfand (2021) concludes that “[t]enure does more to deprive the academic freedom of those who

lack it… than it does to protect the freedom of those who have it” (p. 21).

Doctoral students and candidates, newly minted PhDs, and postdocs face daunting odds in obtaining

tenure-track positions as assistant professors at colleges or universities of any Carnegie classification in any

region of the country. As the above-cited statistics from The Chronicle about the paucity of tenure-track

careers relative to contingent positions suggests, aspiring academics, many of them rigorously trained and

highly qualified, are undergoing “enormous competition for a declining number of full-time, tenured positions

in U.S. higher education” (Bess & Dee, 2012, p. 30). The economic and personal tradeoffs Deresiewicz (2021)

documents in terms of “undergraduate debt, the long slog of graduate school, the opportunity costs of

forgoing a more lucrative career, the abysmal state of the job market, [and] the second slog of an assistant

professorship” are all reasons to dissuade undergraduates with an aptitude for scholarship from pursuing the

dream of becoming a professor, as cynical as that recommendation sounds.

Bess and Dee (2021) describe the preliminary stages of the winnowing and selection process for pre-

career academics in more sanguine terms than often prove to be the case. In the authors’ rendition,

“successful undergraduate students pursuing their bachelor’s degrees are rewarded with high grades and high

praise by the faculty,” who then encourage them to attend “graduate school because they have demonstrated

interest and competence in the subject matter area” (Bess & Dee, 2012, p. 29). In fact, established faculty

members who are approached by promising undergraduates with recommendation requests for graduate

school often hesitate to fulfill these requests because doing so promotes unrealistic expectations about the

likelihood of achieving secure employment as a tenure-line professor, which may be the only window on the

profession precocious undergraduates possess. As a former PhD student in early modern English literature, I,

like many would-be humanists, received a version of ‘the talk’ about the downside risks of attempting to

pursue an academic career from each of my graduate school recommenders before they supplied me with
recommendations to top-30 programs in the field. As I recall, the admission ratio for the middle-of-the-road

program I ended up attending, which fortunately offered me a fairly generous funding package, was 5.5

percent. The odds of successfully progressing through the succeeding benchmark toward an academic career

get dramatically slimmer from there.

The workload required to successfully navigate the six-year probationary period assistant professors

must endure as they prepare for tenure review is described by Bess and Dee (2021) as “extremely stressful”

(p. 30). Sociologist Anthony C. Ocampo (2021), writing in The Chronicle, similarly calls the “pathway to tenure…

an arduous, anxiety-inducing one” for junior faculty: “There’s pressure to publish. There’s the need to attend

conferences in order to manufacture a professional identity. There’s the importance of cultivating a scholarly

network to support your research goals. It’s a lot” (p. 15). During this intensive period of largely self-directed

intellectual labor, “junior faculty members are assessed along three dimensions: research, teaching, and

service” (Zaloom, 2021, p. 26) by discriminating senior colleagues and administrators concerned with the

junior colleague’s scholarly productivity, collegiality, and “fit into the overall cultural practices of the

institution, school, or department” (Bess & Dee, 2012, p. 29). As cultural studies scholar Caitlin Zaloom (2021)

explains in her contribution to The Chronicle series, at most institutions “research, often seen as the most

prestigious category of academic work,” outweighs the teaching and service criteria in evaluations of a

candidate’s tenure-worthiness (p. 26). The reasons behind the outsized emphasis on research among scholarly

community are historical and not well explained in the chapter by Bess and Dee (2012), although the authors

do comment that “productivity and visibility of excellent researchers eventually brings credit to the faculty in

the department, school, and institution” that recruited them (p. 30).

It is customary for candidates for tenure maintain a high level of research output during their six years

of probationary employment. Evidence of research productivity includes “published books, book chapters, and

journal articles, as well as papers presented at annual professional meetings, and other evidence of scholarly
activity” (Bess & Dee, 2012, p. 33), all of which is assessed quantitatively and qualitatively, with consideration

paid to whether the “sponsor of the publication (book publisher or journal) is highly reputed and relies on

professional, peer review processes to determine acceptability” (p. 33). As the six-year period of probationary

employment nears its end, junior faculty prepare an application for tenure that scrupulously documents their

accomplishments to date in all three categories of academic work: research, teaching, and service (Bess &

Dee, 2012, p. 31). At this point, the candidate for tenure finesses “evaluations of teaching by students” and

“peer evaluations of contributions to the department” into their application, alongside evidence of research

output, to satisfy the overall formula for earning tenure (Bess & Dee, 2012, p. 31).

Once prepared, the candidate’s application for tenure is formally assessed by multiple committees and

levels of institutional hierarchy during their sixth year of employment (Bess & Dee, 2012, pp. 31-2).

Departmental colleagues, department chairs, academic deans, and division- and institutional-level committees

review the candidate’s tenure application; even the provost, institutional president, and board of trustees take

part in deciding faculty appointments, albeit the roles of these senior officials are largely pro forma. (Bess &

Dee, 2012, p. 32). (Note: Famed journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones’ recent denial of tenure, and then abrupt

reinstatement, as part of her near-hiring as an endowed chair in the school of journalism at the University of

North Carolina—Chapel Hill is an alleged instance in which high-level administrative and governance officials

intervened to massage tenure guarantees out of a faculty contract. In Hannah-Jones’s case, some conservative

North Carolina legislators and a high-profile donor found the journalist’s nationally recognized, award-winning

work objectionable [Stripling, 2021].)

The above-detailed description of the process by which assistant professors become tenured,

particularly the outsized emphasis placed on conducting specialized research, suggests that such a labor-

intensive and highly prescriptive process for achieving tenure may itself impede the ability of energetic,

innovative young researchers and scholars to carry out creative work that, harkening back to the original
relationship between tenure and academic freedom, is promotive of the “common good” (AAUP, 1970, p. 14).

Many contributors to The Chronicle’s “The Future of Tenure” series criticize the tenure system’s quasi-

authoritarian requirement to produce research that subscribes to narrowly defined, highly specified

disciplinary norms—“publication of a monograph” in the humanities (Garofalo, 2021, p. 16) and a

“hypercompetitive environment for federal funding, [and] the importance of external funding as a criterion for

promotion” in the sciences (Wolinetz, 2021, p. 24). Such prescriptiveness precludes junior faculty from taking

risks on more creative projects and producing innovative scholarly artifacts that have the potential to engage a

wider (nonacademic) audience.

In critiquing the standard model of academic research that remains the main driver of the tenure

system, William Deresiewicz (2021) wryly claims that the “preponderance of significant work is still produced

at a small fraction of institutions which means the vast majority — uncited, undistinguished, uninspired — is a

waste of everybody’s time” (p. 12). In contrast, the ‘public humanities’ movement proposed by Caitlin Zaloom

(2021) offers a refreshing antidote to the stultification of traditional research agendas criticized by

Deresiewicz. Zaloom (2021) pronounces the public humanities to be an opportunity for scholars to

“fundamentally transform our intellectual projects, our modes of inquiry, and our way of evaluating what

counts as real scholarship” and to “fold public engagement back into our work” (p. 24). Such an undertaking,

exemplified by Zaloom’s own Public Books forum, involves a tricky balance of “conceptualizing inquiry as

fundamentally inclusive” and “engaging with people and ideas that are regularly excluded from academic

circles” without compromising the “deep research and careful, thorough argumentation that is the hallmark of

academic work” (Zaloom, 2021, p. 26). Other contributors to The Chronicle series recognize that “important

work is being done that does not look like traditional scholarship — such as digital projects, community

engagement, and research whose purpose is primarily focused on administering an academic program

(Garofalo, 2021, p. 16) or the “writing articles for local and national newspapers or producing a podcast on
sociological topics” (Ocampo, 2021, p. 16). At the same time that the tenure system tends to overvalue

research with overly prescriptive standards, it undervalues the faculty service requirement, particularly service

undertaken by faculty of color, who are charged with what historian Derrick E. White (2021) refers to as a

“‘service tax’” by being disproportionately “expected to engage with students of color, serve as the diversity

representative on too many committees, and engage with the broader local community,” while “white

colleagues have to really excel only in scholarship and teaching” (p. 13).

Taken together, criticisms of the way research and service are evaluated under the current tenure

system amount to the complaint that “it narrows the criteria for faculty excellence rather than broadening

them to encompass all the roles an institution’s faculty should play to make it a successful place for teaching

and learning, research and innovation, mentoring and public service” (Helfand, 2021, p. 21). Opening the door

to scholarship that engages purposefully with a wider democratic public and its concerns, and elevating the

status of faculty service as an evaluative criterion in tenure decision making, may help to transform an old

system which consumes the time, talents, and energies of young researchers and scholars at the height of

their ambition and productivity into something more publicly engaged and professionally satisfying for its

primary stakeholders.

References

AAUP—American Association of University Professors. (1970). 1940 statement of principles on academic

freedom and tenure with 1970 interpretive comments. https://www.aaup.

org/report/1940-statement-principles-academic-freedom-and-tenure

Bess, J. L. & Dee, J. R. (2012). Understanding college and university organization: Theories for effective policy

and practice. (Vol. I). Stylus.

Deresiewicz, W. (2021, April). An immodest proposal. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 67(16), 12.
Dever, C. & Justice, G. (2021, April). The future of tenure: Rethinking a beleaguered institution. The Chronicle

of Higher Education, 67(16), 11.

Helfand, D. J. (2021, April). A radical experiment. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 67(6), 18-21.

Hermanowicz, J. C. (2011). The American academic profession: Transformation in higher education. The Johns

Hopkins University Press.

Garofalo, D. (2021, April). Tenure by the book. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 67(16), 16-18.

Mangum, T. (2021, April). Counting the cost of tenure. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 67(16), 26-27.

Ocampo, A. C. (2021, April). A template for change. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 67(16), 15-16.

Stein, L. A. (2021, April). No departments and no tenure. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 67(16), 21-24.

Stripling, J. (2021, July). How Chapel Hill bungled a star hire. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 67(23). 16-21.

Thelin, J. R. (2021, April). Tenure is tired. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 67(16), 18.

White, D. E. (2021, April). Diversity, inclusion, and tenure. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 67(16), 12-13

Wolinetz, C. D. (2021, April). The healthy and the sick. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 67(16), 24.

Zaloom, C. (2021, April). Bringing the humanities to the public. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 67(16), 24-

26.