Sarah Rothman | Far too many undergrads don't understand 'tenure'

Attention Penn undergraduates - I think we have a problem.

In the past week, I have informally interviewed 10 of you, and only three were familiar with the concept of tenure.

If you're thinking that perhaps my methodology is unscientific, consider that a survey conducted by the American Association of University Professors determined that 45 percent of Americans had never even heard of tenure.

I'm not so concerned about the average American being in the dark. However, I'm deeply troubled that the average Penn undergraduate lacks knowledge of how Penn chooses and retains faculty and exactly what hoops a professor must jump through to secure a permanent spot here.

For starters, tenure is defined as "a status granted to a teacher usually after a probationary period that protects him or her from dismissal except for reasons of incompetence, gross misconduct or financial necessity."

Historically in academia, University donors would hold sway over who was hired and who was fired, and tenure was created to abolish that power. Later, tenure provided security for professors with controversial views. Alan Charles Kors, for example, can express his views to students, as well as criticize the University, without fear of reprisal.

If professors prove their scholarship and validate their opinions, they deserve security. It's sacrosanct. Tenure preserves what might be the last bastion of true free speech - academia.

However, critics of tenure have accused the process of being draconian and unnecessarily brutal to young faculty.

Young faculty are first hired on as "tenure-track," which means that, after five to seven years, they will officially go through a tenure review process which will either end in tenure or termination. Despite variation between departments and universities, the requirements are universally high.

Specifically, in order to obtain tenure, a history professor may need to publish two books and a dozen research articles. For the sciences, tenure likely requires prestigious grants and publishing in specific journals. In particular, you are reviewed by colleagues in your field yet outside of Penn, so it might not matter if you published 15 articles if they were in journals that no one in your field has ever heard of.

The threat of not receiving tenure is so great that, in some departments, professors simply prepare for the worst. Former Philosophy professor Rahul Kumar, who now teaches philosophy at Queens University, said, "It's standard practice that, when you're up for tenure, you will also start applying for other jobs."

Kumar did not receive tenure at Penn. Worse yet, he never found out why.

There is currently no formal process for informing faculty why they were denied tenure. According to School of Arts and Sciences Dean Rebecca Bushnell, "When this happens, we take the situation seriously, and the department chair and the dean will confer and speak with the candidate and decide what happens then."

There is, however, a formal reappointment process that occurs in the third year. Further, Bushnell expressed hope that department chairs would play a role in mentoring.

"If a person has issues with . teaching, this is the time to work on that," she said. But, unfortunately, while requirements for tenure are quite high, they are also not always made clear to junior faculty.

As Kumar said, "In terms of what was expected, it was amorphous - no one ever told you exactly what you needed."

High standards for tenure keep the quality of our faculty high and our overall reputation soaring.

As Bushnell said, tenure "has allowed me as a scholar to pursue areas of inquiry that I thought were important - that I cared passionately about - without having to watch my back."

But are we losing talented young faculty due to vague requirements or medieval evaluations?

The next time you are sitting in class and becoming bored, recall Rahul Kumar, whose doctorate from Oxford and postdoctoral research at Harvard were not enough to secure him tenure here, but enough to get him immediate notice at his pick of universities. Imagine how much research and scholarship was required for your tenured professor to earn the right to teach you.

At Penn, the bar is set very high, and it's time that undergraduates understood that.

Sarah Rothman is a fifth-year Bioengineering graduate student and 2002 Engineering alumna from Fayetteville, N.Y. The Sounds of Science appears on Mondays. Her e-mail address is rothman@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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