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Faulty Towers: Tenure and the Structure of Higher Education

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This book brings an objective economic analysis to the incentive structure of higher education. To this extent, it marks a welcome intervention into the polarized current debate on the topic of tenure. The authors' (Amacher and Meiners) original insight is that tenure is not the problem, but rather the scapegoat for other defects in the incentive structure of a large bureaucratized system of higher education. The early chapters on the history of tenure are very informative; I for one did not know that its original purpose was less to safeguard academic freedom than to get rid of nonperforming junior faculty.

Both authors have a background in the University of Texas system, so their focus is much more on the problems of large, highly bureaucratized systems than on private colleges and universities. Thus, the lessons of the book apply selectively. This book will be more useful to someone wishing to understand a large university system, with multiple campuses and subject to the oversight of Regents and ultimately a legislature, than to the reader interested in private schools. Finally, the authors want public universities to behave more like private ones, with vouchers that let students exercise their control as "consumers."

This makes an interesting argument -- and after years in higher education I am also of the view that the incentive structure works against change and improvement. But this argument is not as "objective" as it pretends to be. Their bias against the shared governance procedures that characterize most institutions of higher learning is so extreme as to be a bit laughable. Any faculty, according to this analysis, who shoulder committee responsibilities are likely to be "below-average-quality faculty. . . . Competent faculty, who of course have the best job opportunities, have little desire to spend afternoons trapped in conference rooms with blowhards...."

Okay, maybe there is some truth there, but there are other sides to such issues. The authors don't fully explore the ways in which universities are not the same as businesses. Yes, some business practices may help to reform higher education, but it will take more than the 95 pages of this slim book to come to grips with the asymmetries that must be acknowledged and understood to make such practices work in an academic environment.

The chief gap in this analysis lies in the failure seriously to question the model of student as "consumer" or "client" and college as "merchant" or "vendor." Not only are colleges not "for profit" organizations; they also will not succeed simply by pleasing or catering to their students. That impulse is part of what has led to grade inflation and other abuses, which Amacher and Meiners mention but do not fully analyze. Also, academic programs should not be undertaken and terminated simply in response to market forces, as the authors imply. Part of the duty of higher education is to PRESERVE and EXTEND knowledge -- and I'd put a lot more emphasis on the "preserve" part than this book does. Consider what would happen to the Classics Department of any major university if the curriculum were formed simply on a market model (in response to what students want to take), and you will begin to see some of the problem. Are we willing to give up Virgil, Seneca, or Aristophanes forever because one generation of students (or even two or three) fails to find them beguiling?

One more brief note: The appendix that lists all the legal appeals brought by fired faculty against their schools (1990-2003) makes for fascinating reading, though it's unclear what it means. Sure enough, there are fewer of such suits than one might imagine, and they almost always go against the plaintiff. I don't know, however, that these facts suggest that tenure is beside the point, as it's impossible to know what kind of legal landscape would exist in the absence of a tenure system.

In sum, a worthwhile book -- and a quick read -- but not the answer it pretends to be.

This is a well written, calm tone book on an emotional topic for many, on the issues of the incentives in higher education, out of which tenure is only one issue, not even the central issue. The authors' structural analysis of the system of higher education with its incentives is well done, with particularly informative history of tenure chapters (for example, though tenure as we know it today was initiated in the early 1900s, "...before that time colleges did not dismiss professors willy-nilly. By 1820, Harvard had appointed professors with "indefinite" terms. Other colleges began to follow its system." (pg. 4).

Though some try to evade the issue of incentives in education, and claim that "non-profit" organizations and individuals don't react to incentives as "for-profit" companies do, the authors explain: "...we believe that individuals respond to incentives. Students, faculty, and administrators at universities are individuals, with their own peculiarities, responding to the incentives they face. Although higher education is a wonderful thing, it is, as former college president friend of ours reminded us, just another service industry. We often loose sight of that." (pg. xiii)

In the second part of the book, recommending solutions to the issues raised, the authors suggest number of internal and external reforms, one of them being vouchers to help eliminate the central planing that negatively impacts this system (or any system, I would add). They also question if we should fund with taxpayer's money graduate schools: "Why should taxpayers pay to educate people who, because of their graduate education, expect to earn above average incomes?" (pg. 91). Very valid points, indeed, which any cool minded person ought to at least consider. However, the authors should have questioned the need to government fund any higher system of education, and instead privatize it fully. I know that some would object that we would lose our Western Civilization knowledge of Latin or Greek without government funding. But, really, is this so, does history and current day education spectrum really support such fear? Just consider the work of private colleges, private seminaries, private schools in general, and even the growing trend to homeschooling (which is privately funded too). Do you really think that those don't teach Greek, Latin, classics, and other Christian and classic foundational elements that formed Western Civilization? Anybody familiar with any of those private learning organizations/ systems knows that they do teach these topics and do so extensively, without government funding. Such has been done for many years, since the founding of America. One book that has good chapters on the early history and private establishment of colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Rutgers, Dartmounth, and others is: Liberal Tyranny in Higher Education, and another book that questions the need of public/ government funding of education that is worth reading is: Is Public Education Necessary?.