Why One Institution Is Bringing Back Tenure

Tenure has lately faced threats on levels both existential and practical. But one institution is embracing it, years after it scrapped the model in favor of hiring faculty members on multiyear contracts. Trustees of Chatham University, in Pittsburgh, endorsed the switch to tenure last week, and faculty members are expected to approve it by a vote that began on Thursday.

Not being able to offer tenure has dampened faculty recruitment and morale, said Linda MK Johnson, a member of the faculty committee that recommended a tenure system to Chatham’s board.

When recruiting faculty members, “you always feel like you have to apologize a little bit at the beginning: ‘I’m sorry, just so you know, we are not an institution that grants tenure,’” said Johnson, an associate professor of sustainability and the environment. Some candidates, she said, would withdraw from consideration upon learning Chatham didn’t offer tenure, and others didn’t apply for the same reason. Johnson remembers losing a top candidate for one job who already had a tenured position and couldn’t “roll the dice” by moving to an institution where tenure was unobtainable.

Nor was the situation ideal for those already on the faculty, who felt that, under the rolling-contract system Chatham currently uses, “every five years, we were going up for tenure again,” Johnson said. No faculty member was ever not renewed as a result of that review process, administrators note, but it has still prompted anxiety and extra work for the university’s 130 full-time faculty members.

Retention proved a problem, too: Some faculty members “would use Chatham as kind of a teaching postdoc, where they would get a couple of years of experience to make them better candidates for a tenure-track position,” Johnson said. Star faculty members might never settle in at Chatham, knowing they could get tenure elsewhere. And when those scholars left, so did the resources and funds Chatham had spent to develop them.

Returning to a tenure system, Johnson and others hope, will remedy those problems and give Chatham a chance to reconsider traditional notions of tenure.

A ‘Capstone’ Model

Chatham eliminated tenure in 2005 in favor of what it calls a “capstone” contract system, under which full-time faculty members work on two- and three-year contracts until they’ve been at the university for seven years. At that point, each can earn a five-year “capstone” contract and work on six-year contracts thereafter. They are, however, still subject to a formal review at the end of each five- or six-year period. The capstone model was designed to strike a balance between what the university had felt was a stratification in the faculty, between those on the tenure track and the many clinical professors it hired to teach health-science graduate programs on annual contracts.

But Chatham’s identity has shifted significantly in the nearly two decades since it adopted that model: Undergraduate programs once limited to women now enroll men. Chatham’s undergraduate population has doubled since it made that shift, in 2014.

Chatham’s return to a tenure system would bring it back into accord with the vast majority of four-year institutions; more than 2,000 two- and four-year colleges had tenure systems in 2017.

Still, some fairly prominent colleges embrace their non-tenure policies. Florida Polytechnic University, which opened its doors in 2014, touted its scholars’ ability “to prove themselves outside the boundary and conditions set by the tenure process,” as one administrator put it at the time. Florida Gulf Coast University, which admitted its first students in 1997, cited the flexibility that rolling contracts offered as it grew and developed new academic programs; a veteran professor there told The Chronicle in 2019 that its system was “humane and forgiving,” striking a balance between providing job security and emphasizing the importance of teaching.

Among the other institutions that don’t offer tenure are Endicott College, in Massachusetts; Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, in Pennsylvania; Shenandoah University, in Virginia; the University of Charleston, in West Virginia; and Quest University Canada. (All, like Chatham, are private, though the two tenure-less institutions in Florida are public.)

Florida Southern College, a private institution, made a move similar to the one Chatham is contemplating in 2010, reverting to a tenure system nearly 40 years after abolishing it in favor of one-year contracts for faculty members. As Chatham started to revise its faculty manual to include tenure, Joseph H. MacNeil, the interim dean of the School of Arts, Science, and Business and chair of the committee that proposed the tenure plan, consulted Florida Southern’s provost.

Returning to Tenure

Chatham began discussions about restoring tenure nearly two years ago, after a faculty listening session in which MacNeil, who was then serving in a different administrative role, and the institution’s president heard concerns about the capstone system. Facing a review to renew one’s contract was daunting for senior scholars, who found the prospect increasingly problematic the longer they’d invested in their careers at Chatham. “The notion that in your late 50s, all of a sudden, you would not be renewed and have to finish your academic career somewhere else was really disconcerting,” MacNeil said. (That wasn’t a problem for MacNeil himself; he’d earned tenure at Chatham before the move to the capstone model and was able to retain that status.)

So MacNeil, Johnson, and a handful of others formed a committee to examine options. One was to do away with the periodic reviews of faculty members on capstone contracts, shifting to a revamped annual evaluation. But the committee soon realized that, in considering such plans, “we essentially had come back to a tenure model,” MacNeil said. The capstone model had always borne a resemblance to tenure, and the criteria it used to review faculty members were the same as those used when Chatham still had tenure. “So we thought that there could be some benefits from just calling it tenure,” MacNeil said. First among those benefits would be the ability to advertise tenure-track positions.

Not offering tenure could have also cost Chatham research grants or membership in professional organizations, Johnson said. Application forms for such opportunities often feature three options for faculty members who fill them out: The scholar is tenured, on the tenure track, or non-tenure-track. She and her colleagues were forced to select the third option, even though they operated on what she called a “tenure-adjacent” system.

Chatham’s board, MacNeil said, was receptive but “properly skeptical” of the tenure plan. Seeing a revised version of the faculty manual that would reflect the new policy, he said, eased that concern, as did provisions in it that ensured Chatham would retain the power to fire faculty members for cause and to reconfigure faculty lines for financial reasons. The board approved the proposal on February 11, and results of the full faculty vote are expected to be tabulated on Monday.

Redefining Tenure

Re-establishing a tenure system will give Chatham the opportunity to define for itself what tenure means, said Johnson, MacNeil, and Jenna Templeton, vice president for academic affairs. The committee was aware of the questions that have plagued tenure as an institution, including concerns that it impedes diversity in the professoriate. (Fall 2020 data from the National Center for Education Statistics indicate, for example, that just 4.9 percent of tenured faculty members nationwide are Black and 5 percent are Hispanic.) They were aware of complaints that tenure allows older faculty members to stay on the payroll without contributing fully, and knew that lawmakers in several states have taken aim at it in recent years. (One South Carolina state representative has introduced a bill that would abolish tenure.)

“Knowing that there’s all of these other views of tenure and what tenure is, what tenure has been, some call them the pitfalls of tenure,” Templeton said, “we approached it as a tremendous opportunity to think differently about, How do we evaluate faculty, how do we value faculty, and how do we pull those together in a contract system that makes sense?”

The plan does not call for a wholesale reinvention of tenure, Johnson said, but a redefinition of practices that, at many institutions, were devised decades or even centuries ago. “We’re trying to make sure that this definition of tenure isn’t just the ‘Publish, publish, publish, or you are unworthy’ kind of model,” she said.

That new system will probably afford Chatham faculty members more freedom to spend time on service and other professional activities, like faculty governance, MacNeil said, and perhaps to expand their research portfolios. Under the contract model, Johnson said, “because you always had to go up again every five years, you had to have a very short-term focus on your professional practice, and you had to sometimes aim for lower-hanging fruit because you had a quick turnaround time.”

And if all goes according to plan, reintroducing tenure will help diversify Chatham’s faculty. Despite employing a number of strategies to reach diverse job candidates, MacNeil said, Chatham’s initial applicant pools have fallen short of expectations, which the university believes is partly due to the absence of tenure.

No longer, said Johnson. She currently sits on three hiring committees, and if the faculty vote passes, she’ll “be able to recruit the faculty that we think are going to be best and have the best fit for the institution. We don’t have to say, ‘the best fit given that we don’t have tenure’ — we get to actually go for the best fit.”