Tenure is declining in higher education across the country: while over 78.3 percent of faculty held tenure-track or tenured positions nationally in 1969, only 33.5 percent did so by 2009, according to a report published by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.
The University, however, is not following the national trend. Based on an analysis of data from the Princeton Profiles, the percentage of tenured and tenure-track faculty positions has hovered between 62 percent and 66.2 percent each year from spring 2005 through spring 2014. Associate Dean of the Faculty Mary Baum GS ’89 identified tenured and tenure-track positions as including professors, associate professors and assistant professors.
Dean of the Faculty Deborah Prentice deferred comment to Baum.
Non-tenure-track categories at the University consist of instructors, lecturers and visitors, who together made up about one-third of the faculty throughout the past decade. In contrast, two-thirds of the national professoriate is ineligible for tenure.
Maria Maisto, president of the New Faculty Majority, said that the national decrease could be attributed to a reduction in public funding for higher education, misplaced administrative priorities and massive spending on infrastructure and amenities to attract students. She added that the rise in non-tenure-track or contingent positions represents an attack on academic freedom and shared governance, which tenure traditionally protects.
“We’ve moved to a more corporate model where administration and management have more control and exercise more control over faculty, and that really undermines the educational mission of the institution,” she said.
Critics of the new model argue that non-tenure-track faculty members suffer from inadequate job security and benefits and lack the resources necessary to help their students. Research also shows that exposure to contingent faculty creates lower student retention rates.
On the other hand, some experts claim that the fierce competition to secure tenure deters qualified people from entering academia, and one study found that students learn more from non-tenure-track faculty.
Baum said the University is demonstrating an emphasis on teaching that reflects its mission as an institution of higher education.
“A core set of faculty members is much more invested in the institution and the students,” she said. “You’re going to be here next year, and they're going to be here next year, and they’re going to be here in five years when you come back and ask for a job recommendation.”
Samuel Dunietz, a research and policy analyst at the American Association of University Professors, said that the University’s case was an anomaly among both public and private schools. However, Maisto said the University’s data is consistent with her organization’s knowledge of private schools with strong endowments, particularly within the Ivy League.
“Because private institutions — liberal arts and research-oriented institutions — recognize and support the value of tenure, they are less likely to reduce the number of tenure-track positions they have,” she said.
The most recent statistics on tenure rates in the Ivy League come from the Modern Language Association's Academic Workforce Data Center, which provides the percentage of tenured and tenure-track faculty in 1995 and 2009.
Brown saw the greatest drop in tenure during that time, from 80 percent to 62.5 percent. Yale had the next largest decline, followed by Dartmouth and Columbia. The University experienced the smallest decrease, by about 3.2 percent.
Only the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard increased the percentage of tenured and tenure-track faculty over the period.
Instructors, who make up less than 2 percent of overall University faculty, fall into two categories: doctorate-holders who teach math or physics typically for three years, and graduate students who will soon finish their doctorates and become assistant professors in less than a year's time.
Full-time senior lecturers, who organize the teaching of languages and introductory science courses, and part-time lecturers together comprise about a quarter of University faculty. Most visitors are faculty members from other institutions.
Baum said that in an ideal world, all University courses would be taught by regular tenure-track faculty members. She added that lecturers and visitors satisfy special needs that the University cannot otherwise address, such as a course in clinical psychology.
“We’re hiring those lecturers and visitors only to teach; we’re not hiring them to produce independent scholarship and evaluating them on that,” she said. “That said, in some ways, our standards for how well they teach are even a bit higher than what they would be for a faculty member.”
However, because the University’s non-tenure-track faculty members must seek reappointment on a regular basis to continue teaching, they could face issues with academic freedom in the classroom, Dunietz said.
“In the direct relationship between the student and the instructor, if you have a faculty member on a one-year contract, and they know that after that year they’re going to be heavily scrutinized, they may be less likely to teach something that would be a little controversial,” he explained.
Baum suggested that the University has been able to maintain the percentage of tenured and tenure-track faculty because tuition and enrollment concerns do not drive the decisions of the institution. As a result, the administration can continue investing in teaching.
“A former dean of the faculty once said, ‘We are creating the knowledge that we teach, or teaching the knowledge that we create,’ ” she said.
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