'Ghosts In The Classroom'. Plastic::Work::School: Whether they're jokingly labeled 'road scholars' or 'freeway flyers,' part-time college instructors have grown 79 percent over the past two decades to more than 400,000 out of a total faculty population of one million. [Plastic: Most Recent]
1:44:26 PM    

Tenure as an institution

Tenure is a curious institution in higher education. One of its primary intents is to provide those who have it with an ehanced sense of `academic freedom'--- that is, the ability to say and do things that may be outside the scholarly `mainstream' of one's discipline, without the fear of being fired for it. It is, of course, not total freedom, just as `freedom of speech' doesn't give one the right to yell `fire' in a crowded theatre (well, maybe if there is a fire...). Still, it enables someone with way-out-of-the-box ideas to explore them with confidence. You can see many examples of this sort of thing in contemporary popular scientific literature- Herrenstein and Murray's The Bell Curve, Gould's Mismeasure of Man, Tipler's Physics of Immortality and many, many others.

It is also reflected in the classwork of many a controversial topic, such as creationism, and political issues.

When we think of the common definition of `tenure' we tend to think of `time at a given place', or (depending on your half-empty v. half-full outlook on life) `time served', and indeed, at some levels of education this is a very large part of the criteria for tenure. In higher education there is obviously a temporal component- you generally don't want to promise someone employment for life if you've never worked with or around them- even if they are some sort of child-genius. (In fact, there is a quite considerable, yet unofficial, social factor to tenure as well. I'll explore this a little in future writings.) Along with time at an institution or in the field (5 to 7 years typically for `fresh meat' such as myself) there is a vast panolply of other criteria that consider (in differing orders of priority, depending on institution)

Scholarship

Teaching

Service

Tenure is granted based on some weighted combination of these three areas, and as I pointed out, the weighting is institution specific. Institution specific is a bit misleading, however, since a given class of institution will have the same general weighting as its peer institutions. For example, Community Colleges emphasize teaching almost exclusively, their private Small College counterparts add in service and a smattering of scholarship. Large Research institutions, like state schools, heavily emphasize scholarship over teaching and put little if any emphasis on service.

This leaves us with the wonderful middle-ground that is the Small Liberal Arts College, like Skidmore.
11:11:36 AM