BY CAROLYN BETENSKY
In the middle of a pandemic, faculty activists have accomplished something of real significance. Working with their provost, the town-hall style faculty governance group at Worcester Polytechnic Institute has managed to secure forty-five tenure lines for existing “teaching” faculty. While the idea of expanding tenure to include teaching faculty has been promoted before, notably by Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth, this is the first time an institution has developed a mechanism, and more importantly, a policy, for the conversion of contract teaching-intensive (vs. research-intensive) positions to fully tenurable ones. You can read more about this inspiring (and hopefully to-be-emulated) story here.
Contributing editor Carolyn Betensky is professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, an AAUP Council member, and a cofounder and executive committee member of Tenure for the Common Good.
This is certainly to be celeb\rated, but it should be noted that tenure for teaching and/or service (especially for extension faculty) was the norm in many places until the 70-80s explosion of “qualifications” and the total focus on research. Many of us were taught in the 60 and 70s by very competent tenured profs who never published anything after their dissertation. Also, in CCs there is especially not excuse for the two tier system except money and administrative flexibility since everyone there is teaching-primary.
Thank you Joe. As I understand it from talking to two WPI faculty, Mark Richman and Kristin Boudreau, who were deeply involved in making this happen, this fact — that tenure was always intended for teaching and service and that the association of tenure only or primarily with research is historically and philosophically wrong — was an important point used to bring around originally resistant research-teaching TT faculty.