BY HANS-JOERG TIEDE
Today, we released the 2022 AAUP Survey of Tenure Practices, the first survey of its kind since 2004. The findings offer a snapshot of prevailing tenure practices and policies at four-year institutions with tenure systems. Among those findings, the survey found that tenure is highly prevalent throughout US higher education, with 87 percent of four-year institutions that have a Carnegie Classification of bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral institution reporting having a tenure system.
Additional central findings include:
- 82 percent of institutions permit probationary faculty members to stop the tenure clock for reasons of childbearing or child rearing, which represents an enormous shift in institutional policies over the past twenty years. A 2000 study of institutional regulations found that 17 percent of the same types of institutions provided that opportunity. This is a strong trend toward AAUP recommended practices.
- Of those that offer policies to stop the tenure clock, almost all (93 percent) make the option available to faculty members regardless of gender, in recognition that partners can be coequal caretakers of newborn or newly adopted children. Only 51 percent of institutions explicitly permit stopping the tenure clock for elder care.
- There has been an increase of institutions that have a post-tenure review program: 46 percent of institutions had a post-tenure review policy in 2000, and 58.2 percent of institutions have one now. Only 27 percent of four-year institutions with a tenure system have post-tenure review programs that can result in termination.
- Tenure criteria related to diversity, equity, and inclusion can be found at 22 percent of institutions; 39 percent of institutions’ criteria for tenure had been reviewed for implicit bias in the last five years; and 40 percent of institutions had provided training on implicit bias to members of promotion and tenure committees in the last five years.
The survey was administered to a stratified random sample of 515 chief academic officers and had a response rate of 52.8 percent. Here’s the link to the survey once again.
And a brief note about our work: the AAUP’s research department has been making a special effort to produce research on academic freedom, tenure, and governance, and this survey on tenure practices is one example of a study on these issues. More to come.
Hans-Joerg Tiede is director of research for the AAUP.
These numbers seem high to me. While most institutions probably claim to have traditional tenure, rules have been changed such that tenure no longer comes with the same guarantees. For example: revocation of tenure is no longer subject to stringent guidelines or tenured faculty are required to raise increasing proportions of their salary from external funding sources. Note what is happening at Tufts Medical School where faculty are suing to preserve tenure guarantees with respect to salary. And then there are numerous recent cases where tenure entitlements have simply been ignored by administrations and tenured faculty outright fired (as the AAUP knows well). Is it possible that the survey missed some of these nuances or that respondents were less forthcoming about the situation at their institution?
I’m not sure which part you think seems high, but the prevalence of having a tenure system is actually based on what these institutions report to the US Department of Education on the IPEDS survey, which asks institution to indicate if they have a tenure system. It’s not an assessment of how well-protected tenure is at those institutions.
It sounds like Marie is asking a different but no less important research question in her comment. Is it enough to have tenure listed on a piece of paper so that an institution can check a box while also striving to kill tenure with a few exceptions (especially male dominated fields such as STEM) and, as Marie indicated, terminating faculty with tenure without cause (well, not our fault but not necessarily without targeting faculty who were outspoken and/or unionists) – which we at The University of Akron know about all too well. Of course, that type of study would not include provosts as data providers… but I think it would be a worthy study.
Thanks, Susan. That is exactly what I meant.