Today's talk about tenure must be framed within broader discussions about the role of the university. Our university system is now over one hundred years old, the “Old-Time College” is gone, the “cold war” university is no longer viable, and the foundations of the modern “multiversity” are cracking, so it is time to talk about change. But change is not necessarily reform, and resisting change probably will not keep things the way they are, so academics must understand the forces reshaping the university. Whenever I listen to colleagues defend the status quo by saying that the United States has a university system that is the envy of the world, I hear echoes of the Detroit automobile industry's casual dismissal of foreign competitors in the early 1960s. The decision not to change did not preserve the auto industry, and it is unlikely to preserve public universities as we know them.

The current debates about tenure began with ideological attacks on “tenured radicals” who used their secure jobs to subvert conservative cultural values. The attack on tenure gathered steam as fiscal hawks in financially-strapped states looked for ways to save money and found huge state university systems with budgets to match. When asked why he robbed banks, the legendary Willie Sutton replied, “Because that's where the money is.” When asked why they are robbing tenure, legislators, regents, and administrators reply, “Because that's where the money is.” Personnel costs are a large share of university budgets and tenure ties the hands of administrators and legislators accustomed to using purse strings to control universities.

Here, two college professors explore the dilemma of tenure, and ultimately argue for a change in the way tenure is promoted and perceived within the academy. One professor—an associate dean and former department head—has over 35 years of experience with the academy and has observed the best and worst aspects of tenure. The other, currently teaching his third semester of classes, has a perspective on tenure based more on expectations than experience. The perspectives differ, but at the same time provide insight into the two sides of tenure—one that views tenure as a public good needed to protect academic freedom and the other which sees it as a menace that protects incompetence.

As a young professor, I was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War at a university in very conservative section of the Midwest. My public stand against the war was criticized on local radio, television, and in the newspaper. In that Midwestern city, the war could be seen in two ways: through the eyes of the patriotic American or those of the traitor. The community made clear its attitude toward opposition to the war. Being an untenured assistant professor, I was most fortunate that the department head and academic dean were devoted defenders of academic freedom. If these academic administrators had not held their respective positions during the Vietnam War, there is no doubt my contract would have expired without renewal.

Should university professors be exempt from the job insecurity that afflicts much of the population? As businesses become leaner and meaner, shouldn't universities do the same? After all, Universities have become expensive. Wouldn't abolishing tenure make change possible—especially by eliminating deadwood?

These are fair questions. One answer is that a great many savings of the same kind that have become commonplace in business are already extensively employed by universities. For example, much of the teaching at our universities, is done by poorly paid part-time employees or graduate students, and as older faculty retire, they are often not replaced. So universities HAVE been part of the larger trends. In many respects, universities were, in fact, leaders in shifting work to part-timers.

Why shouldn't university presidents be like corporate CEO's and (as they were in the 19th century) able to hire and fire at will? Wouldn't a workforce responsive to changing organizational goals be good for universities? These questions look like two parts of the same question, and surely many people outside the university do not see the two questions as distinct. Indeed, perhaps precisely because of the way in which organizational change is occurring in business presently, the two problems seem to be one.

The two issues are not the same, and separating them is crucial to understanding the role of tenure in universities.

Today, tenure means many different things, including job security, merit reward, career motivator, protection for academic freedom, a multi-million dollar investment in a single professor, and the output of a legislative personnel process to colleges and universities (Whicker et al. 1993; p. 8–21). But increasingly, to the public and politicians, tenure is an unwarranted, unjustified, and unaffordable job perk that borders on a “rip-off” of innocent participants and bystanders in higher education (Naylor and Willimon 1996). Events at the University of Minnesota are but one example of several recent skirmishes over the practice of tenure (Sanchez 1996). Each side in the great tenure wars has interests which, if solidified in hardened positions, present an impediment to negotiating a compromise (Fisher et al. 1991; Crawley 1994). One approach is to draw from economics and its spillover into public choice to impute economic motivations—the maximization of various income streams—as the primary driving force behind parties debating the practice of tenure. This simplification of complex psychological motivations loses subtlety, a certain amount of realism, and contextual richness. It gains power, however, through simplistic theoretical eloquence that allows us to delve below the surface of positions to underlying interests.

We usually think of description and prediction as two different things, but are they really so disconnected? Suppose I report that the temperature now is 65 degrees—that is description without prediction. But if I say that it is noon on a Spring day and the temperature is 65 degrees—that is still description, but haven't I really also made some predictions? Aren't I, in effect, predicting that during the next 12 hours the temperature will fall, but that three months from now the temperature will be higher?

When I predict that the temperature will fall during the next 12 hours it is not based on a trend, or a statistical analysis, it is because I understand that the sun causes the temperature, and that because the Earth revolves on its axis every day, 12 hours from now we will be in the shade and therefore cooler. Because I know what is happening, I know how the present is related to the past and I can predict the future. If you can't predict anything of the future it is because you don't understand the present.

Take another example: Suppose we have a group of four animals whose average weight is 85 pounds and average age is 22 years—is any prediction possible? Not much. But suppose that the description includes that the four animals are people, two children, age 9 and 11, and their mother and father, age 31 and 33.

Does Latin America exist?

Latin American studies centers (like African, or Middle Eastern or West European studies centers) are based on the assumption that Latin America (and Africa, the Middle East, etc.) are more than arbitary geographic expressions: they define coherent cultural regions, having people with distinctive values and worldviews that make them think differently and behave differently from people of other cultures.

The most powerful challenge to this view currently comes from the rational choice school, whose practitioners occasionally mention the importance of cultural differences but whose models almost always ignore them, implicitly assuming that in a given situation all people will make the same “rational” choices regardless of cultural perspectives. But if major differences exist between the worldviews and motivations of people in different cultural zones, a rational choice model that applies to the United States may not accurately describe the behavior of people in other cultures.

The existence of meaningful cultural areas has been challenged on other grounds as well. Modernization theory focuses on the differences between “traditional” and “modern” societies, each of which are characterized by distinctive economic, political, social, and cultural institutions. This perspective tends to attribute any differences between Latin American and highly industrialized societies to differences in their levels of economic development: with economic development, these differences will tend to disappear. Differences between various “traditional” cultures tend to be ignored.

The usefulness of “Latin America” as a meaningful cultural boundary could also be disputed on various other grounds.

On the final day of her American Government class last spring, one of my wife's students approached her and said, “You're a really great teacher. It's too bad you're teaching this subject. I hate politics.” The young man had begun the course getting D's and F's, but gradually raised his grades to B's. Clearly he was diving into the work, but the dislike of politics that he brought into the course remained.

Professor Linda Bennett's experience at Wittenberg University typifies what many people tell me and my observations confirm. Today's young Americans on and off campus have a visceral dislike of politics, and it is expressed in many ways.

Like many Americans over 30, young people do not trust politicians, believing many to be corrupt and self-serving. Large percentages think government is unresponsive to people like themselves, and that government is too much in thrall to well-organized special interest groups. The 1994 National Election Study found, for example, that 77% of Americans under 30 said they trusted the Federal government to do the right thing only “some of the time” or “none of the time”; 79% thought that Washington was run to benefit just “a few big interests looking out for themselves”; and 54% believed that “quite a few” of the people in government are crooked. (Among those over 30, 79% said they did not trust the government in Washington to do the right thing; 80% thought it benefitted just a few big interests; and 51% said that quite a few people in government were crooked.) Large portions of young Americans do not think that they have any political clout or that national politicians are solicitous of their opinions.

The special Senate election in Oregon, held during January 1996, was the first time in which a federal election was held using a vote-by-mail format. The purpose of this survey was to address most of the relevant issues and concerns involving vote-by-mail elections and to provide an assessment of this electoral method at a crucial time in the political process.

Maltzman, Sigelman and Binder (1996), in what we regard as monumental work, have reinvigorated the study of death in office. But their data analysis is incomplete. First, they fail to project realistically the trends in actual and expected congressional deaths illustrated in Figure 1 of their paper. Second, like many congressional scholars, they do not pay sufficient attention to the Senate. We provide new evidence that the U.S. Senate may offer the solution to mankind's oldest quest, the fountain of youth (Gilgamesh n.d.; de Leon 1460–1521).

Table 1 presents data on the proportion of U.S. Senators who died in office, by decade, from 1910 to 1990 (CQ 1995).

We plotted the senatorial mortality rate data reported in Table 1 versus year (for data grouped by decade) as shown in Figure 1.

The r2 for the regression of mortality rates on time is an astonishingly large .87. Rarely have we seen such a clear time trend. Senators are increasingly not dying in office.

However, as our colleague, Bernard Grofman, pointed out to us (personal communication, April 2, 1995), projecting this equation past 1990 would give us negative estimates of mortality rates as early as the year 2000. Given the strength of our empirical results and the scholarly commitment we share with Gelman and King (1990) to investigating incumbency effects without a priori bias, we do not reject the idea of revenants out of hand.