University professors typically divide their time between teaching, research, and administration. In theory, and often in practice, professors' research informs their teaching, and teaching makes people better researchers.
Yet, as time goes by, the research ideas come less frequently, it becomes harder and harder to "keep up with the literature", and a certain percentage of people give up on research. What then?
Tenure means that the non-research active professor will not be fired. Two other possibilities remain.
First, academics who stop doing research can simply devote their additional free time to, say, skiing or travelling or politics or whatever takes their fancy.
Second, non-research active academics can be re-deployed, into administration or additional teaching. Some do, in fact, choose an administrative career path, as it offers an alternative route to advancement. But no one takes on extra teaching without some incentive to do so.
The Commission on the Reform of Ontario's Public Services (the "Drummond Report") makes this recommendation:
Recommendation 7-9: Encourage universities that do not presently have flexible provisions regarding teaching and research workloads in their collective agreements with faculty to consider such provisions in future bargaining. While each university must conduct teaching and research, top-performing teachers and researchers should be recognized with the appropriate workloads and rewards.
I read this as meaning: professors who are no longer research active should have an increased teaching load. (An alternative interpretation is that universities should have arrangements for teaching-stream faculty, that is, hire instructors who are not expected to do research).
I can think of few things that would be more strongly opposed by the average academic, not just because of the greater workload that an increase in teaching would represent, but also because of the loss of status. The stigma of being designated "no longer research active" would be almost unbearable.
For these reasons, the criteria for workload adjustments would be extraordinarily difficult to design. For example, would all departments have to designate a certain percentage of faculty for workload adjustment? I can't imagine how it could be done.
So, a bleg: What is done elsewhere? How do other jurisdictions deal with non-research active faculty members?
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Jim: “And if we need to cut the consensus is cut administration.”
I should look at what the Drummond report says about university administration – IIRC admin costs have been increasing faster than other costs. But I don’t see how all of the accountability, monitoring, assessment, evaluation of teaching etc that the Drummond report envisions can be done without having even more administrators.
“Is a giant fight inevitable in the Ontario university system?”
It depends how pliant Faculty Unions are. My political nose says they don’t have much to stand on.
As a paid-up member of the NDP, I fully admit that “adjustments” can and do happen, in fact they need to. The reason I am a lefty is that I believe it is our responsibility to make such adjustments as humane as possible and to make the labour more robust to accommodate these changes, for instance eliminating employer health plans in favour of a public drug plan along the line of the NHS. Count the costs of failure and make it fail gracefully.
But many economists were on Reagan’s and Thatcher’s side (and other cost-cutting initiatives, how about when Air Canada tried to roll back its DB pension for flight attendants?) and it will be hard to miss the “shoe on the other foot” observation.
Jack, it is not self-evident that faculty salaries will rise if we eliminate tenure. That assumes there is a shortage of faculty. Given the number of grad students who want to be profs, I doubt if it will cause any financial rise. Benefit cuts in other industries and sectors have not led to overall compensation rises, quite the opposite in fact. Welcome to cost-cutting in the presence of unemployment.
@Determinant: I agree, here I was assuming we wish to maintain quality of professors constant. If you believe faculty are interchangeable drones, then, yes there is slack. But there is good reason why many ABD grad students never get a faculty job. They are good, but not good enough. If you cannot complete a dissertation, how do you hope to publish every year on top of teaching, supervision, grant-writing, and admin?
I also agree that it would vary by field. In some fields, faculty salaries are above market-clearing, so cutting perks need not lead to higher wages. But in other fields, salaries are below market-clearing (e.g., engineering, finance, computer science, maybe law and medicine too?), and cutting perks without increasing average salaries would lead to a brain drain.
I imagine faculty salaries are the biggest piece of the pie when it comes to costs? If so, that might explain why Drummond focused there.
P.S. A little Googling seems to confirm this, but I’m looking at OUSA report and I’m inclined to be sceptical….
Patrick – Canadian Association of University Teacher’s Almanac on http://www.caut.ca (just google CAUT) is the best source for university finance stats.
My point was that admin costs (and senior admin salaries) have been growing relative to faculty salaries. Faculty salaries are still a big piece of the pie however.
Jack – the rising Cdn $$ is making it much easier to hire academics. Topic for another blog post!
Frances: could that growth be attributable to competition with equivalent private sector positions? Senior management positions in the private sector have grown much faster than the rank and file workers wages.
I wonder if Canada might want to consider something more radical than just trying to tweak around the edges of the system. Based on my own experience at McGill in engineering and CS, it was a huge waste to have the professors I had teaching the likes of me. So, it’s really no wonder they didn’t want to be doing it. It’s like getting Feynman to teach kindergarten – sure he could do it, perhaps well but is it a good use of resources? All I and most of my fellow students really wanted was to get a piece of paper that would enable us to get a reasonable job. Maybe we need a system that does that, and thus free the Universities to go back to there work of educating the truly brilliant (or wealthy) students and doing research.
Patrick – this is what the whole idea of “teaching stream faculty” is about, to have people who are solely dedicated to teaching the likes of you!
In Ontario there seems to be a move to making entire Universities teaching oriented and keeping a few large research institutions.
Chris J – U of T is right next door to Queen’s Park. This maters.
Here’s one scenario: U of T St George slashes undergrad enrolment, admitting a small number of undergrads and charging top dollar ‘market fees’ to the elite who can afford to pay for the UC/Trinity/Vic etc experience (they can’t get rid of the undergrad colleges, the alum would riot). This would work, financially, for U of T St George if if the ‘market fees’ are high enough and they can divert research funding from other universities towards U of T – and extract sufficient rents from U of T Mississauga and Scarborough etc. Meanwhile other universities/degree granting colleges take up the slack, teaching those who would be in 1000 seat lectures at U of T, and leaving research to our betters.
One slight problem with this scenario: U of T St George has enough deadwood to start a rip roaring bonfire.
Moreover, if status as ‘research’ or ‘teaching’ oriented is fixed, there are no incentives for effort, let alone excellence.
“If you remove it, faculty salaries will have to increase on average (simple economic market-clearing)”
Not necessarily. That would depend on the demand in the marketplace. For some university disciplines, demand is not so great outside of the iniversity sector itself; there might have to be a heck of a lot of ‘market-clearing’ first. In some disciplines, wages could fall by quite a bit.
I expect that tenure will either disappear or be greatly modified in the future. In addition, I think we will eventually have to see a great deal more collaboration among universities / community colleges in terms of who offers what programs (reducing duplication) and how teaching is ‘delivered’. Perhaps some of the unis now known primarily as undergrad ‘teaching’ universities will morph into 2 yr institutions offering local and internet-based courses. Graduates would move to ‘research’ universities specialized in their areas of interest.
Insofar as the way the public views profs, I’d say there’s a mix of respect for the institution, envy of the perceived working conditions, and appreciation for good teaching and research. As tax dollars become tighter, however, there is bound to be a feeling that universities have too great a slice of the pie, and there will be more of a demand to see the value in the cost.
Are there synergies or economies of scale to be had by keeping teaching the masses and research shoved together? ’cause I’m thinking more along the lines of creating new institutions for the purpose of teaching the masses and completely freeing research oriented institutions from the burden of dealing with the mess of teaching huge numbers of students.
Salary levels overall might not have to rise if tenure is eliminated, but there would have to be a wholesale levelling of the salary grid, as faculty could no longer trust that their early years of being underpaid would be compensated by higher salaries later – especially if we also bring in systems to eliminate those who under-perform. You end up with something like the world of finance, where you bring young hotshots in at high salaries and burn them out.
That would also in my mind undercut much of the built in incentive structure to perform – why bother getting promoted if you don’t get paid more?
Tenure isn’t just a perk, I think it’s an integral component of an incentive system that has evolved to give faculty, who are difficult to monitor, reason to continue to perform. You can replace it with assessments and administrative oversight, but as Frances has suggested that requires resources.
Jim: “You can replace it with assessments and administrative oversight”
And sometimes the cure is worse than the disease!
Exactly.
I am not convinced by these arguments that removing tenure would lead to lower wages for professors.
First off, I don’t think it’s true that there are very many “professor quality” unemployed PhDs floating around in the economy. If there are so many of these people out there then why aren’t faculty wages already falling? Why don’t these unemployed PhDs offer to perform the quality-constant research-teaching-service duties of professors for less money? In Canada, unionization might make it hard for universities to respond. But the academic market is international and in the US the universities would surely be willing to pay less if they could.
Second, I think people have been confusing the idea of “removing tenure to alter contractual work incentives” with the idea of “a negative shock to the demand for professorial labor services”. If we get rid of tenure but we don’t shrink our demand for teaching and research then why would there be downward pressure on wages? I can think of lots of negative demand shocks for professorial services, of course — large scale online teaching could be a big deal, for example — but these things are separate from the effects of the tenure.
Tenure is a perk that employees like to have. It’s part of the total compensation package. Workers will mostly “pay” for tenure with lower wages than they would have in its absence. What if I offer you a) a job at 50k per year with employment at will, or b) a job at 49k per year with lifetime tenure? If you want the tenured job then you see my point. Tenure is worth giving up some salary. Like many perks and in-kind transfers, tenure has implications for ex post effort levels. And so maybe we should reconsider the way that tenure works. Maybe we should keep it. Maybe we should leave it behind or alter it. Whatever.
But I don’t think you can make a very good case that the causal effect of tenure on prevailing wages for professors is positive. It just doesn’t seem to make sense. Other factors may lead to falling professor wages. But removing tenure would increase wages, other things equal.
I don’t think tenure is as simple as that.
We don’t get a 49k or whatever k job with lifetime tenure, we get a job with a steep gradient that significantly underpays us to start and arguably overpays us later. We accept the low pay to start on the promise that if we perform and get promotions we will be overpaid st the end. Tenure is our guarantee that the sneaky bastards in administration won’t take advantage and cut us off before we get payback.
Without getting into why we do that, which I think is related to setting up incentives so that we self motivate to produce without having to spend a lot of resources on monitoring and enforcement, if you get rid of tenure you will have to up the ante for people to start, and might well see wages at the upper end reduced. I don’t know that overall wages will be higher or lower, but they should be leveler, and I think experience bears that out.
Plus as I said you lose the incentive structure and have to hire a bunch more administrative people to breath down our necks and evaluate us.
Perhaps what you say is true. But to me it seems like the age-earnings profile is pretty flat in the academic sector. There are only three major promotion periods,right?
Maybe you are counting graduate school wages as the underpayment period. But lots of people have graduate degrees and end up working in the private sector without tenure. These people face a pretty steep age-earnings profile over careers with more than three promotion cycles. To me it still seems like the offer of tenure will shift the lift-time age-earnings curve down and should not simply change it’s tilt. Still…this part is complicated.
(I really should go back to trying to get tenure now.)
🙂
There are only three promotion periods (plus tenure) but the scale at least in Canada goes up hugely within each rank. For a job that has virtually the same responsibilities at beginning and end, it has an overall scale that more than doubles. Might be a bit flatter for economists and those that have outside alternatives but for average faculty it’s quite steep.
Frances, I have looked at some http://www.heqco.ca webpages and reports and it is pretty clear what direction this is going in. This is not to say UofT will cut the number of students but smaller Universities will have a tougher time getting grad programs approved or getting money to support researchers in their first year. etc etc.
To be clear there are some great undergraduate liberal-arts schools. A friend is a prof at Harvey Mudd. There are some great ones in the Maritimes, Bishops…
This thread seems to illustrate a confirmation bias among economists. When other sectors have their perks (pensions, tenure, whatever) removed, it is “restructuring” and economists generally go out of their way to justify firm behaviour. In a field that utilizes utilitarianism so much, firms are assumed to be more utilitarian than individuals, particularly individual workers and even unions.
There is no a priori reason to assume this, it is a fallacy. But when the perks and benefits of academic faculty are attacked, many economists here have adopted the “let’s adapt and try to keep what we can” and make appeals to “humanity” and “kindness” that when others (such as myself) make them are dismissed as so much special pleading.
I am struck by the cognitive dissonance going.
Whatever happened to “blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy?”
Determinant: I have not noticed many arguments on this post that are about how academics can manage to keep all of their “perks”. Rather, the discussion has been about how best to design tenure and other incentives in order to promote better research and teaching. And about how to avoid costly and disruptive dispute resolution processes like strikes.
I do not see the pleading for “humanity and kindness” that you keep mentioning in your posts.
From what I can tell a lot of the conversation has been about how to improve productivity, how various universities have tried to align post-tenure incentives, what type of conflicts and arguments were involved, and about whether there are win-win solutions that are possible in the Canadian setting.
None of this seems very different from the way that economists interpret “restructuring” in other industries. Further, plenty of economists have studied and are concerned about how “restructuring” and other structural economic changes have affected individuals and families in negative and positive ways. The labor and public economics literatures provide loads of examples.
Your characterization of economists as wild hypocrites seems unjustified to me. But maybe we just read different papers?
The Caterpillar thread shows what I mean.
As a more general example, when a manufacturer terminates its DB pension it is controlling costs. When a provincial government moves to demand more teaching from academics, it is endangering research and its incentives. How many times have economists actually listened to labour instead of management in other contexts? When an economist seeks tenure it encourages research, when a labourer seeks secure manufacturing employment it is a rent. Actually the two are the same. How much does it take to actually get an economist to think critically about firms and employers? Barrie McKenna’s recent article in Economy Lab illustrates this criticism.
How about Frances’ recent assertion that the federal Public Service Pension Plan may be cut generates no criticism from the economists around here, but when economists’ pensions and benefits are discussed, it generates much interest. The source of funds for both are taxpayer dollars, but the treatment and view of their costs and benefits by the academy is very different.
My issue is with those whose arguments concerning faculty are at odds with their analysis of other sectors of employment. Those who are consistent for all sectors including their are innocent, but the party who switches views is inconsistent and this is the group I take issue with.
I’m not an economist, I’m an outsider and as I like to say a member of the Maple Leaf Peanut Gallery, just like Patrick is.
cw – thanks for putting things so articulately.
Determinant – If you have problems with Mike’s thread on Caterpillar, take it up there, not here. Stay on topic.
I have no problems with that thread other than the general take on restructuring and the lack of empathy and attempts at justification of Caterpillar’s actions contrast with the empathizing and justification of existing faculty benefits that exists here. It was mentioned as an example of contrast with reference to this thread, a point that is about this thread.
“From what I can tell a lot of the conversation has been about how to improve productivity”
I don’t agree. We are likely entering a period where we will see the same re-structuring pressures on universities that we have seen on, e.g. manufacturing. I see no evidence here that university staff recognize the implications of that.
“As a more general example, when a manufacturer terminates its DB pension it is controlling costs. When a provincial government moves to demand more teaching from academics, it is endangering research and its incentives. How many times have economists actually listened to labour instead of management in other contexts?”
If the point of the observation is that people’s tune changes when they’re personally affected, it’s a fair, if obvious point. Then again, that merely highlights that academics are human, not souless automatons. Moreover, I think that many of the arguments made against restructuring in academia have the exact same merit as those made by the CAW or CUPE (i.e., not much).
That said, I don’t think many of the posters here are arguing against restructuring in the academia. The suggestion that, if possible, it should be done smoothly is a reasonable one. Is that inconsistent with the purported support of “economists” of the Thatcher/Reagan battles? (I say “purported” because, in practice, economists are far less monolithic than you seem to believe) No, actually. The Reagan/Thatcher battles occured because smooth change wasn’t possible IN THOSE CONTEXTS. In those cases there were conflicts between newly elected governments and powerful entrenched labour unions – unstoppable force meet immovable object, not an atmosphere condusive to gradual change.
Indeed, the view that you ascribe to Frances and others of “let’s adapt and try to keep what we can” isn’t inconsistent with the views of economists in those disputes or, say, the EMD dispute. Quite the contrary, that’s precisely the advice that the people on this blog suggested that the CAW should heed (and I suspect, if asked, that would have been the advice given. Had they listened to the economists, the CAW members in london would still have jobs, albeit at reduced pay rates.
We’ll see whether a smooth transition is possible here. I’m not obtimistic because I don’t think the McGuinty government (and the broader public sector, on both the management and labour side) have the gumption to act in a timely fashion to make that possible (if it isn’t already too late). The end result will
likely be that universities will be told that their per student funding is getting cut and that if they don’t want to see hefty salary and benefit cuts, they’d better figure out a way to start getting more teaching from their professors. That will involve strikes (because there is a segment of the academic community who see themselves as members of the oppressed proletariat, despite the fact that their pay grade puts them pretty close to the 1%), disruptions and all sorts of nastyness. And the thinking that Frances has initiated here will be important for both management and labour in that dispute to ensure that they structure their reformed compensation scheme in way that doesn’t create perverse incentives for either teaching or research.
Sorry missed a sentence in the second to last paragraph: “(and I suspect, if asked, that would have been the advice given by economists in the winter of discontent or the air traffic controllers strike as being the best possible outcome for labour)
By the way, my post on the Drummond report is currently up on Economy Lab under my tab. It should meet with Determinant’s approval.
I wouldn’t discount the politics. Google is telling me that higher ed isn’t that big a chunk of the budget in ON, but like it or not, profs are an easy target. Undergrad degrees are the new high school leavings. Viewed from the perspective of the average working shlub, the question will be framed as “why does a glorified high school teacher needs 6 figures and guaranteed employment for life?”
Look, I’m not trying to piss anyone off here. But if it comes to a fight university profs will have an uphill battle. One I suspect they’re unlikely to win. Try and economy lab article on this topic. It would draw some, umm, interesting comments I’m sure.
If it was me, I’d be inclined to just take my ball and go home; take the plum private sector job that pays more and be done with it. Or privatize the schools – it doesn’t seem to do your US counterparts any harm.
One very interesting point that I completely agreed with. University Professors who stop doing as much research or book writing can indeed be deployed into other areas. After publishing a number of books and doing quite a bit of research, this is exactly what my father did. He went to a whole new department in fine arts that had poor facilities and poor funding. In six years, he completely revamped it – more funding, new facility and two more professors added. He also took on a more active role on committees etc. He loved it, and it was good for both him and the University.
When profs stop being research active …. they get sacked:
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/02/university-of-sydney-sackings-trigger-academic-backlash.html
Patrick – Wow!
“Letters were posted to researchers on Monday 20 February, informing them their positions were being terminated because they hadn’t published at least four “research outputs” over the past three years, Michael Thomson, branch president of the National Tertiary Education Union, told Nature. It is unclear which research fields the academics work in.”
I wonder what counts as “research output”? How are disciplines where many short articles are the norm treated in comparison to disciplines where a smaller number of longer articles are usual?
I also wonder – given the uselessness of much academic research – about the merits of introducing such draconian publishing incentives.
From U Sydney article: “The move is part of wider cost-cutting plans designed to pay for new buildings and refurbishment to the university”. This tells you everything you need to know about why higher education inflation. Faculty salaries are a small part of it, to be sure, but mainly it is admin and their pet projects. Where I used to teach in the US, I “brought” $224,000 in student credits to the university, and cost the uni about $40,000 net (subtracting research soft money that I brought in), and not including summer salary that I had to get myself. Since tuition was roughly matched with public funds, it means my cost to the university was less than 10% of the budget (pro rata). Where did the other 90% of the money go??
Re: productivity, I agree with the principle of expecting researchers to publish (else, teach more!), but measuring research output is difficult, and any system will be gamed. For a researcher, the same effort over 2 years might yield either:
– 10% chance of a publication in an A journal, otherwise ending up in a B journal, or
– 2 articles in B journals, or
– 10 articles in D journals (!)
As a researcher, I would prefer the first strategy, because research will be more meaningful, more widely read, more influential. But if the University only counts beans, then I will publish 10 weak papers in obscure journals that no one reads. A sad outcome for all.
Jack, a few books have been written about this recently, including Why Does College Cost So Much? I did a little post about the rise of the professional administrative class in universities here
Wow. I hadn’t thought about the professional administration angle. Stupid of me. This seems to parallel my claim that professional management is really the common enemy of labour and capital. Has d^2/dt^2 (administrators salaries) been increasing? Once you get a professional administrator class, you’re hosed. They’ll set their salaries by bench marking (e.g. everyone says “our administrators must be the best, therefore we pay 10% above median”). They’ll gut the institution to pay their salaries while telling everyone it’s necessary to retain the best ‘talent’, and therefore you should be grateful.
Man, if this is what’s happening the academics union should find a way to short circuit the dynamic, ’cause it doesn’t end well for anyone.
Patrick: Has d^2/dt^2 (administrators salaries) been increasing?
Not sure from your notation whether you’re talking first or second derivative. Admin salaries have been increasing much more rapidly than regular faculty salaries, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they’re increasing at an increasing rate.
Yup, second derivative w.r.t time. Maybe \frac {d^2} {dx^2} is more familiar 🙂
BTW, I just found mathurl.com. It’s too cool. You enter latex and it gives you a png to reference in an img tag. I’ll try it below …
Seems to work (at least it did with preview).