Tenure: Who's to Judge?

"How can the process be fair if people unqualified for tenure today participate in decisions about the tenure of others?," she asks.

But hold on a minute. Few would dispute that tenure bar keeps being raised, but how can we know "whether someone who had too-low-for-tenure-today Evening Dressesproductivity way back when would rise to the challenge of today's standards or not"?, she asks. Sure, she's met the odd deadbeat senior professor here and there who seems to have succeeded because ... well, who knows why? FSP admits: "These particular senior professors have published only a few no/low citation papers, got few or no grants, and mostly got by on their charms, which in some cases are not considerable." But they're the exception, not the rule, she's quick to add.

Maybe "some tenured professors can't be trusted" to judge their junior colleagues fairly — "whether because they have no idea what it is like to be constantly working Louis Vuitton Speedy 25on manuscripts and proposals or for their own nefarious reasons" — and maybe "in some departments there are a few professors who reflexively vote no in tenure cases," she writes. Yet such bad seeds are rare, she argues: "In my limited experience, these unpleasant individuals have been vastly outnumbered by more reasonable people" who take the process seriously.

Which is why she concludes that the tenure process, while not perfect, works pretty well most of the time:

    In most cases, I think the system itself has enough checks and balances to keep these unfair naysayers in the minority. I am not saying that the system is completely fair; every year, deserving candidates are denied tenure and others with similar records attain it. But I do think that the process of frequent evaluation at one-to-three year intervals, although stressful, provides a lot of data and accountability to somewhat demystify the process.

What do you think?
I think the system is questionable, not because those using it wouldn't now satisfy it, but because it has become what it was intended to protect faculty from: a blunt in Louis Vuitton New Speedystrument of power held in the hands of a few, easily manipulatable (they like you? Who cares about your teaching evals? They hate you? Your good evals are the kiss of death, and the bad ones are worse) and actually manipulated to keep out people you don't like, whether their work is satisfactory or not. It has become like the "intellectuals'" version of fraternity and sorority rush.

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