The system of academic freedom and tenure was constructed nearly
a century ago by white men for white men, in a time when all
women and most African-Americans could not vote, and when dual-career
families were most often the result of hardships, not professorships,
said Richard Chait, professor of higher education and director
of the Study of New Scholars at the Harvard Graduate School
of Education, in his keynote opening address at the 2005 Institute
for Chief Academic Officers.
Chait offered troubling statistics showing that fewer and fewer
graduate students have a desire to pursue careers in academe.
He said that in order to answer the question, “What can academic
administrators do to improve the quality of work life and work
satisfaction for new generations of faculty?,” one must first
consider “Who’s leaving?,” “Who’s coming?,” and “What do these
newcomers want?”
Older, white male, tenured professors are or will soon be leaving
academe. Women, who now earn more than half of all bachelor’s
degrees (56 percent) and more than half of all master’s degrees
(57 percent), and students of color, who earned over 17 percent
of all doctorates in 2003 (an all-time high), are coming. What
do they want? In short, a tenure-track appointment in a desirable
location with a good balance between teaching and research,
according to a survey of doctoral candidates.
What can an academic dean do about these desires? On the issue
of location, Chait suggested “deans might recruit more intensely
candidates apt to find the institution’s location agreeable—for
instance, someone raised as a child or schooled as an undergraduate
in a comparable environment. In addition, deans can champion
the case with the president and trustees to improve the overall
quality of life in a community, from stellar schools to dual-career
opportunities, in order to create a competitive advantage and
strategic edge.”
On the issue of balance between teaching and research, Chait
had a number of suggestions. He noted that newer faculty members
argue that transparency assures equity. Deans could create “a
secure intranet website where faculty could view each other’s
course load, student enrollments, committee assignments, and
administrative responsibilities, especially important information
because so many women and faculty of color do not believe that
workloads are equitably distributed.” In addition, “salary data
could be available…. Some degree of disclosure does mitigate
against inconsistencies and inequities.”
To improve the promotion and tenure process, Chait suggested
that deans “make the portfolios of recently successful tenure
candidates available, absent internal confidential recommendations.
If the stakes are too high on campus, enter into an agreement
with a consortium of peer institutions to allow probationary
faculty from one campus to observe, in confidence, a promotion
and tenure committee at work on another campus.”
View
the full text of Chait’s address.
