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Jobs, Tenure, and Academic Freedom

The threats to academic freedom are generally systemic. In my previous commentary I discuss how government funding hinders free inquiry. This week I discuss how the overproduction of graduate students and the granting of tenure reinforce orthodoxy within the scientific community.

The usual justification for tenure is that it enables a professor to examine freely controversial subjects. In practice, I believe the opposite happens: tenure provides a mechanism to permanently populate academia with a group of people who generally think the same way.

When a professor is given tenure, he is absolved of any real accountability. At the major research universities in the United States, he is often only expected to teach one semester-long class each year. Only under the most unusual circumstances will he be fired. I have never heard of anyone in astrophysics with tenure being fired. If he is able to win research grants from the government, he will have one or two postdoctoral fellows and several graduate students working for him on research projects; the professor in this case acts as the head of a small research company, but unlike a small company in the private sector, the research professor is protected if he loses his grants: only his postdocs and graduate students suffer.

Obviously this is a wonderful position to be in for a university professor, but it does have some bad consequences. One problem with this structure is this shelters from accountability. In some cases, the professor goes on permanent vacation, doing the minimum required by his university. I have seen some people go on this path, but most that I have known continue for some time after becoming tenured the habit acquired as graduate students of working long days. In these cases, the lack of accountability does no harm. The bigger impact of no accountability is on the responsiveness of a professor to his students and their parents, an issue I return to next week.

The harm done to academic freedom by tenure is from the entrenchment of stale ideas within academia. There is a joke within the scientific community that science advances when the oldest generation dies. This plays on the difficulty most of us have in jettisoning beliefs that are contradicted by new data. Younger scientists, especially scientists who are just learning a discipline, are more adaptable to new theories. But young scientists hold temporary positions, and when most of them are unable to find permanent employment within the astronomical community, they change careers. The older professor, who are more set in their ideas, are fixed in place. The situation is similar to an industry dominated by government or a small number of large companies; such an industry becomes stagnant. When a scientific discipline is dominated by a handful of professors protected by tenure, it is in danger of becoming stagnant, with these professors reinforcing an orthodoxy upon the discipline.

The overproduction of doctorates within the sciences intensifies this tendency. A tenured professor normally has several graduate students working for him. The career of a graduate student ranges between 4 and 8 years, although some graduate students have longer careers, especially if they are involved in an experiment that flies on a satellite. In contrast, a tenured professor has a tenured career of 25 to 35 years. This means that a tenured professor will produce his replacement plus perhaps a dozen more. This leads to huge numbers of applicants for each tenure-track position that becomes available. My own experience was that you would send in your resume, and the college would respond that you are one of one or two hundred applicants, and this in a profession that opens perhaps a dozen new tenure-track positions every year.

So how does a researcher with a new doctorate stand above this swamp of resumes? In part he does so by having excellent recommendations from the most respected researchers. If a famous astrophysicist writes that you are his best student ever, then you have no problem getting hired to a tenure-track position. But the safest way to become someone's best student is by developing that person's ideas. The effect is that the tenured positions become dominated by the students of the most reputable scientists, entrenching the ideas of these scientists in numerous universities. A second effect is that contrarian thinking is suppressed, because few researchers tolerate being contradicted, especially by their students; in most cases, a student whose thinking is in consonance with his adviser's has a better change at a good recommendation than one who argues against his advisor's ideas. The whole process therefore selects orthodoxy over contrariety.

The principal argument for tenure is that by providing a sheltered research environment, the university enables a researcher to examine controversial subjects without fear of loosing his position and to spend years researching a subject before publishing results. I don't believe tenure achieves either of these objectives. If a scientists is not researching unconventional theories before he receives tenure, he is unlikely to have the temperament to alter his habits after he receives tenure. As for taking long periods of time between publications, this is a course to obscurity. I have known several researchers who took long periods of time to research a subject before publishing a paper on the results. They worked alone, and their papers did not have a big impact on the community. But few researchers follow this path, and for two good reasons. Normally a researcher with a group must publish often if he is to win the research grants that support his postdocs and graduate students; without publications, a researcher's funding dries up, and his team disappears. A researcher must also hold the community's eye if he is to have an impact, and research publications serves as an advertisement to the community of what the researcher is working on. If a researcher ceases publishing for any length of time, he becomes forgotten. Publish or perish persists for the researcher regardless of tenure.

So the combination of a tight job market and the entrenchment of scientists within academia through tenure discourage unconventional thinking within the community. I believe this accounts in part for tendency of theorists to all work on the same idea.

Freddie Wilkinson

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