Skeptics have raised important questions about faculty tenure. Why should tenured professors have greater job security than other employees? Doesn't tenure protect unproductive senior faculty, highly paid deadwood? How can universities with numerous tenured professors wedded to traditional disciplines make room for new faculty in emerging fields?

photo/Andrew Higley

My response defending tenure relies heavily on personal experience from a 35-year career in higher education, including a total of 21 years with tenure at two different institutions. Four years of study for a Columbia University PhD in political science opened the door for my first college job at Wilberforce University. After three years studying at the UC College of Law, a JD helped me land my current position in 1984. At both institutions, I served seven years as a probationary assistant professor subject to several rigorous internal and external reviews of my teaching, research and service before promotion to associate professor with indefinite tenure.

A civil-liberties, First Amendment advocate, I have long cherished tenure as a guarantee of academic freedom. During the Red Scare of the early 1950s, professors falsely charged with disloyalty were drummed out of the academy. The discredited loyalty oaths of that anti-communist era have reemerged with signed counter-terrorism affirmations now required of new employees at Ohio public universities.

Some conservatives, accusing college professors of a leftist bias, have recently sought to protect students' academic freedom by legislating against politically slanted classroom presentations unrelated to the academic subject. Some feminists and civil rights activists have sought to banish sexist and racist ideas from the academy.

In provoking students to think critically, I explore Marxist, fascist, feminist, racist, libertarian and fundamentalist perspectives offensive to a host of potential censors. When arranging co-op placements and awarding students academic credit for service-learning internships, I have placed students with both the Republican and Democratic parties, the pro-choice ACLU, as well as Right to Life organizations. Tenure provides me with vital protection against elected officials and others with partisan interests on both the left and the right.

With tenure, I can also raise challenging questions to my dean, provost and president without fear of losing my job. Administrators need senior curmudgeons with institutional memory to speak freely in debates about curricular reforms so that initiatives like UC|21 benefit from a full range of independent perspectives.

Tenure also enables faculty teaching introductory skills courses in English and math to be creative and original when department colleagues who favor traditional methods and texts resist new approaches. Confucius argued, "To throw oneself into strange teachings is quite dangerous."

Administrators and some senior faculty who acknowledge the value of academic freedom, nevertheless, have for economic reasons increasingly replaced full-time tenured professors with teachers who have no prospect of earning academic tenure -- graduate assistants, part-time adjuncts and full-time instructors with fixed-term, renewable contracts. Appointing new full-time faculty on fixed-term contracts facilitates greater program flexibility and reduces long-term salary commitments.

Consistent with national trends, the number of non-tenurable fixed-term appointments has doubled at UC since 1990 -- from 369 to 738. In 2006, that brings the total to 32.6 percent of the 2,267 AAUP-represented faculty and leaves UC with 1,529 tenured faculty. Unrepresented adjuncts paid $400 to $1,000 per credit hour are a considerable savings both on campus and for revenue-generating distance learning classes.

In 2006, UC employed 1,283 term adjuncts and 174 annual adjuncts. In the higher education job market, teachers are readily available per George Bernard Shaw's maxim: "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."

From the perspective of individuals making career choices, tenure offers a valuable economic benefit in a profession marked by low salaries. After completing a JD, I left Wilberforce, served as a law clerk for a year and interviewed for jobs with law firms and government agencies.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, law school graduates entering private practice earn on the average twice the salaries of those who become academics. After 35 years in higher education with both a PhD and JD, my annual compensation is considerably less than the starting pay for a first-year law school graduate at a major law firm.