Is it time for tenure to evolve?

Tolu Odumosu didn’t think he had reason to worry when he went up for tenure at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in 2018. His department had been excited to hire him as an assistant professor in 2013, and all had gone well in the third-year review of his progress. But over the next few years, the engineering school that oversaw his department changed its tenure policies. When Odumosu’s time came, his application was lauded by his department, but rejected by the school. He was told that part of the problem was that he hadn’t published any single-author books — the first he’d heard of the requirement.

When Odumosu appealed, a faculty grievance committee raised concerns about racial bias in the engineering school; Odumosu is Black. The committee also noted that he should have been held to the tenure criteria that were in place when he was hired, not the revised regulations. Odumosu obtained a second tenure review, but the verdict remained the same. In a 2020 article on the Inside Higher Ed website, the university denied that any bias or procedural errors had contributed to Odumosu’s tenure denial. And when asked for a response, the university told Nature it had nothing further to add.

But by then, Odumosu wasn’t interested in working at the university any more. This month, he started a position at Morgan State University, a historically Black institution in Baltimore, Maryland — and he made sure that tenure was part of the offer before he accepted it.

In North America, tenure protects the freedom of academics to pursue the studies of their choice. It typically comes with promotion from assistant professor to associate professor, after a probationary period and extensive review by peers at the department, school and university levels. It also includes the promise that a faculty member cannot be dismissed except in extraordinary circumstances, such as dereliction of duty or violating codes of conduct, although universities can also let tenured professors go if they discontinue an academic programme or find themselves in dire financial straits.

“The tenure system is designed to make sure that if somebody is let go, it’s for reasons that aren’t about them asking questions or delving into areas that are controversial,” says Todd Benson, executive director of the Harvard University Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

According to a survey done in 2020 by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in Washington DC, 87% of US institutions that offer degree-level courses have a tenure system. But Odumosu’s ordeal demonstrates the power that tenure committees hold, and how the process can derail careers when committees at different levels of the institution disagree, and when criteria change or are opaque.

Although tenure denials are relatively rare, a spate of high-profile anecdotes has scholars discussing what tenure means and how they can unravel long-standing biases that keep professors from under-represented groups from making the grade. The tenure system has also come under attack in the conservative-leaning legislatures of several US states, making academics feel that they must defend it as crucial to academic freedom and education.

The North American tenure system has sometimes struggled to keep up with the goals of modern academia. But it is changing. Some universities and schools are altering their tenure criteria; others are seeking to help faculty members to meet the criteria already in place.

“There are campuses that are making those incremental shifts that are really impactful,” says Chavella Pittman, a sociologist at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois, and a consultant on faculty development.

Systemic shortfalls

Modern North American tenure sprang from controversies about academic freedom. In one high-profile case, in 1896 at Stanford University in California, economist Edward Ross came under fire for making public political remarks that the founding Stanford family disagreed with. He and several other Stanford professors eventually resigned, and in 1915, a group of academics founded the AAUP to safeguard academic freedom through the tenure mechanism. The AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure remains widely cited in faculty handbooks. Tenure is also a perk that compensates scientists and engineers for getting lower salaries than they might command in industry.

Tenure allows scientists to be bold in their research, says engineer Wole Soboyejo, provost of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. It made him comfortable with risking a mid-career switch from working on aerospace materials to investigating biomaterials.

“I think that the tenure system is one of the strongest things about the American education system,” says Soboyejo, who was raised in Nigeria and trained in the United Kingdom.

But much has changed since the AAUP was founded. Academics today are less likely to simply want to pontificate from ivory towers. “Writing a paper that’s cited by four or five people is important,” says Malcolm Hill, dean of the faculty at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. “But with climate change, poverty, racism, our faculty are coming in and saying, ‘I want my scholarship to also have relevance to real-world problems’.”

The process of getting tenure has changed, too. The 1940 document called only for a probationary period. Now, the tenure system also involves an onerous review process, in which academics need to submit detailed documentation of their value. The criteria frequently come down to contributions in research, teaching and service — but the last two factors often don’t count nearly as much as the first.

In addition, tenure criteria can be unclear or open to interpretation, and there are often unwritten requirements that faculty members become aware of only through word of mouth. Plus, tenure committees frequently focus on the factors that are easiest to measure — such as journal impact factors and student course evaluations — rather than looking deeper into the applicant’s contributions.

And people such as Odumosu, who come from a marginalized demographic or pursue research that differs from that of the members of the tenure committee, sometimes get short shrift. According to the US National Center for Education Statistics, 79% of full professors are white; only 4% are Black and 4% are Hispanic. In comparison, about 60% of the US population is non-Hispanic white, 14% is Black and 19% is Hispanic. “Just like every other institution or anything that is influenced by people, bias is baked in,” says Pittman.

Problems can also occur with the tenure system at the tail end of a professor’s career, if their productivity wanes, says Prabhakar Clement, an engineer at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. “I’ve definitely witnessed people collecting rust and slowing down, and there are cases where we just cannot make them retire,” he says.

Given all these criticisms, some scholars argue that the tenure system should be scrapped (see ‘The road less travelled’). Clement suggests that universities offer 20-year contracts, after which faculty members would be free to renegotiate or take their services elsewhere. Barring that, he thinks there’s room for tenure to evolve. “It can be made more perfect,” he says.

Tweaking tenure practices

It’s that kind of incremental, evolutionary change that Bates College enacted in 2021 when it broadened tenure criteria beyond requiring peer-reviewed journal papers to also include contributions such as work with professional associations, efforts to remove barriers of oppression in the university and community-based research. Although it’s too early to quantify the results of these changes, Hill hopes it will signal to faculty members new and old that Bates values a variety of scholarship.

Worcester Polytechnic also broadened its tenure system in 2021, to offer tenure to professors who focus more on teaching than research, who weren’t eligible before. Already, the institution is seeing benefits, says Soboyejo, including a substantial drop in the attrition rate for teaching-focused faculty members.

Universities can also rethink how they evaluate professors for tenure. In the case of teaching, Benson notes that women and people of colour are known to score lower than do white men in student evaluations. As such, many institutions have revised or dropped their use of student ratings, according to the AAUP.

Another change institutions could make is to limit the amount of materials required in a tenure application, suggests Deborah J. Cohan, a sociologist at the University of South Carolina, Beaufort. “I remember someone telling me that you should save every conference programme that you were in, and your name tag,” she says. “It’s just too much.”

And Cohan has witnessed tenure committees consider factors they shouldn’t, such as whether someone is a great office mate, or if they’re happy at the institution. People who don’t fit in owing to aspects of their identity or their research focus can get pushed out, adds Odumosu: “If you have outsize personalities that are driving the process, it can easily lead to monocultures.”

Researchers at the University of Denver in Colorado say they have a remedy for that, in a decision-making protocol that several of its colleges and schools have implemented in the past couple of years. Called deliberative decision-making, it’s a two-step process that anyone can learn in a two-hour online training session. The process grew out of the research of Darrin Hicks, a communications professor at the university, and a committee he led.

Step one is to discuss the criteria for decisions. What would a successful tenure application look like? Simply asking this led committees in the university’s Graduate School of Social Work to update and clarify their criteria, says Kate Willink, former vice-provost of faculty affairs and a specialist in communication studies. For example, the school has now explicitly listed podcasts and other public-facing scholarship as research contributions.

Then, in step two, the committee considers individual applications. But the system is set up so that no one person can dominate the discussion. The order of speakers is drawn from a hat, and everyone gets the same amount of time to state their opinions, with a timekeeper to keep everyone on track.

An unfolding evolution

Although it’s too soon for hard data, Willink and Hicks say they’ve received positive feedback from committee members who have used deliberative decision-making. Hicks says that women and faculty members of colour who participated in committees that implemented the process have told them how much they prefer it and that it makes them more confident in the final results.

There are also training programmes that faculties can use to combat implicit bias directly, says Brian Coppola, a chemist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The US National Institutes of Health offers one such course.

As well as changing metrics or requirements, Coppola says it’s important to support faculty members to meet the criteria already in place. His department has worked to ensure that new faculty members can teach large introductory courses effectively. A senior professor is assigned to handle the logistics and provide the syllabus, so that the new professors can focus on their teaching. And the initiative has helped: those new professors achieve ratings as good as or better than those of more experienced peers, says Coppola.

Professors who assemble tenure packages can consider modern ways to measure their scholarly impact in terms of web and social-media metrics, says Heather Coates, a data and metrics librarian at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. For example, she says, they could track when studies are shared online by a professional society or another prominent scholar.

Some data back up this practice: bookmarks and downloads of papers on the reference management software Mendeley, for instance, are known to reflect future citations of that work (M. Thelwall Scientometrics 115, 1231–1240; 2018). These metrics can also be found on Altmetric from Digital Science and PlumX Metrics from Elsevier. (Digital Science is operated by the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which has a majority share in Nature’s publisher, Springer Nature.)

But, Coates warns, these metrics are so new that it’s hard to say what a ‘good’ social-media statistic looks like. Is 1,000 paper views good? 20,000? The answer will vary by research area. “Use them with caution,” Coates says.

The evolution of tenure to reflect modern academic life and to value community engagement will ultimately help tenure’s ongoing public-relations problem, says AAUP treasurer Chris Sinclair, a mathematician at the University of Oregon in Eugene. The public, he argues, needs to know what faculty members are doing and why tenure protections are important. “We, as faculty, need to get better at being able to communicate that.”