Texas Bill Nukes Tenure

[dismalist]

There is no doubt that tenure is good for people who get tenure! The point at issue is whether it matters to Texas in abolishing it.

I came across this article https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4309283/ a couple of weeks ago. A trio of engineers looks at PhD production in engineering, but also cites work for many other subjects.

Their method is to estimate R₀, the reproduction rate of PhD's, taken form biology. [We do spread like the plague!:-)].
The results for engineering, including Computer Science are astounding! R₀ is 7.2 or 7.4. That is to say in a high growth area like Computer Science each professor is producing 7.4 additional PhD computer scientists each year.

Being engineers, they lament all the competition. An economist embraces it. Plenty of good people left to occupy less well remunerated academic positions.

For English PhD's one can just look out the window, but if we can have a surplus of people who are preparing for an academic position in engineering, we can have it in anything. And, my point, they can't all be stupid!

As stated elsewhere, that is the average number of PhDs graduated per faculty member over the course of their career. I'm midcareer, and I have graduated 7 PhDs, with 6 more in the pipeline. But, a large reason why such fields are able to generate that many PhDs is because the non-academic job market is extremely lucrative, so that provides a significant pressure release valve on the system.

Yes, if academia was the only option for such students, then Texas could eliminate tenure with impunity, and without any significant consequences. But they're competing against a non-academic job market that offers starting salaries that exceeds what I make as a full professor with full summer salary, and with a salary ladder that makes deans, university presidents, and even some coaches appear poorly compensated.

And some will enjoy the academic lifestyle and give up money for it. They couldn't before because the tenure barrier pushed them into non-academic pursuits. Some of those denied tenure just had bad luck. They can go to Texas.

People differ.

[mleok]

And some will enjoy the academic lifestyle and give up money for it. They couldn't before because the tenure barrier pushed them into non-academic pursuits. Some of those denied tenure just had bad luck. They can go to Texas.

People differ.

How does the tenure barrier push them into non-academic pursuits except for the fact that they were less competitive? So, you're admitting that Texas's system will appeal to people who are less competitive? Okay.

You make it sound like a rational preference, when really it's just creating a position with a less competitive applicant pool.

[dismalist]

And some will enjoy the academic lifestyle and give up money for it. They couldn't before because the tenure barrier pushed them into non-academic pursuits. Some of those denied tenure just had bad luck. They can go to Texas.

People differ.

How does the tenure barrier push them into non-academic pursuits except for the fact that they were less competitive? So, you're admitting that Texas's system will appeal to people who are less competitive? Okay.

You make it sound like a rational preference, when really it's just creating a position with a less competitive applicant pool.

The preference would be for the academic life.

The barrier keeping the non-tenured out is not a perfect wall. It is offered to the expected productive, subject to error. Those who are mistakenly denied tenure, or expect such, can go to Texas, and those who have mistakenly been offered tenure outside of Texas can stay outside the state.

Competitive can mean anything.

Anyway, given the numbers involved, they can't all be stupid.

[mleok]

And some will enjoy the academic lifestyle and give up money for it. They couldn't before because the tenure barrier pushed them into non-academic pursuits. Some of those denied tenure just had bad luck. They can go to Texas.

People differ.

How does the tenure barrier push them into non-academic pursuits except for the fact that they were less competitive? So, you're admitting that Texas's system will appeal to people who are less competitive? Okay.

You make it sound like a rational preference, when really it's just creating a position with a less competitive applicant pool.

The preference would be for the academic life.

The barrier keeping the non-tenured out is not a perfect wall. It is offered to the expected productive, subject to error. Those who are mistakenly denied tenure, or expect such, can go to Texas, and those who have mistakenly been offered tenure outside of Texas can stay outside the state.

Competitive can mean anything.

Anyway, given the numbers involved, they can't all be stupid.

Yes, I'm sure that's all it takes to maintain UT's research prowess, "they can't all be stupid."

[Wahoo Redux]

What those arguing against dismalist have failed to demonstrate is that there is a need for an (equally) qualified warm body.

In many ways, a less qualified person would be a better instructor for most of the students I have.

I've heard this debate before.  I've had this debate before. 

Honestly, if you just want someone to teach cookie-cutter classes, it is conceivable that a person with a Bachelor's could teach college as long as they were given the material ahead of time and taught what they know.  We might not need any graduate degrees.

Several people, myself among them, have mentioned MA holding faculty who did a very good job at, I believe, lower division classes.  But in my experience, these are more the exception than the rule.

I wonder if you could be more specific why you say that, quasi.

[MarathonRunner]

There is no doubt that tenure is good for people who get tenure! The point at issue is whether it matters to Texas in abolishing it.

I came across this article https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4309283/ a couple of weeks ago. A trio of engineers looks at PhD production in engineering, but also cites work for many other subjects.

Their method is to estimate R₀, the reproduction rate of PhD's, taken form biology. [We do spread like the plague!:-)].
The results for engineering, including Computer Science are astounding! R₀ is 7.2 or 7.4. That is to say in a high growth area like Computer Science each professor is producing 7.4 additional PhD computer scientists each year.

Being engineers, they lament all the competition. An economist embraces it. Plenty of good people left to occupy less well remunerated academic positions.

For English PhD's one can just look out the window, but if we can have a surplus of people who are preparing for an academic position in engineering, we can have it in anything. And, my point, they can't all be stupid!

Did you even read The Chronicle article? It is already having a negative effect in Texas, with candidates completely withdrawing from searches, other searches not able to get even one person accepting an offer, and others who are already on the tenure track in Texas leaving for other positions? Clearly the threat of abolishing tenure is already having negative consequences, regardless of what you think should happen.

[dismalist]

There is no doubt that tenure is good for people who get tenure! The point at issue is whether it matters to Texas in abolishing it.

I came across this article https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4309283/ a couple of weeks ago. A trio of engineers looks at PhD production in engineering, but also cites work for many other subjects.

Their method is to estimate R₀, the reproduction rate of PhD's, taken form biology. [We do spread like the plague!:-)].
The results for engineering, including Computer Science are astounding! R₀ is 7.2 or 7.4. That is to say in a high growth area like Computer Science each professor is producing 7.4 additional PhD computer scientists each year.

Being engineers, they lament all the competition. An economist embraces it. Plenty of good people left to occupy less well remunerated academic positions.

For English PhD's one can just look out the window, but if we can have a surplus of people who are preparing for an academic position in engineering, we can have it in anything. And, my point, they can't all be stupid!

Did you even read The Chronicle article? It is already having a negative effect in Texas, with candidates completely withdrawing from searches, other searches not able to get even one person accepting an offer, and others who are already on the tenure track in Texas leaving for other positions? Clearly the threat of abolishing tenure is already having negative consequences, regardless of what you think should happen.

There is churning in all labor markets. The point is that there are very good substitutes for all of us.

[Mobius]

While I think the bill is bad, the public R1s will not have trouble finding highly qualified candidates. It might not be a top choice of a search committee, but in the end, enough talented people need a job.

The testimony and stories about applicants is obviously biased to present a narrative to legislators. You're not going to get the full story from anyone. It is also telling that candidates aren't withdrawing from searches if we get tales of offers being turned down. That tells us many of these just have other options. I'm sure one of the finalists are going to say yes for vast majority of searches. If the bill passes, you also won't have this issue with offers being refused for this reason. The applicant pool will adjust. It will be weaker, but not by much.

[ciao_yall]

While I think the bill is bad, the public R1s will not have trouble finding highly qualified candidates. It might not be a top choice of a search committee, but in the end, enough talented people need a job.

The testimony and stories about applicants is obviously biased to present a narrative to legislators. You're not going to get the full story from anyone. It is also telling that candidates aren't withdrawing from searches if we get tales of offers being turned down. That tells us many of these just have other options. I'm sure one of the finalists are going to say yes for vast majority of searches. If the bill passes, you also won't have this issue with offers being refused for this reason. The applicant pool will adjust. It will be weaker, but not by much.

Will they still be R1's if their research is compromised by political interference?

And I'll trot out the statistic that those with a Doctoral degree are very unlikely to be unemployed, period. Even if they are not college professors they have transferable skills that can be applied to many other fields.

[research_prof]

While I think the bill is bad, the public R1s will not have trouble finding highly qualified candidates. It might not be a top choice of a search committee, but in the end, enough talented people need a job.

The testimony and stories about applicants is obviously biased to present a narrative to legislators. You're not going to get the full story from anyone. It is also telling that candidates aren't withdrawing from searches if we get tales of offers being turned down. That tells us many of these just have other options. I'm sure one of the finalists are going to say yes for vast majority of searches. If the bill passes, you also won't have this issue with offers being refused for this reason. The applicant pool will adjust. It will be weaker, but not by much.

"It might not be a top choice of a search committee, but in the end, enough talented people need a job."

This statement is so wrong especially when it comes to STEM. Industry needs talented people so badly and pays 3-4x more than academia. Do you think talented people will still want to go to academia if they know that they can essentially be fired any time (in the same way as in industry)? They have to be stupid to go to academia, if that's the case.

PS: If my private R1 tells me at any point that they are getting rid of tenure for whatever reason, I will start interviewing for industry positions right away.

[quasihumanist]

What those arguing against dismalist have failed to demonstrate is that there is a need for an (equally) qualified warm body.

In many ways, a less qualified person would be a better instructor for most of the students I have.

I've heard this debate before.  I've had this debate before. 

Honestly, if you just want someone to teach cookie-cutter classes, it is conceivable that a person with a Bachelor's could teach college as long as they were given the material ahead of time and taught what they know.  We might not need any graduate degrees.

Several people, myself among them, have mentioned MA holding faculty who did a very good job at, I believe, lower division classes.  But in my experience, these are more the exception than the rule.

I wonder if you could be more specific why you say that, quasi.

I wasn't really talking about people without PhDs.  I'll do this for pure math, but I don't think it's that different in most humanities fields.  Let's break doctoral faculty into research tiers, keeping in mind it's really all a continuum and not entirely measurable on a single variable, but...

A) People who are at least long-shot candidates for the major prizes - Fields Medals and the like.

B) People who are on trajectories that have them being plenary speakers at one of the AMS Sectional conferences.  (There are roughly 32 of these a year, and you can assume they are never repeated.)

C) People who are likely to get an NSF grant at some point.  (Maybe with funding rates, this is already all in B.)

D) People who regularly publish in A journals.  (I'm thinking of the list Australia used for a while - so A is roughly the top third of journals.)

E) People who regularly publish.

F) People who maybe publish a paper from their dissertation in a write only journal and maybe another paper for tenure and another for promotion.

(I'd consider myself a D.)

A place like UT-Austin is mostly hiring B's and C's.  A place like UT-Tyler is mostly hiring E's.  In terms of benefits to the state, they might do just as well with E's for UT-Austin and F's for UT-Tyler.  (And I should emphasize that, by the end of doctorate education, talent is what mostly determines which category you end up - give all the research resources to an F person and, with rare exceptions, they still won't become a D person.)

In fact, maybe they'd do better that way.  I sort of naturally assume my students can read about an abstract theoretical idea and make sense of it with some guidance, and I sort of naturally assume that my students can, when faced with a problem, grab a variety of theoretical tools they learned about over the semester, find the ones that apply to a problem, and use them.  In fact, I think acquiring these aptitudes is the whole point of education, not whatever facts or theories they learn.  But I'm naturally gifted with these skills, and my students aren't.  Maybe my students would do better with someone who doesn't expect them to have or even acquire these aptitudes and gives them specific direction on how to do specific problems encountered in the class.  I tend to think that defeats the point.

[Wahoo Redux]

Wow.  Okay.  I was thinking of MAs vs. PhDs, but you are actually talking about the rock star status of your professors.  The Mick Jaggers and Pinks in the faculty world may not be the best mentors for certain types of students.  This is not entirely different from the humanities. 

The Ivies have people who have made a significant contributions in both quality and quantity, but they are really only separated from the more prestigious public R-1s by luck or maybe by PhD pedigree----your average big-name public R-1 English prof, for example, might or might not have an Ivy PhD but they will have published about as much and as impressively, even if they are have a doctorate from Bumper Knuckle State somewhere no one has ever heard of.  I suppose in some ways the public R-1s are the most meritocratic for faculty.

Your R-2s and small state schools (both of which I've worked at) seem to have the same type of faculty; that is, someone who is capable of publishing, but essentially produces just enough to hop over the relatively low bar for tenure (at my wife's place, it is two peer-reviewed articles----some of the faculty have greatly exceeded this, of course, but most publish their two and float out their careers, trapped where they are but content.  There is not a lot of ambition there but some good teaching).  I don't think they high-powered-personality professor would do well at my wife's, now my former, school.  I find the lack of interest in creating new knowledge or new creative projects very depressing.

I don't know a lot about the SLACs except that they seem to mirror this hierarchy.

CC humanities faculty seem completely unconcerned with the publishing aspect.  The focus is entirely on teaching basic and remedial concepts.  I am sure that is not true about all CC faculty.

I think what you are saying reflects on Big-D's concepts.

I've never heard of making a job less desirable to attract better candidates. 

I guess if you don't want top-notch faculty, make the job less attractive.   

[bio-nonymous]

I was not going to weigh in on this debate, but I decided to share my two cents worth:

Some up-and comings stars would give up tenure/potential tenure at a mediocre university to go to a no-longer tenure granting upper-ranked university with gigantic research resources and a more competitive pool of students for a "five-year renewable contract or some such scheme", a massive start-up package, and a much bigger salary. It is essentially trading "security and mediocrity" for a chance at the big-time (and bring your R01 with you).

Many of those who leave traditional academia for large research institutes survive as essentially soft-money positions which would be even less secure than a renewable contract scheme. Many private medical schools do not grant tenure anyway (hello Boston University, etc.) and often research faculty (as opposed to clinical) need to pay themselves with grants if they want a job (Columbia, etc.).

However, leaving tenure world is risky, but no more risky than getting a job in industry where you can be fired at will for whatever reason. It all depends on the quality of the package offered and the risk-aversion or lack there-of of the applicant, I think. The key in this is how much money is Texas willing to throw at rising stars/stars/and super-stars who will succeed regardless of tenure/no tenure and thus will have their positions secure either way (always meeting acceptable standards of production for their whole career, thus always getting renewed in a contract system). Give someone a 50% raise and an extra million or so in their start-up and some might say, "Tenure what?"

Granted, I view this whole debate from a biomedical perspective where indirect costs rule the roost, but it could be extended into a STEM generalization. I am not really qualified to comment on how this would impact book fields. Ultimately, I don't know if the anti-tenure bills will really go anywhere in the end. The one recently proposed in NC is dead in committee I think?

[mleok]

While I think the bill is bad, the public R1s will not have trouble finding highly qualified candidates. It might not be a top choice of a search committee, but in the end, enough talented people need a job.

The testimony and stories about applicants is obviously biased to present a narrative to legislators. You're not going to get the full story from anyone. It is also telling that candidates aren't withdrawing from searches if we get tales of offers being turned down. That tells us many of these just have other options. I'm sure one of the finalists are going to say yes for vast majority of searches. If the bill passes, you also won't have this issue with offers being refused for this reason. The applicant pool will adjust. It will be weaker, but not by much.

I think the real problem isn't the quality of the applicant pool, as you say, people will still likely apply to UT Austin even if no longer offers tenure, but they will be far more likely to turn down offers if they have any other viable options. This will actually make it very hard and frustrating for search committees, since the candidates they bring in for campus interviews are likely the strongest of the pool and therefore are most likely to eventually have other offers to consider. I suspec there will be far more failed searches as a consequence.

[Aster]

I am currently working in one of these states.

Our faculty applicant search pool is now at its lowest point in over a decade. It is so bad now that the search committees may have no more than 1 or 2 even semi-decent candidates to look at. Sometimes, there are zero good applicants. I know this because I am almost always on a faculty search committee every year now. Sometimes I'm serving on multiple search committees. We're always short on faculty.

I keep records of the applicant pools on committees that I've served on. It has been nothing but a downward spiral. We used to get a good variety of applicants across the United States.  But now, we get very few from out of state. Our applicant pool over the last few years is mostly local people now. And most of them are either brand new with little or no experience, or they are long-term adjunct teaching faculty that have never been hired for a full-time position.

And when we do hire someone, the new faculty churn is enormous. The new people that we do manage to hire, are going back on the job market and leaving for new jobs just as soon as they can.

My department is now mostly made up of new hires from the local area. For most of them, this is their first full-time faculty job out of graduate school. And at least two of them are currently applying for new jobs. They've both been on the job for less than three years, and they're already looking to leave.

I have heard similar stories from colleagues at other colleges in my state. The new faculty churn is taking place at every level, from R1's all the way down. Some of the R2 faculty are telling me that their faculty departments are down by anywhere to a third to a half. That's a combination of covid early retirements, failed new faculty searches, and new faculty hires that are jumping ship. Like most other U.S. states, only a tiny number of faculty work at the R1's. Most of the faculty work at the R2's and smaller institutions. At these places, there are few big incentives in terms of start-up funds and grants to entice new applicants, much less keep them there.

For those that are hired, there are so many of them now that it is impossible to effectively mentor them. There aren't enough senior faculty left to do the mentoring, and those of us that are left are disgusted by the lost effort of mentoring a new person just to see them leave a few years down the road. Many of the senior faculty (the ones with tenure) are checking out and not helping out in the department with service duties anymore.