An Economic Perspective of Academic Tenure

Today, tenure means many different things, including job security, merit reward, career motivator, protection for academic freedom, a multi-million dollar investment in a single professor, and the output of a legislative personnel process to colleges and universities (Whicker et al. 1993; p. 8–21). But increasingly, to the public and politicians, tenure is an unwarranted, unjustified, and unaffordable job perk that borders on a “rip-off” of innocent participants and bystanders in higher education (Naylor and Willimon 1996). Events at the University of Minnesota are but one example of several recent skirmishes over the practice of tenure (Sanchez 1996). Each side in the great tenure wars has interests which, if solidified in hardened positions, present an impediment to negotiating a compromise (Fisher et al. 1991; Crawley 1994). One approach is to draw from economics and its spillover into public choice to impute economic motivations—the maximization of various income streams—as the primary driving force behind parties debating the practice of tenure. This simplification of complex psychological motivations loses subtlety, a certain amount of realism, and contextual richness. It gains power, however, through simplistic theoretical eloquence that allows us to delve below the surface of positions to underlying interests.