(A continuation of an earlier blog.) Also, please note there is a good website that lists the main websites on tenure.
A story in today’s NY Times gives a good reason for keeping tenure. The story describes the Federalist Convention that is going on in DC today. (A close friend of mine, Bob, just gave a talk at the convention.) The Federalists are a conservative group of lawyers who now number 36,000. The Federalists are powerful in government and they are particularly powerful on the bench. They got started in 1981 in reaction to the blatant Lefty Fundamentalism of their law school professors. Tenured professors no doubt.
So a good thing about tenure is the reaction it created in the form of the Federalists.
The most powerful traditional argument for tenure was meaningful in the early part of the 20th Century. The argument was that intellectuals needed jobs and the academy was a good place to use their talents. Some of their ideas were considered "radical" in their day. They were generally wimps and they needed job security. Their nearly universal ideology was Marxist pacifism. There were no market jobs for people with those anti-business ideas. They needed tenure.
That reason for tenure is gone. Today's new ideas are not ideological and not inherently pacifist and anti-business.
There are plenty of jobs in the market place for intellectuals. To start with there is a list of think tanks in the U.S. with more than a thousand high-paying research jobs listed.
How to get rid of tenure?
Congress simply needs to set a date, hypothetically January 1, 2007, and state that anyone who receives tenure after that date is not eligible for any federal grant. I would love to see the battle on campus. Administrators and non-tenured faculty would wage a beautiful, vituporous battle to end tenure.