Universities and colleges nationwide are feeling the pangs of financial pain. Private institutions are caught between the effects of a dwindling pool of students able to pay full tuition and the steadily increasing cost of maintaining academic programs. Public schools are losing out to prison construction or other state-supported ventures as states mete out their monies. Research institutions are facing an especially uncertain future in funding for basic research.
"There's a lot of turbulence in the funding environment," says Philip J. Stephens, chairman of the chemistry department at the University of Southern California. "On top of that, there's a constant move in Congress to reduce the amount of overhead that universities can charge on outside contracts."
Such funding problems in higher education have revived attacks on academic tenure, which protects faculty members who have been granted this status from summary dismissal. Tenure is perceived by some people as a way of preventing incompetent faculty from being fired or laid off, says Stephens, so the way faculty members do their business is under increasing scrutiny. University administrators and state legislators are becoming hard-nosed about the relationship between what they spend on education and what they get for their money, he explains. They want to know how faculty members perform, how much teaching they do, and whether they teach effectively. They want "accountability."
Martel Zeldin, dean of science and technology at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island, concurs. "Over the past decade, as Congress and state legislators have swung to the right, they are being more skeptical that faculty deserve tenure," he says. "Very few [lay people] recognize the activities of a faculty member. ... [They don't know that] higher education in the research lab is a laboratory education. ... When you're teaching a student to do titration, tune an instrument, or read a spectrometer, it's not something you can do by the book, or by videotape, or [with] an instruction manual. It's one-on-one, and it's experimentation. ... Academics must articulate better what we do," he says, because "the attack by legislators on tenure is misplaced judgment."
Last spring, legislation introduced into the South Carolina House of Representatives called for abolishing tenure in public universities and colleges. The bill (H. 3767) "was introduced by some Republican members of the legislature and ultimately got a large number of cosponsors," says Jamie W. Moore, a professor of history at the Citadel - the Military College of South Carolina in Charleston. "It went to the House committee, where the measure died."
But he predicts that the issue probably will come up again. It's all about finance and the money involved in faculty salaries, he explains. Legislators have "mythical stories about faculty who aren't doing what they are supposed to do." The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) viewed the bill as extremely dangerous, says Moore, who is president of the South Carolina AAUP Conference. If it had passed, he explains, specialty programs and upper-division chemistry and science programs likely would be among the endangered species, because fewer students are enrolled in these programs than in some other majors. Legislators would get rid of the course or the major. "What would you do with the faculty [then]?" he asks.
"Legislators are tapping into an anti-intellectual culture in our environment" warns attorney Robert K. Moore Jr., a professor of sociology at St. Joseph's University, Philadelphia. Moore has testified at hearings on legislation introduced this year in Pennsylvania by Republican state Rep. John A. Lawless that questions the fairness of sabbaticals, tuition benefits to dependents of faculty members, and tenure, as well as travel expenses and faculty workload.
Robert Moore, who is president of Pennsylvania's AAUP Conference, points out that a threat to tenure is a threat to academic freedom, which entitles teachers to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject and freedom from institutional censorship when they speak or write as citizens. "Without tenure, there can be no academic freedom," he says. "Universities are presumably in the business of producing knowledge for knowledge's sake. Although this knowledge can eventually be applied, the idea is that we are to pursue intellectual inquiry wherever it takes us."
He acknowledges that looking into how state funds are spent is appropriate. "We should be held accountable. ... But cracking the whip on academics by doing away with tenure is extremely shortsighted, because ultimately you're headed down the path of destroying what we know."
A university can't be run like a production plant, he explains. "If I go to work every day and someone tells me what to teach and how to teach and what to do my research on and how to do my research, I'm not in a university anymore. I'm in an R&D factory where the bosses tell the workers what to do."
"Frontal attacks on tenure from outside the institution are very alarming," says Iris F. Molotsky, AAUP director of membership development, because they show the lack of public understanding of what really goes on in universities and colleges. "But there's a more destructive and less obvious erosion of tenure through increased reliance on part-time faculty and non-tenure-track appointments," she says.
Robert Moore agrees. "Given the academic job market, people in some fields are very desperate for work and they will take whatever comes their way" - annual contracts, for example. That will fundamentally change the nature of higher education, he contends, to the extent that free inquiry will be lost.
Kenneth W. Cooley, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin Center, Waukesha, believes the trend toward hiring more part-time faculty is blatant throughout two-year colleges, but Ph.D. institutions are hiring them as well.
Nowhere, perhaps, have more dramatic measures been taken than in California's public universities. As a way to reduce payrolls, employees of the University of California system schools were offered three separate early retirement incentives between 1991 and 1993. "The university budget was in dire straights," says Ellen S. Switkes, assistant vice president of academic advancement for the UC system. "Our retirement system was able to bear the cost of the program, which is very unusual. We couldn't move the money ... to fund [university] operations." A fairly large number of faculty members took early retirement and then were hired back in part-time positions, she says, to save money on salaries.
Cost-cutting measures at institutions in the California State University system also have led to more positions being filled by part-time faculty, says AAUP First Vice President Rosemarie Marshall, a professor of microbiology at California State University, Los Angeles. Adjunct faculty often don't participate in governance, grant writing, and curriculum development, so tenured professors and those in tenure-track positions are having to assume greater responsibility, she says. Yet full-time faculty in the CSU system haven't had a salary increase in four years, not even a cost-of-living increase, notes Marshall.
For the past several years, she says, the schools haven't had money to maintain buildings or equipment. If a science faculty member has a grant and buys a piece of equipment, the equipment becomes state property, she explains. But "if that beautiful new piece of equipment breaks down," the university has no funds to fix it.
Hiring a faculty member into a tenure-track position is becoming more and more difficult, says Marshall. The number of students and the demand for courses continue to increase, she explains. "To invest in a tenure-track faculty member versus three or four part-time people, you're looking at what you can do for the students and how many you can accommodate." The state allocates funds according to the number of students we serve, but "the state budget has only 15% discretionary funds" for all public education and prisons, she notes.
The UC system is in somewhat better financial shape than the CSU system because it includes major research universities - which bring in grant money - and medical and other professional schools. The system hasn't changed its interest in hiring tenured faculty, says Switkes, who sees the current load of part-time "retired" faculty as an interim measure. "We needed [to rehire] them, because the number of students didn't decline," and it takes time to hire new faculty. The large number of faculty who retired has given campuses a unique opportunity to step back and decide where new positions are going to be and which new directions to emphasize, she says.
Yet, at UC Berkeley, the number of full-time-equivalent faculty positions in the chemistry department has dropped from 56 five years ago to 45, says department chairman Kenneth N. Raymond. Some faculty members at Berkeley took the early retirement incentive, but they "didn't pack their bags and go to other chemistry departments," he notes. Had they done this and moved their research to other universities, Berkeley would have lost both graduate student and overhead support. The retirees were hired back as adjunct faculty members, but those with funding for both lab space and graduate students are required to carry a normal teaching load, Raymond points out. The department doesn't want to create a two-tiered faculty where junior staff members do all the teaching, he explains. He believes the impact of the early retirement plan will be to phase in retirement over several years.
"It's very much in the interest of faculty to control the tenure process," Raymond says, noting that a draft policy for dealing with incompetent faculty in the UC system has been discussed by the UC Systemwide Academic Personnel Office, but has not yet emerged as policy. In the CSU system, the academic senate is exploring the defense needed for ensuring that tenure is preserved, says Harold Goldwhite, chairman of the chemistry department at CSU Los Angeles.
Some schools, such as the University of Wisconsin system, have instituted "posttenure" faculty reviews, says AAUP's Molotsky. These reviews can be useful in helping people assess their workload, plan long-term goals, and improve teaching techniques, she says. "But if [this type of review] is used to weed out deadwood [professors] rather than as a developmental tool, then I think it's very destructive." Tenure is not easily achieved, she says. "There are very few professions where you have to serve an apprenticeship for up to seven years before you can become a fully fledged ... member. Once you achieve tenure, it's an acknowledgment by your peers that your work is valuable, useful, and productive."
Tenured chemistry professors contacted by C&EN, although concerned that the need for tenure is being questioned, are more troubled by the reduction in tenure-track openings, the fierce competition for these positions among young Ph.D.s, and the enormous pressures today's young academicians must endure if they wish to achieve tenure. "What's happening in general, the way I see it, is when people retire from tenured positions they're not being replaced on a one-to-one basis," says Eli M. Pearce, professor of chemistry and of chemical engineering at Polytechnic University, New York City. "Slots are being eliminated and the requirements for teaching and [other] duties are going up. ... The stresses are tremendous, even for senior people."
Nevertheless, young Ph.D.s are diligently ferreting out tenure-track slots, getting hired, and going on to get tenure. Three recently tenured professors in research institutions offer advice to aspiring graduate students setting their sights on academe. And two professors in tenure-track positions at very different institutions - a small two-year college and a large state university - describe how they got hired and how they're tracking their careers. All three tenured professors agree that the minimum achievements needed to be recommended for tenure include publishing several papers in peer-reviewed journals, receiving major funding awards, demonstrating teaching ability, and performing service - committee work, governance, and student activities, for example.
"Most people really bloom once they achieve tenure," says Debbie C. Crans, an associate professor of chemistry at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. "Their papers get better; their science gets better, because they don't need to publish as fast; their teaching gets better; and their long-term goals start being established." The years before tenure are stressful, even for those who fly right through, she emphasizes. "How you relate to people who are perceived as experts in your field is important ... and you must understand the politics of [your department]." Crans, a biological chemist who works in vanadium research, had obtained a pretenure grant from NIH to study vanadium as an insulin substitute in humans. "There had been a lot of growth in this area of research," she says. She was granted tenure in 1991, her fifth year at Colorado State.
Emily Ann Carter, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, was recommended for tenure after three years. "What helped me get tenure early and be promoted to full professor [two years later, in 1992] was being very single-minded about the task and very focused on what needed to be accomplished," she says.
Carter was hired as an assistant professor at UCLA while she was writing her Ph.D. thesis at California Institute of Technology. In a move she says she "wouldn't recommend to everybody," Carter asked if she could do a postdoctoral fellowship. She was given a leave of absence to do this, but advised not to spend time writing grants. She devoted part of her time to doing just that. "The tenure clock started ticking with my appointment," says Carter. Because "I'm not too much of a gambler, I didn't want to be gone two years and have only four left to get everything to work [for tenure]." As it turned out, "I had three major grants funded," she says, "so I had money walking in the door."
That's a very unusual situation, says Carter. Some assistant professors can get a starter grant from the Petroleum Research Fund, which is administered by the American Chemical Society, she says. Then some are nominated for various young investigator programs such as those administered by the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health. After that, they apply to various government agencies for major funding.
Carter believes the visibility she gained by carving out a niche that combined ab initio electronic structure theory with dynamics in a way that hadn't been done before helped accelerate the tenure process. People were interested in the subject so it led to a number of speaking invitations, she explains. "That's really important," she says, "given that letters of evaluation are requested from outside experts" when decisions are being made on whether someone should receive tenure.
"I didn't have a lot of hardships [professionally] getting tenure," says Carter. "But emotionally it was hard, as it is for a lot of people. ... There are a lot of stresses associated with the uncertainty of whether it is going to work out." She advises young people to take a two-pronged approach to research - pick a long-shot project that will confer great visibility if it pans out, but also work on a much more sure-thing project. She managed to do both successfully.
Not all graduate students are likely to have the opportunity to emulate Carter. Nevertheless, they still can succeed. Joseph J. Grabowski, a professor of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh who received tenure this year, advises graduate students to work really hard. "Chemistry is very much a 'blue-collar' science," he says. "People who work very hard can do very well. You don't have to be a genius. You have to be smart - for sure. But hard work really pays off. And hard work as a graduate student will really help you find that job."
Grabowski, who came to Pittsburgh four years ago after a holding an associate professor position at Harvard University, says there's a lot more pressure and stress on students at Harvard to work hard. "[At Pittsburgh] it's much more left up to the student, and those who apply themselves do just as well."
Hoping to get tenure this year, Roger A. Egolf, an assistant professor of chemistry at Pennsylvania State University's Allentown campus - one of 17 commonwealth two-year colleges that feed into the main campus at University Park - began teaching part-time at Allentown in the 1988 - 89 academic year while he was finishing his Ph.D. at nearby Lehigh University in Bethlehem. When a tenure-track position opened up the next academic year, he was hired as an instructor until he defended his thesis.
The Allentown campus offers the same freshman and sophomore chemistry curriculum as all Penn State campuses. "Teaching is a major responsibility [at two-year campuses], says Egolf, "but research is important for promotion." Penn State is concerned about publications and scholarly presentations, he explains, but there are no research laboratory facilities at the Allentown campus. The position for which he was hired was advertised in C&EN as requiring "either a theoretical organic chemist or an experimentalist with access to outside facilities," he notes.
Falling into the second category, Egolf maintains a lab at Lehigh, where he's an adjunct professor. He shares an NIH grant with a physiologist at the State University of New York Medical School, Syracuse. The money covers research costs, he says, and pays summer students a small stipend. Penn State offers an honors degree in chemistry that requires a thesis, he explains. "So far, I've supported [research for] three of those students and I have another two working with me now."
At North Carolina State University, Raleigh, James D. Martin is entering his second year as an assistant professor of chemistry. Getting into a tenure-track position is very difficult," he says. "One needs to have solid qualifications ... but what pushes one over the line are the contacts one has made." Martin, who obtained a Ph.D. degree in molecular chemistry from Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1990, did a postdoc in solid-state chemistry at the University of Paris - South, in Orsay, and a second one in synthetic solid-state chemistry at Iowa State University, Ames. In between, he took time out to learn more about X-ray crystallography. Like UCLA's Carter, he says he's creating a niche, although, "I'm not breaking completely foreign territory in my research." He's looking to construct framework solids from metal halides, instead of from the more commonly explored oxide-phosphates and metal chalcogenides.
Martin is disappointed that "visibility and [academic] pedigree have such an amazingly strong sway" in determining who gets the job offer in academe. "It's too easy for people on search committees to look at where people come from," he says, "although I think they do recognize original ideas and original scientific thinking."
Some senior professors agree with him. "It's still a sparkle dust situation in academic employment," says ACS immediate past-President Ned Heindel, a professor of chemistry at Lehigh University. Those making the hiring decisions have not realized that tomorrow's chemistry department will have a lot less funding from the traditional sources, he explains. "Yet we continue to hire on the basis of whether someone has the right pedigree to impress NSF or NIH and get those starter grants" - on the premise that the source of the person's degree alone enables one to stay funded. "We're developing new ways of funding our graduate students," he says. But these new sources often don't provide either long-term support or adequate overhead funds. People with incredibly narrow pedigrees who are hired because they have high-level publishability in certain journals often don't know how to position their science to obtain research funds from industry, he says.
Heindel stresses the need for tenured faculty to be willing to learn and master new, active areas of research. Institutions need to be able to respond to market forces, he says. In this context, he believes tenure can be an impediment, because it can "rigidify a chemistry department so it has difficulty embracing emerging areas." As a result, says Heindel, "one of the tragedies I see is chemistry being nucleated outside the chemistry department - in departments of molecular biology, polymer chemistry, or materials chemistry, for example." Environmental chemistry may wind up in a geology department or within civil engineering "like on our campus," he adds.
"When a department has a large number of tenured faculty in the same discipline and there are a fixed number of slots," an administrator can't alter the composition of the department very rapidly, he says. Thus, "tenure [can lock] a department into a set of disciplines and a set of skills over a long period of time," when there might not be many opportunities for research funding in those areas.
But St. Joseph's Robert Moore warns that if a state begins to put the
clamps on academia and the production of knowledge as an end in itself and
starts to do away with tenure, then universities "might as well hire a bunch
of actors because we'll all be reading management scripts."
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