No Corporate Makeover for Higher Education

When entrepreneurs take over a company, they make the company over into an enterprise that reflects their values, ideas, and opinions.

In the process, no one challenges the new boss, certainly not if someone expects to continue on the job. That's simply the American way in business.

Today, of course, entrepreneurs are not just taking over new companies. In several states, they're taking over entire systems of public higher education. What happens in these cases? Do the entrepreneurs adapt to new realities, or do they treat the educational enterprise as any other business?

In Massachusetts, Board of Higher Education Chair Jim Carlin has decided to apply the same principles that made him a successful insurance salesman to the public colleges. But he's encountered a few obstacles. The biggest one: a collective bargaining law that prevents him from dictating wholesale change.

Wholesale change is exactly what Carlin wants. First and foremost, he wants to abolish what he sees as an antiquated idea that's outlived its usefulness: tenure. To him, tenure is nothing more than a guaranteed job for a bunch of ineffective salesmen---the professoriate. In Carlin's view, tenure must go if the company is to run efficiently and well.

Term contracts, Carlin believes, can cover the workload, and the hired help can be turned over with little or no trouble. No reason need be given for nonrenewal, or one can easily be trumped up if needed. There should be no lawyers to contend with, no faculty boards, no appeals processes, no lawsuits, and no hassles. The elimination of tenure is the sine qua non of the Carlin agenda.

Carlin's next priority is a tough post-tenure review process. He wants tenured professors reviewed every five years. Unlike the current review process--- which is conducted every three years---Carlin's review would not be controlled by a faculty member's department chair. Instead, the chair would be limited to one pick on a five-person committee. The other four would, in effect, be chosen by the college president.

These anti-tenure proposals open the door for serious abuse. In the past, the only area of the higher education system that has been relatively free of political interference and manipulation has been the faculty. There are many faculty slots that the pols would just love to move into the patronage pool. Faculty collective bargaining agreements severely limit the politicians' capacity in this area.

If these faculty contracts were to be dumped or radically modified, then the hacks would have a system of hackoramas awaiting the next round of patronage.

To someone like Carlin, all this would pass for progress. Turnover is a signal that the system is working. Carlin would have us believe that the corporate model, with a healthy dose of partisan politics, is just what the people need.

But having new faculty faces every five years is not a healthy prescription for quality higher education. Trashing tenure is not going to improve America's colleges. Putting tenure decisions in the hands of college presidents isn't going to help matters either.

With all its faults, tenure is still the bedrock of a high-quality faculty committed to its profession. The business model won't succeed in the academic environment. It's time to send the business ethic back to business.

Gerald Concannon, a professor of English at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, serves on the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts State College Association.