Retired executive Jack Welch once said “Tenure is a terrible idea.  It keeps them around forever and they don’t have to work hard.”  (One assumes he is speaking of professors.)
It’s dangerously easy to buy into this reasoning.  But if one is not careful, it’s also easy to believe that public teachers work only from 8 to 3 on weekdays for nine months a year.  (Or perhaps that ministers only work on Sundays, and ‘don’t have to work hard’.)
Tenure in higher education can easily be misconstrued. Therefore, it has gradually become more controversial.   Politicians in Wisconsin have managed to gut the idea, and bills are pending in both Iowa and Missouri to eliminate it.
Let’s calmly explore some facts about tenure.  For today, at least, I’ll restrict my remarks to tenure in higher education.
In the first place, tenure is not automatic upon hiring.  At most – if not all – institutions, it takes seven years for tenure to be granted, and then not easily.  Do detractors know this?
This gives the institution a great deal of time to evaluate a professor and his/her work.  Seven years is a sizable chunk of anyone’s early career, and stereotypically, new professors work much harder than they should during those years to try to ‘over-insure’ that the granting of tenure later will be an ‘easier’ decision.
So, why is there this assumption that a professor will ‘sit back and do nothing’ after tenure is granted?  Most professors love the research, teaching, working with students, and community service in which they are involved.  And while they may (probably should) ‘let up’ a little to return to a saner life, they rarely sit still.  Why would they? Their profession is not ‘just a job’ to them.  (Besides, raises are not automatic!)
Like it or not, higher education is a profession where the ability to be protected for doing one’s job can easily be needed!   Here’s a case in point:  Representative Rick Brattin from Cass County, who has introduced Missouri’s anti-tenure bill has said “If you’re doing the right thing as a professor and teaching students to the best of your ability, why do you need tenure?”
Think about that statement.  For starters, he appears to have ignored the important research component of many professors’ jobs.  Second, please tell me: WHO gets to decide what is ‘the right thing’?!  What about a professor that is teaching, say, an established fact of science that Mr. Brattin may not like, in a legislature controlled by his party?
This is precisely why tenure was born, and is still needed.  Mr. Brattin’s statement is a good argument against his own bill.
In higher education, especially at bigger universities, part of the goal is to help find new knowledge, as well as disseminate existing knowledge.  This can be controversial, and has been in the past.  Would Mr. Brattin, living in Galileo’s time, have wondered if Galileo’s then-highly-controversial teaching about a sun-centered universe was the ‘right’ thing to do?  Does Mr. Brattin now consider science-based teaching on climate change, the ‘right’ thing, regardless of his own (or his constituents’) views?
It is important to remember that one of the goals of education – the ongoing search for truth and knowledge – is not just an idealistic whimsy.  It is important to us all.  It must be allowed to continue (and to be debated and tested!) in an environment that is free from the pressures of politics, religion, and/or society.  If this ability is restricted, truth suffers.  Tenure exists not just to protect the professor, it exists first to protect the truth.