UC Tenure: a Forest of Deadwood

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig asked last month whether California was getting its money’s worth from University of California faculty who teach as few as six hours per week. He complained about the faculty member who says, “I’ll do my research and you leave me alone.” Honig argued, “That’s not good enough. The people of the state are paying the bill . . . and they deserve a better accounting.”

Honig is right, but the situation is worse than he may realize. Many UC full professors do not teach as many as six hours per week, year-round. Typically, they teach six hours during two quarters, three hours during a third quarter and zero hours during the fourth (summer) quarter. Those who do maintain a heavy schedule of research, I hasten to add, are fully employed even at that modest level of teaching. Yet many professors do no research at all during time bought for them by the taxpayers.

Honig questions the quality of UC research: “You look at the published stuff some of these guys do and you wonder if it’s all that valuable.” For the moment, forget quality and only consider quantity. During nearly seven years as an editor with the University of California Press, I had abundant contact with the best of the UC faculty; a perennial topic in their conversation was “deadwood”--the distressingly large number of their colleagues who did no research but, in effect, took state money and ran.

I am not talking about the most senior or junior professors, who, for good and different reasons, might be less than abundantly productive. I am talking about people in their prime who “haven’t published anything in years,” to use a phrase heard with alarming frequency.

Deadwood is a drag on academic competitiveness. It is also, obviously, an affront to elementary ethics. The amount of teaching required of a UC full professor simply does not constitute full-time employment. Any tenured professor who does his teaching and stops there is a thief. What else do you call someone who takes money for work and then doesn’t do it?

In any other walk of life, someone who--over the years--failed to discharge a major portion of his or her responsibilities would be fired. UC professors who fail to do research are not fired. What protects them is tenure, that munificent guarantee of lifetime employment bestowed on the fortunate after only six years’ probation.

But if tenure prevents dismissal, it does not prevent another corrective response. Once a tenured professor at a research university is clearly doing no significant research, that professor should be stripped of full-time pay for de facto part-time work and be required to teach full time.

This “punishment” would scarcely be cruel or unusual if the teaching load were pegged at the level required of faculty at the Cal State system--12 hours of teaching (plus three of advising) per week.

Nor would such change create the “two-class faculty” of teachers and researchers that one Berkeley dean has warned Honig about. Such a division, in fact, already exists. Just ask professors who work long hours on research how they feel about those colleagues who, with perfect impunity, go golfing instead.

The proposed reform would address the most notorious consequences of the status quo: the ever-rising cost of higher education. At California State University, Long Beach, where enrollment is 33,700, according to “The College Blue Book,” full-time faculty numbers 950. At UCLA, where enrollment is 33,167 (same source), full-time faculty numbers 2,100. If UCLA faculty time not actually spent on research were claimed for teaching, that university would need fewer faculty. Alternatively, it could enroll more students without hiring new faculty.

The “punishment” of extra teaching would not end the research career of any serious professor. One early discovery at UC Press was the outstanding research being done in various parts of the Cal State system, the supposed “teaching system” of the state. A given department on a given Cal State campus might well rival its UC counterpart. Shift the comparison to the level of individual professors, and all old bets were off.

During the 1970s, many UC departments began to be “tenured in”-- all members holding lifetime employment, all still too young to die or retire. Bright new Ph.D.s from the best universities turned perforce to the less prestigious Cal State campuses, bringing their research plans with them. An acquiring editor interested in publishing the best new work, no matter who was doing it, could find plenty of possibilities at the erstwhile teaching campuses.

The teaching load on those campuses is heavy. It does interfere with--but does not preclude--research. At Cal State San Diego, for example, an English professor with a research project may request three hours of “assigned time” to work on it, bringing classroom hours down to nine per week. Not all such requests are approved, though most are; nor do all professors make such requests. In one exceptional case, a professor was recently granted six hours of “assigned time.”

The Cal State San Diego approach to research accountability contrasts sharply with the usual UC approach--granting a senior professor a 50%-75% reduction of the benchmark 12 hours of teaching per week, whether reducation is requested or not. A tenured UC professor is, in effect, presumed to have this much research in progress. The professor who has quietly set research aside in favor of real-estate investing or horse breeding may eventually pay the price in slow promotion or smaller raises, but not in increased teaching.

If there is a natural symbiosis between teaching and research, as spokespersons for research universities rightly claim, then purely in the interest of teaching, the state would do well to allocate more of its research money to the Cal State system. By the same token, once it becomes clear that a given UC professor either cannot or will not do significant research, the state is surely within its rights to double that person’s teaching load. The UC faculty clubs play host each day to a number of living, breathing, serenely aging tenure mistakes. Everyone knows them. Behind their backs, some laugh at them and more complain about them. Here is a way to make them less expensive.

Honig is right to question the proposed expansion (from nine campuses to 12) of the UC system. California has experienced no explosion of demand for new university research. If it had, the proper response would be research institutes--without gymnasiums, dormitories, student health center, student union and other student services. What the state faces is an explosion of demand for the kind of high-quality university education the UC system manages to offer at a relatively low price.

The demand, in other words, is for extra teaching. Then why overlook surplus capacity already in place? The state could redeploy the unused, paid-for time of dormant UC research faculty in the form of new hours of university teaching. If there is such a thing as found money, there may also be such a thing as found time.