Should Universities Remain Shelters for the Slothful? : Tenure: UC Berkeley sends shock waves through the country’s ivied towers with a bold proposal to scrap the system that protects those whose work is dimmed by age or indifference.

Within California’s vast system of higher education, a debate is now under way that seems certain to have an influence far beyond that system’s immediate reach. It is no great exaggeration to say that California is contemplating what is, to many if not most in academia, the unthinkable: making a breach in the entrenched practice of faculty tenure.

The debate has been set off by an impending change in federal law. Legislation enacted four years ago provided for the elimination of mandatory retirement at age 70; universities were permitted to retain that cutoff until 1993. With this deadline now less than three years away, they face the painful prospect of having no effective way of ridding their faculties of professors whose competence has been diminished by age and/or indifference, yet who are locked in their positions by the rigid protections of tenure.

In response to this, the budget committee of UC Berkeley in 1988 devised a proposal that it called “The Problem of Grossly Incompetent Faculty: Recommended Policies and Procedures,” and presented it to the campus’ academic senate. It defined “gross incompetence” as teaching that, “as measured by the usual standards of intellectual and professional competence in university-level instruction, is so inadequate that it is a disservice to the students,” and recommended that schools be empowered to dismiss professors, tenured or not, whose performance meets that description.

The academic senate has yet to take conclusive action on the proposal, but emotions within the state’s university community have been stirred to a considerable pitch. The academic senate at UCLA unanimously repudiated the proposal, and faculty committees at other branches of the university are reacting--both negatively and positively--with similar intensity. Efforts to reach a compromise are being pursued. But compromise, so often desirable in human affairs, may be the least welcome outcome in this instance.

The Berkeley proposal would give faculty administrators what they now, to all intents and purposes, lack--a way to circumvent the strictures of tenure in cases where the larger welfare of the university clearly is undermined by the incompetence of tenured individuals. It is a foot in tenure’s door; the professors recognize it as such, which is why they are fighting it with all the vigor they can muster.

The problem, though, is that tenure is an idea whose time has gone. Originally, its intent was to ensure the academic freedom that the professoriate requires for unfettered inquiry and research, and to heighten teaching’s allure by providing long-term job security.

Tenure has long since deteriorated into a shield against the reality of the marketplace, a cover for incompetence and laziness, an instrument of bureaucratization. Like the satraps of communism’s dying empire, the members of the professoriate are insulated in their warrens of privilege and indifference, answerable to no one except themselves; but the bureaucrats of Eastern Europe are on the run, and in time, so, too, will be tenure’s apologists.

In his withering jeremiad, “ProfScam,” Charles J. Sikes quotes the distinguished historian and sociologist Robert Nisbet: “Mental deterioration, sloth, abandonment of professional standards, gross immorality in or outside the university, flagrant breach of academic position, none of these on the evidence is likely to affect the permanence of appointment once tenure has been granted.”

Having served his apprenticeship--usually about seven years--the professor who is allowed to pass through tenure’s gates is thereupon granted what amounts to a lifetime’s dispensation; wealth and fame may pass him by, but for the rest of his working life he is guaranteed a paycheck--in universities these days, a generous one--for doing whatever he jolly well pleases.

This may be beyond the comprehension of people who work in the real world--people whose job security, pay and promotions are actually connected in some definable way to how well they do their jobs--but it is true. Members of the tenured professoriate routinely spend fewer hours in class each week than most city dwellers consume commuting between home and work, and do only as little or as much research as they feel like doing; having acquired tenure through the publish-or-perish system, they have no further reason to do anything else.

For many, of course, intellectual curiosity and personal pride are motivation enough to continue to work hard, in the classroom or the laboratory or both; for many others the temptation to embrace the 6-hour workweek is irresistible. Which is to say that there are good professors and bad professors, just as there are good and bad in every other line of work.

But why is it that the good professors seem willing to fight to the last man in defense of a system that now exists almost entirely to shelter the bad? Why is it that competent and conscientious professors, who surely are much in the majority, demand protections against performance review that are not enjoyed by any other professional workers?

Sorry, but the academic-freedom arguBment doesn’t wash anymore. Academic freedom is now an established principle, within the universities and without; from time to time a bumptious bureaucrat or elected official makes an issue of it, but never to telling effect. Such interference is thwarted not by tenure but also by the near-universal agreement that academic freedom is the sine qua non of higher education.

The real issue is whether the professoriate is somehow entitled to an entirely unique insulation from the normal workings of the competitive marketplace. Bear in mind that workers in most trades and professions are now protected against unfair or arbitrary dismissal by laws and practices that did not exist when tenure came into being, and the conclusion becomes all the more clear: The system of tenure, at least in its present form, is utterly without legitimacy.

That being so, people who care about higher education--who believe that the job of teachers is to teach, not to go on permanent vacation--can only hope that in the great California shoot-out, Berkeley hits the bull’s-eye.