Tenure and Jobs in Universities

The Times is wrong to blame the job crisis in academia on tenure (editorial, March 24). The problem is not that older faculty use tenure to hold on to their jobs for life. Faculty have been retiring in large numbers during the 1990s, especially here in California. Early retirement programs opened many new positions at University of California and Cal State University campuses. That trend will continue into the next decade.

The true problem is that despite increasing enrollments university administrators are not hiring permanent, tenure-track faculty members to replace the retirees. Instead, they hire new PhDs to teach classes on a part-time, temporary basis, with few benefits and low pay.

If California’s students are to be well served in the coming century, university administrators must replace the retired faculty with eager new PhDs on a permanent, full-time, tenure-track basis. Temporary part-timers--”freeway fliers” who have to cobble together several jobs at several campuses to make ends meet--do not have the security, local connections and institutional clout necessary provide full service to their students.

DOUGLAS W. DODD

Bakersfield

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Tenure is not the problem. U.S. higher education is the best in the world because professors have academic freedom to pursue new knowledge. Tenure protects that academic freedom. Nor is forced retirement the answer to open up jobs for “new blood.”

The reason that young PhDs find it difficult to find professor jobs is because universities, in some areas, are producing too many PhDs. Universities are indeed using graduate students as “slave labor,” not only for teaching, but also for research. When I was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins 30 years ago, very few students were admitted and in four to five years most obtained the PhD degree. Today, more students are admitted and they are often kept on for seven to 10 years before they get the PhD degree. That is the root of the “slave labor” problem.

STEVEN B. OPPENHEIMER

Director, Center for Cancer

and Developmental Biology

Cal State Northridge