From the issue dated February 25, 2005

Report Calls for a More Flexible Tenure Process

By ROBIN WILSON

Higher education should consider changing the tenure system drastically to make academic careers less rigid, particularly for professors raising young children, the leaders of 10 research universities said in a report.

The report, "An Agenda for Excellence: Creating Flexibility in Tenure-Track Faculty Careers," was sponsored by the American Council on Education and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. It says universities should consider:

• Giving young professors up to 10 years -- instead of 6 -- to earn tenure.
• Allowing faculty members to work part time for up to five years at a time.
• Granting multiyear leaves to professors for personal and professional reasons.
• Creating postdoctoral jobs to help people who have stepped out of academe after earning their Ph.D.'s, perhaps to raise a family, to re-enter their careers in higher education.

At a news conference announcing the report this month, the university presidents and chancellors who prepared the report said that none of those options were available yet on their campuses, but that they had begun discussing such changes and hoped their report would prompt other universities to do so.

Administrators involved in "work-life" issues at universities have talked for years about making the tenure track more flexible, but the new report was the first in which a national group of presidents endorsed such changes.

"Tenure is a very important bedrock principle at our universities," William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, said at the news conference. "But we also recognize that the policies and practices on our campuses that undergird the principle of tenure were developed in a different era, in a different time. All of us recognize that the system is too rigid for the modern era."

In particular, the report says, women are being driven away from careers at research universities because of the lock-step nature of a tenure-track career. That is happening even though women now earn 51 percent of the doctorates conferred by American universities (The Chronicle, December 3). If careers in higher education do not become more flexible, the report says, universities will continue to lose out on talented women, particularly those who want to have children. Already, female faculty members say they are much less satisfied with their jobs than men say they are, according to the report.

Part of the problem is that departments are run by men who "typically have spouses or partners who do not work or work only part time to manage their home lives," says the report. Young faculty members, by contrast, are much more likely to have partners who work. "Consequently, faculty homes with spouses or partners to manage the family and household are becoming obsolete," says the report.

Universities should try to help new faculty members whose spouses also work and need to find jobs, the report says. And institutions should consider creating on-campus child-care centers, if they have not already, that would offer evening and even overnight care for faculty members who need to travel.

"When you think about a faculty career, it is 40 years long," said Mr. Kirwan. "The idea that for good and legitimate reasons a faculty member might need to step back for a couple of years, for family reasons or whatever, then come back into a faculty position -- for most of us this just wouldn't have been possible. But it makes all the sense in the world to allow for this kind of flexibility."