Peter Lorange: Faculty jobs-for-life must go

Click here for the article of The Financial Times (with its remodeled home page), November 3rd, 2008.

Peter Lorange was former President of IMD in Switzerland.

Extracts:

Tenure, a cornerstone of higher education, is a career-long commitment between the university and the scholar, irrespective of performance. But is the job-for-life system still applicable in the modern business school?

Although I was once a tenured professor at Wharton.. over time I have come to question its value to the point where I can no longer endorse it.

Our modern concept of academic tenure traces its origins to the Middle Ages, when professors justifiably needed guaranteed protection against politicians to ensure academic freedom and self-expression. But that was then.

Today, the pressing business issues that business schools are tackling – whether through research or in the classroom – require cross-disciplinary teams of professors working together, typically with different yet complementary academic backgrounds. This is in opposition to the tenure approach, which primarily calls for individual faculty members to work alone and within clear disciplinary silos in their quest for tenure. Single-authored, refereed journal articles typically represent the safest route to tenure.

The second main reason tenure is undesirable relates to the tenure process itself, which is at best dysfunctional. The peer process of evaluating candidates for tenure is typically subjective, judgmental and highly political. Candidates must “play the game” if they want to be successful. The “safest” route to tenure is to publish single-authored articles in refereed journals. Issues of relevance and broader contribution typically do not enter into the equation. The reviewers make judgmental assessments based on their familiarity with a narrow disciplinary area.

In the end, the process leads to a binary outcome – a yes or a no. Typically, there will be proponents and opponents within the same academic organisation, which can easily lead to fragmentation and polarisation into distinct academic camps. Again, this is in contrast to the team approach, which...