COMMENT ⊗   VALID 00002 PAGES
C REC  PAGE   DESCRIPTION
C00001 00001
C00002 00002	.require "memo.pub[let,jmc]" source
C00017 ENDMK
C⊗;
.require "memo.pub[let,jmc]" source;
.cb WHAT THEY DON'T TELL YOU ABOUT TENURE AND RESEARCH AT STANFORD


	A high official, such as a university president or provost,
must often find compromises among the various goals of the organization
and among the interests of the various groups that comprise it.
Such compromises are tedious to set up and maintain,
because the partisans of each group will often bargain and exert
various pressures to get more.  It is much more convenient if a
everyone can be convinced that a practice is equally in the interests
of all groups; then there is no need for tedious bargaining that
would probably end up with the same final result but with a lot
of hard feelings and lost time.  Therefore, a good official is one
who can sincerely see what he wants to do as in the interests of
every group and in support of every goal of the organization.

	Similarly, the partisan of one goal or interest group
sees no advantage in a clear picture of the divergent interests
of the different groups.  It is to his advantage to identify the
goals of the institution with the interests of his group.  The
interests of other groups are identified only to the extent that
they can be characterized as illegitimate.

	As a faculty member, I have my interests and also (distinct
from that, I hope) my conception of what the goals of the institution
should be.  Somehow I don't feel terribly threatened at the moment
and therefore can attempt an objective identification of the goals
and interests at Stanford.

	The goals of Stanford University include
undergraduate education, graduate education, and research.
The interest groups include the undergraduates, the graduate
students, the faculty, the staff, and the administration.
Each group has short term and long term interests.  For example


There is a substantial congruence among the different goals of
the institutions and among these and the interests of the different
groups that comprise it; otherwise it would not have been found
effective to combine these goals and groups in a single institution.
However, there are differences of interest also.  Let's consider
a few.

	First, there is the relative weight to place on teaching
and research.
The professors at a university like Stanford consider research
very important to humanity, like to do it, and like research
success as a criterion for success as a professor.  For one thing,
it is possible to be recognized as one of the greatest chemists
in the world, but it is not possible to be recognized as one
of the greatest chemistry teachers in the world.  Partly, this
is because the greatest chemist in the world may contribute
twice as much as the second greatest and more than a thousand
run-of-the-mill chemists, whereas the world's best chemistry teacher is worth
hardly worth as much as five reasonably good teachers, except if he
writes an outstanding textbook - but this isn't teaching per se.

	There is no denying that research is important to society -
both for practical purposes, and because research is the major
expression of humanity's collective curiosity.  I am pleased that
someone understands the populations of butterflies on Jasper Ridge
even though I am somewhat skeptical of the claims that this will
benefit me.

	It is generally agreed among researchers that the quality
of research benefits from combining it with teaching - especially
graduate teaching.  The intense and concentrated effort that the
best graduate students put into their research supplements the
greater experience of the professors.

	It is less clear that the undergraduates are benefitted
directly by the emphasis on research.  I think the bald way to
put it is this: the undergraduates are benefited by having
the course material up-to-date in most subjects, and they are
benefited by contact with the smartest people in the world -
among whom are the leading professors.  However, they would
be even more benefited if the top professors could be persuaded
to drop research and concentrate on the undergraduates.
So!  If the trustees love the undergraduates so much, why don't
they restructure the institution and make the professors give
the undergraduates their full attention?  There are four reasons:

	1. The trustees share to some extent the professors'
goal of research and want that to prosper also.

	2. If they changed the terms of work drastically, the
best professors would go somewhere else, and a process of
survival of the unfittest would take place.  For one reason or
another, the survival of the unfittest is not rare at institutions.
It is quite painless to all involved, because the people who
stay easily persuade themselves that they are really just as
qualified as the others - not so flashy but more sound.
Moreover, the generation of students who persuaded
the trustees to make the professors put more emphasis on undergraduate
education might well benefit - by the time the deterioration set in
they would all be gone.
Actually, there are good institutions that put primary emphasis on
undergraduate education, and some of them have rather good faculties.
My guess is that they attract a smaller percentage of the best
undergraduates than the schools that emphasize research.
Apparently, no-one in this big country wants to know which system
works better badly enough to do an objective research project
on what different institutions do to and for their students.  (There
are plenty of pseudo-studies designed to select facts to support
some ideology).

	Another issue on which there is great
confusion is tenure.  Confusion about this exists even among
faculties The effect of tenure is not mainly to protect the
nonconformist.  The academic community including the trustees
is very tolerant, and there are few cases of nonconformists
genuinely protected by tenure.  Nor is it to protect middle-aged
incompetence.  Middle-aged incompetence unless extremely gross
is rather well protected in every institution of our society.
The mechanisms differ, but since the number of middle-aged men
is fixed by biology and since as a class they control the society,
they are rarely cast off.  The only field I know of where income
drops off with middle age are project oriented engineering
organizations which are re-organized for each project.  There
is also a small effect of this kind in construction work where
non-union contractors sometimes hire strong young men who are
willing to work very hard and pay them well above the union
scale.  Presumably when a worker gets too old for this, he has
to go back to union work.

	The effect of tenure is quite the reverse.  Namely, it creates
a filter on quality that doesn't exist in any other walk of life.
What other institution in society evaluates highly trained professionals
in their early thirties and discards two-thirds to four-fifths of them?
You can ask, how does this depend on tenure as an institution?
Couldn't the instition keep just as high standards without
tenure and discard people in their forties and fifties who aren't
the best who can be obtained.  In principal yes, but if you had
ever participated in preparing the documentation to justify a
tenured apointment at Stanford, you would realize that it
wouldn't work.  It is necessary to get letters comparing the
candidate with the best people in the world in his field, and
answer why Stanford can't get whomever might have been rated
better.  The decisions are agonizing all the way from the
senior professors in the department, the department chairman,
the deans, the appointments and promotions committee, and the
provost.  The amount of work involved is at the limit of the
willingness of the participants to do it, even given that
a Stanford faculty member is usually the subject of such a
study only once in his career.  Even now, the work is sometimes
skimped, and it would be quite impossible to get the
qualified people, including those outside of Stanford who
right thoughtful letters based on having read papers, to
put even twice as much work in.  Psychologically, the 
process is difficult enough - even with the stimulus that
a mistake in giving tenure will cost the institution for
perhaps thirty years.  If appointments were on a year-to-year
basis, or even on a five year basis, people couldn't bring
themselves to the hard decisions.  At least the industrial
research laboratories, some of which have similar values,
cannot bring themselves to the same rigorous personnel
policy as universities do, and the average quality of their
research people shows the consequences.

	The rigorous tenure policy depends for its success
on the fact that universities differ in quality and in
the ability of faculty to which they can reasonably aspire.
It is also important that the relative rankings of the
different schools are not precisely defined and vary with
time.  This means that someone who doesn't get tenure at
Stanford or who isn't reappointed is not wiped out.  He gets
a job somewhere else in the academic world, and he can even
hope that the new place will outdo the old if he is successful.
Of course, at the very bottom level of college, there is
substantial attrition out of the profession, but there the
motivation is usually lower as well as the ability, and there
is more mobility between the academic and other professions.