December 13, 2011: When you get to question tenure going to want to pull your hair out

My biggest frustration with the public conversation about higher education these days is the ridiculous tendency to assign the one-size-fits-all model to all colleges and universities.  I've been lucky to be associated with 4 institutions of higher education, representing three distinct models:

Southwestern Michigan College -- a "community college" serving a wide range of students, some college ready, many not; offering associates degrees and certificates; balancing a dual mission of training and re-training in occupational fields while at the same time developing transfer students who will go on to complete bachelor's degree at four-year institutions; and being at the mercy of public and governmental pressures.

Davenport University -- a "business college" serving the same range of students as the community college; operating entirely as a private institution; balancing its own dual mission of training and re-training for occupational fields while at the same time graduating bachelor's and master's level students; and being at the mercy of student tuition for almost all funding.

Indiana University and West Virginia University -- state universities offering all the traditional "trappings" of higher education in the eyes of the public (and probably the government):  degrees all the way up to doctorate level; research focus; tenure-based positions; graduate student teaching undergraduate student in many courses; sports; greek system; deeply rich endowments; and so forth.  (I could spend time showing some obvious differences between IU and WVU, but that is not the point here.)

Meanwhile, there are small liberal arts colleges, high-end private institutions, such as Harvard (Davenport and Harvard share only the adjective "private"), online-only colleges, for profits, historically black colleges, and on and on.  Needless to say, some institutions easily fall into more than one category.  The point is -- there are categories and they are meaningful.

So, whenever someone wants to paint all of higher education with a broad brush, I am particularly pained, as are many of my colleagues across the country.  Even within the world of "community colleges," the differences can be pretty overwhelming.  The differences between Southwestern Michigan College, in rural Cass County, are tremendous when compared to Grand Rapids Community College, just two hours up the road, enrolling six times the number of students as Southwestern.

Most vexing can be the blurring of lines among institutional types within the two main publications of our industry:  The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside HigherEd.  You can often see this blurring in the commentary found at the sites for these two publications, both their official, published commentaries, and more humorously, in the unofficial commentary following the published articles.  It is in those "leave a comment" sections that many academics show that we could all be the same: pretentious, self-justifying, territorial, and too often extremely judgmental people.  (Note that I say "many," not all!) 

Hence, I was very disappointed to participate in Inside Higher Ed's Survey of Provosts and Chief Academic Officers this week.  No demographic information, outside of how long each of us has been CAO's in our current position or throughout all CAO positions, which means they won't be able to sort our responses by type of institution.  That distinction is extremely important. 

It is most evident when questions about tenure arise. Neither Southwestern Michigan College nor Davenport have tenure systems, and while these institutions are in the minority, the total number of non-tenure offering institutions is not negligible.  I did have opportunities in this survey to select "not applicable" to tenure-related questions on this survey, but not always:  "Tenure remains important and viable at my institution" could be answered in the range from strongly disagree to strongly agree.  If I disagree, it infers that tenure is available at my institution.  Or, check out this doozy:  "As provost, I generally defer to the tenure recommendations of academic units, even if I might disagree with recommendations to award or deny tenure," to which again I must respond with some version of disagree or agree.

Conclusions are going to be made about the efficacy of tenure, based upon the responses of CAO's who were never allowed to discuss how their institutions may operate without tenure.  This is a dangerous move, because as tenure continues to enflame pro and anti tenure advocates, there will be no attempt to measure responses from tenure-based institutions with non-tenure based institutions.

I tell you, this gets me so angry I want to unionize!

Oh, wait, that's a subject for another time.