Massachusetts may offer higher salaries to faculty who give up tenure

The Massachusetts Board of Higher Education recently proposed an alternative to the tenure-track--a salary incentive of an additional 4 percent to 12 percent--that it hopes will spur faculty to forgo tenured status.

The proposal applies to all the state's public higher-education institutions, which the board represents. If approved, faculty would have the option of signing up for multi-year contracts, renewable depending on their performance.

The plan's aim, says board chair James Carlin, is to increase hiring flexibility and decrease the number of tenured faculty in a state that has one of the highest rates of tenured faculty in the country. He believes such a move would control costs and improve administrators' ability to encourage good teaching with salary incentives.

For example, for one of the board's charges--the University of Massachusetts system--the number of full-time tenured faculty is close to 80 percent. In all, the system employs more than 4,000 full- and part-time faculty on its five campuses. Carlin and board chancellor Stanley Koplik, PhD, believe that by providing lifelong job security to senior faculty, tenure makes it more difficult to hire new faculty, change curricula or lower or freeze tuition.

Although Carlin and Koplik don't seek to abolish tenure outright, many faculty and faculty leadership view their proposal with suspicion. The threat to tenure may not be direct, but many believe the proposal ultimately seeks to dismantle the time-honored practice, which was founded to preserve academic freedom.

"This is a terrible idea," says Jordan Kurland, associate general secretary for academic freedom and tenure at the American Association of University Professors. "If you have fewer people with tenured status, you have two classes of faculty, and the academic freedom of the faculty as a whole is weakened."

Kurland notes that a few individual institutions, such as the University of Central Arkansas, have installed salary incentives for giving up tenure, but Massachusetts would be the first to do it state-wide.

The proposal's future is uncertain. For acceptance in any form, it must first be considered in contract talks with labor groups representing faculty. And while labor talks will soon be held for community college faculty, they appear far off for University of Massachusetts faculty because the board just concluded contract talks with their unions last year, and another round of talks has not been scheduled.

--B. Murray



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