I just did a post of some ideas on The Futures Initiative, An Open Project of the Graduate Center (CUNY) .
Here is the FULL BLOG over at Hastac. In this, I’m suggesting that faculty need to imagine a post-tenure bargain with their universities that will avoid everyone being (mis)treated like adjunct faculty are now.
Here are my thoughts of what a post-tenure university might look like:
Better than tenure
What is better than tenure? Here are the beginnings of potential guidelines, a strawman to build from:
1) A university-wide pay scale for teaching courses that allows for incremental adjustments for years served, and bonuses for class size and results (how do we want to measure results?). No second-class citizens in this system. Everyone who steps up to teach has the rank of professor. The full-time teaching load is the same for all professors.
2) Four-year contracts for all professors, with a review after three years, and an expectation of renewal unless specific causes (bad results, etc.) are evident. At the end of two consecutive four-year contracts, one year of sabbatical is provided to every professor. Teaching is the only activity under review for contract renewal.
3) Release (for a semester, or a year, or more) for externally funded research stops the clock on contract review process. Research projects fund the researcher’s salary during these periods (as they now fund other research team members). Research results and publication are not reviewed for contract renewal. Of course, these are reviewed by funders and will impact future funding. Researchers are rewarded bonuses (culled from the overhead of research income) based, say, on the metrics of their publications in open source journals. When the funded research ends, the professor goes back to teaching full time and the contract review clock starts again.
4) Faculty-run review system to guard against university actions that might infringe on academic freedom, and also to review decisions to not rehire a faculty member.
Photo Source: http://www.usw.org/districts/district-10/photos/PointPark3.JPG
So, what are your ideas for a system that is better than tenure?
Virtual Democracy 
