We live in a world turned upside down. Students get away with shouting down speakers and violent protests but receive barely a slap on the wrist by college officials, but when a veteran professor wrote that he regarded tenure as a bad policy (and took the further step of actually turning it down), his superiors decided to punish him. I write about the strange case of Texas Tech business professor James Wetherbe in today’s Martin Center article.
Professor Wetherbe thinks that tenure undermines the incentives needed for doing your best work. To enhance the credibility of his argument, years ago, when teaching at the University of Minnesota, he took the probably unique step of resigning his tenure in favor of negotiating year-by-year employment contracts. Several years ago, he was hired at Texas Tech and did the same thing. Furthermore, he published several articles in heavily read places such as Harvard Business Review in which he explained why he opposes tenure. For that, evidently, a dean at Texas Tech decided to get back at Wetherbe, blocking him from consideration for the deanship of the business school and from receiving an esteemed teaching award.
So Wetherbe filed suit. The trial court dismissed the case on the dubious grounds that the public has no interest in a professor’s opinions about tenure. Happily, however, the Fifth Circuit has reversed that ruling and the case can now go to trial.
I hope Wetherbe prevails in court and also that his alternative to tenure catches on. It’s a poor way of protecting academic freedom as we have seen recently in cases at Marquette and Duke (if school officials get sufficiently angry at what you say or write, they can hound you out even if you have tenure) and it does encourage professors to coast if they feel like doing so.