Ryan C. Amacher and Roger E. Meiners, The Independent Institute2004
This short book offers an overview of professorial tenure and a host of other issues in higher education, not to argue that tenure should be abolished but rather to show that it's not the major problem in colleges and universities today. Rampant costs, useless departments, frivolous courses, uninterested professors, inflated grades, and stifling bureaucracies are bigger worries. (A general decline in university curricula doesn't help matters.) The solution to these ills is simple in theory: promote decentralization and competition. The former idea, embraced so long ago by business that it's become a sort of holy writ, enables those with the best information to make decisions. By contrast, in higher education too much is decided by faculty committees (in which economics professors can make decisions about physics and poetry departments). At these meetings, the authors lament, clearly reliving a personal experience or two, "[c]ompetent faculty . . . spend afternoons trapped in conference rooms with blowhards who take hours to make pompous pronouncements about any issue." Eliminating such committees would promote competition, by empowering administrators to reward effective departments and reconsider weak ones (tough decisions that faculty worried for their jobs or reputations are unlikely to make). They also recommend better course descriptions (in part so students can be informed when making choices), a voucher program modeled on the GI Bill (of which they provide an enlightening history), and transparency (such as published course evaluations by students). Perhaps most ambitiously, they urge that centralized university systems and state boards be abolished in favor of campus autonomy, in order to replace politics, overhead and bloat with rational decision-making. The book's brevity means it cannot explore anything in much depth; grade inflation is relegated to three paragraphs, and the main recommendation - reporting grade distributions in addition to GPAs - doesn't, for example, consider how publishing the grading curve might affect students' choices about where to enroll. But the book is short, lively, and doesn't mince words. For those hoping to read about tenure, there's still plenty, and the punch line is this: it's a guarantee of due process, not lifetime employment, and would work better if universities were run better. The ISBN is 0945999895 and you can order a copy here.
