A Return to Tenure
17th February 2022
Chatham University in Pennsylvania did away with tenure in 2005. Now the university is poised to transition to a tenure system once again.
Joseph MacNeil, interim dean of the School of Arts, Science and Business at Chatham, said two main factors are at play: faculty recruitment and faculty morale.
“We have some stories where people we’d made offers to declined us because—while they were happy to participate in the job search—when they were getting offers, the fact that we didn’t have tenure disqualified us from the conversation,” MacNeil said. “And the part that no one can quantify is the number of good faculty that never applied for a job here because it wasn’t tenure-track in first place.”
Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.