Life-Long Appointments vs. Tenure

Two of the biggest areas where arguments can impact the political debate have somewhat similar institutional protections: federal courts and universities. Judges are appointed for life. Professors are given tenure. The principle behind both is the ability to freely express opinions without fear of losing their jobs.

Once you dig beneath the surface, the similarities are not very strong.

Trial court judges may be guaranteed a job, but their ideas are not guaranteed to go unedited. The trial court judge can be appealed. This threat of being overturned has varying impacts on individual judges. Some judges take great pride in the percentage of cases that stand after appeal. Others issue their opinions without much consideration of the actions that the appellate court will take. At least, it may seem that way. However, even these judges must follow a set of rules and acceptable methodologies for issuing opinons. These judges who wish to stick their finger in the eye of the appellate court still need to hew to the line that the appellate system dictates, otherwise the appeal will knock over the trial court's action like puff of air gives flight to a feather. This tends to moderate nearly any opinion or action of a trial court.

That is not all that different from academia, right? When a professor writes a piece that sticks his finger in the eye of the university administration or the proponents of a conflicting idea, there is no moderating force on the loose cannon. The only way to put controls on a professor is if the professor violates a provision of the university's code.

The ideal promoted in academia is that tenure promotes the free expression of ideas. As is long since a widely known secret, for many years there is little freedom of expression on campus, unless the speaker hews the liberal line. Simply put, on many campuses, conservatives are not given tenure. In 1969, my law school at Indianapolis became a full-time institution rather than merely the night school branch of the other Indiana University law school. This anomoly of two law schools in one small state's university system arose in no small part because conservative professors rarely were given tenure on the Bloomington campus. To this day, nearly 25 years later, that political segregation still remains. This institutional division was necessary to truly allow nearly any expression of conservative position and obtain tenure.

The largest reason for this liberal dominance is that universities are one of the few insitutions that completely ignore the basic need in all human society to check outrageous behavior. The founding fathers manage to build into the Constitution the concept of checks and balances. This institutional concept has done more to preserve freedom than any status-conscious system ever has. Academia tries to preserve freedom of speech by a grant of privileged status. This is the equivalent of the king's favorite having freedom of speech.

Freedom does not come from institutional grants of status. Freedom comes from systems having separate institutions overlapping charges. Checks and balances. Universities have preserved the freedom of speech of only favored persons who tend say similar things.

Universities then end up with these protected persons rotting in place until retirement day. Only then does the institution receive a jolt of new thought.

Tenure may have made sense when Ph.D.'s were a rare commodity. They are not now. Universities need to have more potential for adaptation and moderation.

I am not actively involved in academia, so I am not well informed about the alternatives to fix the problem. The symptoms are all too clear. Academia is not immune to the hubris that develops without countervailing persons supervising or monitoring behavior. How many people do you know that can live up to the standard of morality of doing right even though no one else sees you? We have assumed all tenured professors can. Does this make sense?