THE BIG RED SUBWAY AND THE GREAT STEEL FLEET. I have found several posts suggesting that academic tenure limits the flexibility of the academy to respond to changing enrollment patterns. A number of these posts draw parallels to the passenger transportation industry, something to which I can claim some expertise. Wormtalk and Slugspeak spells out the basic problem.

Administrators would like to address the problem, but if you can't reduce the number of tenured faculty in department A, it's budgetarily dangerous to increase the number of tenured faculty in department B. So things just stay the same, and administrators make up the difference with exploitation of adjunct faculty.

That's the basic flexibility problem. This observation, within the same post, illustrates a problem that requires a separate analysis.

Obviously administrators would have a lot more flexibility in staffing courses if they weren't constrained by tenure. Administrators could also continually replace senior faculty with less-expensive junior faculty. The senior faculty and all the junior faculty who hope to become senior faculty (i.e., all the faculty in TT or T jobs) know this, and it is by far the biggest reason for the ferocity of the defense of tenure.

As an exercise, ask yourself whether you'd prefer to compensate, and then pension off, the best researchers the same way that professional sports does. But that's for another day. I want to focus on the flexibility argument. Blogs for Industry provides a focal point, using budget airlines as a metaphor for flexibility.

The airplanes may be moveable to different routes, but they're expensive, long-term investments. Changing the routing is nontrivial, as an airline also has to deal with landing rights, gate space, maintenance facilities, the various employees from mechanics to pilots who may have to be housed overnight more often in St. Louis, away from homes and families, and moving the planes around the cities they serve so that moving planes to St. Louis doesn't cost them more than they'd make serving the demand. In fact, increased demand is often unmet by major carriers, creating market opportunities for the Southwests and Jet Blues of the world, and driving the Pan Ams and TWAs under. These new carriers, which have more fuel-efficient planes, lower labor costs, and niche market advantages, can drive decreases in the price of air travel - the benefits of deregulation for those of us who travel, and a nice example of why "pro-market" is not the same as "pro-business"...as long as "creative distruction" is happening at the level of companies and not actual airplanes. I'm not an economist but this is my impression of the state of the airline industry.

Why hasn't this sort of thing happened in academia? Where are the Southwests and Jet Blues to teach government to Dartmouth students?

The Southwests and Jet Blues are called Northern Illinois and St. Cloud State, and the lifetime prospects for graduates with comparable talents and ambitions to their contemporaries at the Ivies are just as good. That's the Ivy degree as positional arms race among parents, something else that I've been following for some time. Presumably the "Dartmouth students" who want comparable lifetime rewards at Southwest prices are at Northern Illinois. But that doesn't completely answer the question. John in the Shadow of Mount Hollywood suggests that the oversubscribed course problem at his alma mater, Dartmouth, is comparable to the poor service on Amtrak.

If I were foolhardy enough to book long-distance travel on Amtrak, and in consequence found myself asking the conductor, "Wait a minute -- I paid four or five times to ride on Amtrak what I'd pay to fly to Chicago on Southwest, and here I'm riding in a car that smells like s--t. Why does this car smell like s--t?" I could expect an answer not much dfferent from Prof. Sa'adah's reply to disgruntled students and alumni: "Sir, it's very complicated. And it's just not fair to complain that this particular car smells like s--t. We have several other cars on the train that do not smell like s--t. Any report on the web that all the cars smell like s--t is just inaccurate. The baggage car, in fact, smells very clean right now. And we're doing everything we can to try to clean all the cars when we get to Chicago, but frankly, if you've ever had to get three kids in the car and make it to Sunday school on time with them, you can understand our problem. We're trying to get budget to hire more car cleaners. It's all very complicated. Have a nice day, sir."

Amtrak is probably a poor analogy, as it is even more a political creature and it is less productive than higher education, even if its shameless redefinition of "on time" might have inspired the academy to look at six-year graduation rates. But it's an analogy that gets me thinking about some transportation history, and hence the title of my post. Right now, higher education would be a growth industry. (Enrollments at Northern Illinois are historically high. My department is a faculty of 13 with three adjuncts. When I started in 1986 we were a faculty of 23 with a number of adjuncts, each teaching fewer courses per person.) The tenure system might saddle universities with irreversibilities that makes them less responsive to changes in student demand than some other set of labor relations might allow, and administrators exploit adjuncts (to a larger extent in some disciplines than in others). But the tenure system might also serve as a constraint to encourage universities to ration their services differently. Hence the contrast between the Great Steel Fleet and the Big Red Subway. During and after the Second World War, the New York Central Railroad's Great Steel Fleet (note the precision implicit in "on time!") continued to offer a premium service (although rationing limited the food service in the dining cars, often that was restricted to uniformed armed services personnel) but when the train sold out, travelers were out of luck. (Interstate Commerce Commission regulations precluded the New York Central from raising fares to allocate the space efficiently. University trustees are under no such compulsion.) The Pennsylvania Railroad's Big Red Subway would accommodate everybody, sometimes late, often in a converted box car (I am not making this up, the illustrated caboose is a war emergency caboose and it may have been converted from a box car to a coach before it was converted to a caboose) and there might not have been seats for everybody, but you got there.

Blogs for Industry spells out part of the problem.

The long term question, then, is whether the designer universities can justify their higher cost relative to the coming wave of Outsource Universities to students, parents, and in the case of state institutions, to taxpayers. Having a product that is actually different and better would help. As I am as close to a true believer in the post-WWII research university as anyone I've met, I think this can and should be what we do, and why things like tenure and academic freedom can be justified as more than just special pleading.

The unanswered question is, can the Outsource Universities do as well by their students as the traditional research universities. My position is that the traditional research universities are to the Outsource Universities as the Great Steel Fleet is to the Big Red Subway. The Outsource Universities might offer people an opportunity to talk shop with colleagues in related businesses, but that's not the same thing as a liberal arts education. (And let us not forget Adam Smith: "People of the same trade seldom gather together, even for diversion and merriment ...") Research matters. Tenure as we understand it has a purpose. I will defend these positions, probably next week, which is spring break and it offers some thinking time I haven't had recently.

I pledge also to continue the trashing of the "access" fiction, the "assessment" follies, and the depressingly high defect rate in higher education. But those are a consequence of administrations undermining the authority of the faculty -- sometimes with the connivance of the faculty -- rather than evidence of the shortcomings of tenure.