THE ECONOMISTS WILL BE RECEIVING RETENTION BONUSES. The management of the Kentucky state community and technical college system have decided to make all future faculty appointments on a short-term basis.

New hires to the system will be offered a series of three one-year contracts before having the opportunity to sign a two-year contract. Any exceptions to these short-term contracts must be approved by the system president.

The managers expect to be able to make more full-time appointments.[System president Michael] McCall also suggested that, as a result of eliminating tenure, the system may see a rise in the number of full-time faculty. Currently, he said, the economy has forced the institution to hire more adjunct and part-time faculty than he would prefer.The assertion is spin. Fluctuations in enrollment might give the management reason to not commit to long-term hires. With a more steady-state enrollment, the management is in a position to maintain a steady-state cohort of full time faculty, whether these are tenured or on renewable contracts. The article suggests that tenured appointments produce rigidities.

Richard A. Bean, chair of the KCTCS board, said the system would have greater hiring flexibility without the tenure system. As demand for instructors in various disciplines fluctuates, he said the system would be better able to make appropriate hiring decisions with faculty members on short-term contracts. Hypothetically illustrating his point, he used the example of having the ability to hire more Spanish instructors if demand for the language were great, and to retain a limited number of Latin instructors if there were little demand.

“Our objective is not to find ways to let people go, but to educate the people of this great commonwealth with flexibility,” said Bean, emphasizing that the regents had been discussing this matter well before Kentucky’s budget crisis, and the national economy, took a turn for the worse.

Again, readers are being spun. Retaining a limited number of Latin instructors is not inconsistent with a small number of tenured Latin specialists. Or perhaps a local Catholic college would be willing to be a subcontractor. Flexibility is almost always a code word for reducing commitments, whether to capital or to labor.

The dean at Anonymous Community gives the proposal a revise-and-resubmit with no presumption of acceptance.

In various forms – the adjunct trend, increased tenure requirements, ratcheted-up employee contributions to health insurance and retirement accounts – this has been the MO of higher ed in America for the last thirty years. Everybody at the table agrees to screw over the folks who aren't yet at the table. This satisfies everybody at the table, but it does so at the cost of long-term sustainability and intergenerational fairness. Rather than solving the problem, it postpones it with interest.

The Kentucky system is looking down the barrel of several decades in which some faculty have tenure, and some full-timers never will. There is simply no way for that not to result in high drama. The impact on shared governance alone is likely to be devastating.

The full post and the ensuing bull session merit your attention.

It's almost certainly true that doing away with tenure won't result in immediate short-term savings. If anything, it might actually cost a little in the short run, if prospective hires demand higher salaries to compensate for increased risk. (In the evergreen disciplines, I suspect that most prospective hires won't have the market power to make those threats stick, but it might happen in some niche programs.)

Part of running higher education like a business is making businesslike offers to prospective hires. That includes retention bonuses.