A NEW FORM OF TENURE QUOTA? Invisible Adjunct and King at SCSU Scholars use this report on four of six professors at Wisconsin's Carroll College who were recommended by their departments and the college promotion committee for tenure but denied by the college president. Invisible Adjunct and King Banaian both draw parallels between the president's action and administrative tyranny elsewhere, and in particular with whether Carroll's administration might be behaving badly by attempting to replace tenure-track faculty with temporary faculty, as an economy measure.

The Chronicle article, however, is misleading in part: "Every year professors at colleges around the country come up for tenure -- and, inevitably, some of them miss the mark. But what has made the decisions here so unsettling and unusual, some people say, is that by all accounts each of the four professors excelled in teaching, research, and service -- the traditional standards by which tenure candidates are judged. Nonetheless, Carroll's president and trustees simply decided that it didn't make good business sense to keep them.

"Financial issues typically don't figure into tenure cases unless a college is facing financial collapse, or enrollment is declining and a college wants to close a program. Neither is the case at Carroll."

Actually, financial issues do matter, and they have mattered for a long time. Some university administrators keep track of something they call tenure "depth," referring to the proportion of a department currently tenured, and I have an old set of suggestions for students on the job market that includes looking at the dean's strategic plan, if you have an interview with the dean as part of your visit. The author of these suggestions noticed that one such dean had characterized the economics department as tenured up, and presumably took a job elsewhere. Moreover, during my time at Wayne State, we were able to hire a very good demographer and economic historian who became available to us because a dean at Cornell decided that department already had one of those specialists with tenure. Nearly 30 years ago, The Progressive did an article on the phenomenon of universities discovering that it was cheaper to do searches at seven-year intervals rather than grant tenure. The Carroll College case might be unusual, but not astonishing.