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Sean Byrnes's avatar

One of the most compelling reasons Universities offer tenure is that it provides them with a huge amount of cheap and disposable labor. Graduate students and associate professors work for next to nothing in hopes of achieving tenure, which is the economic engine that makes the University business model work. If the school has to pay all of those people a proper wage, the business model would be disrupted.

As a result, it makes sense for a University to offer tenure to a relatively small portion of their staff in order to ensure it can staff the rest. It's not unlike huge bonuses offered to top performers, which motivates everyone and not just the ones that receive it.

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John Smith's avatar

> I must admit that this description of academic freedom sounds pretty powerful and awesome. But are professors the only people in the “truth” business? Almost certainly not. (The postmodernist professors even deny that there is such a thing as objective truth, but let’s ignore that.) There are certainly other professions that have some claim on the pursuit of truth. Detectives try to figure out who committed a particular crime. Investigative reporters certainly see themselves as in pursuit of truth. But I have yet to see a tenure announcement for an investigative reporter on the local news.

Detectives and investigative reporters don't have tenure because their methods are often much more straightforward, easier to evaluate, and less controversial than academic discussion.

And while universities are designed to encourage diversity of thought, diversity of thought within a police department could be dangerous. Most newspapers are also supposed to be somewhat ideologically homogenous.

That idea also contradicts the history of tenure, assuming this study is correct: https://doi.org/10.2307/4609390

> If Alchian’s theory is correct, then one would expect it to be more likely that people get tenure in not-for-profit institutions than for-profit firms. Also, one would expect it to be more likely that tenure is awarded in publicly-funded institutions than in privately-funded institutions.

That's also consistent with the academic freedom hypothesis, if you believe not-for-profit and/or publicly-funded universities care more about academic freedom.

And that isn't counting the fact that private, for-profit institutiions might emphasize different things that may affect this analysis.

For example, although he controls for the presence of graduate degrees, he doesn't control for the extent to which universities emphasize graduate education, which could affect this analysis.

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