Well, at least we won’t need search committees.

Academics have long suspected that the bean-counters at colleges and universities would happily do away with tenured faculty if they could. Indeed, from the administrative perspective, the only advantage to the tenured and tenure track faculty over non-tenure track folks (who can be paid less, given fewer benefits, assigned five course loads, and needn’t be rehired the next term) is that you can make them serve on committees. (Actually, non-tenured folks also get pressed into committee service, but it strikes me as pretty exploitative.)

Now, according to a story from the Chronicle of Higher Education, there may be one less flavor of committee for service by the tenured and tenure-track — plus, the bean-counters may finally have a way to shrink the tenured professoriate until it’s small enough to drown in a bath tub.

The state of Illinois is close to finalizing details of a plan to make tenured faculty posts “hereditary positions”. This would mean that a tenured professor in chemistry (for example) could, upon her demise or retirement, leave that professorship (with tenure still intact) to “an appropriately trained designee”. Under the plan, the designee could be a spouse, or one’s child, or a sibling. The designee could also be one’s favorite grad student or post doc of all time. The department would get to maintain that tenured billet and would, presumably, have a qualified chemist in it without the time and effort of a search committee. As the article notes:

To pass on one’s position, professors will be required to file an “academic will” laying out the order of succession for administrative approval. Without such a plan — or if the persons specified in the plan are judged to be lacking the appropriate training — the position will revert to the non-tenure track pool for its erstwhile occupant’s department.

Here, the department still avoids the hassle of a search for a new tenured or tenure track professor.

According to the Chronicle article, an issue yet to be resolved in this plan is whether professors will be allowed to pass on their tenured position to their heirs upon retirement (rather than having to die to trigger the succession).

UIUC History Professor Linda Ethelred noted, “Our suspicion is that some faculty would happily retire, rather than staying in those posts past their prime, if they could appoint their own replacements. But retired faculty cost university systems money and the administration wants to cut one of those expenses, either the expense of maintaining the retiree or of maintaining the tenured post.”

What this plan would mean for university departments, if implemented, is not entirely clear. Maybe allowing senior faculty to choose their own successors would generally preserve a department’s strength in a particular area of specialization, but maybe it would entrench focus on an area that is some distance from where “the future of the discipline” is judged to be. Possibly, though, hereditary tenured posts will encourage more collegial relations within a department. If your senior colleague is in the position to pick your future colleague, helping that colleague to understand the value of your approach to the discipline (and working hard to appreciate the value of her approach to the discipline) strikes me as a pragmatic move, one that may positively influence her academic will-making. Indeed, it might even lead to productive conversations and collaborations before she shuffles off this mortal academic coil.

A totally separate issue is what this plan might mean for the family life of tenured and tenure track faculty.

Could this be favorable to couples who have trained in the same academic discipline? The chances of both partners getting academic posts at all, let alone in the same location, are frighteningly small in some fields. Here, if one has landed the tenure track job, the other may finally have a reasonable expectation of someday also having such a post. If a couple’s employment will be sequential rather than simultaneous, potentially this could change the realities of child-rearing, too — the partner providing the hands-on care for the children would no longer be abandoning hope of a tenured post and a fulfilling research agenda, but merely deferring it. (This is a place, I reckon, where it might matter a lot if the final plan allows the transfer of a tenured post on retirement as well as death. Personally, I like it when I’m worth more to my better half alive than dead.)

And who even knows what influence this might have on parental pressure to follow in professorial footsteps, or on offspring’s rebellion in the face of such pressure, or on the shape of sibling rivalry in families with multiple offspring. Indeed, the potential competition between an offspring pursuing the professorial parent’s field of study and that parent’s best graduate student might make for some very awkward dinner table conversation.

There are probably legal ramifications that need to be explored. For example, in divorce proceedings, would a tenured position acquired during the marriage be counted as community property? (I have no idea what the situation is in Illinois, but California is a community property state, and I expect the administrations of the University of California and California State University systems are looking at the Illinois plan with some interest.)

And, especially relevant in scientific disciplines, will federal funding agencies recognize such a transfer of academic posts and transfer the remainder of an ongoing grant to the academic heir of the original grantee?

Color me cynical, but I worry that some of these complications are features rather than bugs. The more ways there are to actually disqualify the designated academic heirs, or to practically undercut their ability to perform the duties of the job (like keeping a lab funded), the better the odds that the corresponding tenured posts will be abolished and replaced with non-tenure track positions that are much more subject to the whims of budget-focused administrations.

We’ll see how this plays out.