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By Root 455 0

The deferral of retirement, therefore, creates additional pressure on limited budgets. There are intellectual problems, too. To be candid, on campuses, the best work of people in their late sixties and seventies is behind them. With rare exceptions, aging faculty members either rewrite previous books or produce nothing at all, and in the classroom they recycle notes they have used for many years. Faculty members who refuse to retire almost always hold positions that would be better filled by young people. When I discuss these difficult problems with graduate students, I am struck by how many insist that they would gladly trade the prospect of guaranteed lifetime employment with no mandatory retirement for the opportunity to compete for jobs that the very tenured professors training them are blocking for the foreseeable future. Though their perspective might change if they get a job, most of them will never hold an academic position. I believe we should take their opinions seriously.

A viable system for appointment, review, promotion and dismissal must fit the new organizational structure of colleges and universities and must be designed to adapt to their ongoing evolution. Just as fixed departments and rigid disciplines should be loosened up to make room for new programs in emerging fields that are approved for no longer than seven years, so permanent faculty contracts should be discontinued and replaced with seven-year contracts whose renewal or termination depends on performance-based evaluation. These reviews must be serious, not perfunctory. While the criteria used in making assessments will, of course, vary from institution to institution and department to department, there should be a general commitment to supporting faculty whose work cuts across traditional departmental and disciplinary boundaries (one or more of the Emerging Zones) as well as outstanding work in a particular field (established disciplines).

Shifting criteria for evaluation will lead to changes in the people making personnel decisions. The current review process resembles a rite of initiation into a private club that is far from an open and fair evaluation process. The practice of peer review, which, like so much else, dates back to Kant, establishes a closed system that is self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating. Experts pass judgment on colleagues in the same subfield whose acknowledgment and deference establish the experts’ own authority. While intended to protect objectivity and ensure the quality of the work evaluated, the secrecy of the peer review system creates the possibility of arbitrary and self-interested judgments. Moreover, this closed system discourages people from taking risks by doing innovative work.

In her insightful study entitled How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (2009), Michèle Lamont comments on the contrast between the ideals and the reality of the peer review process. Reviewers, she explains, “bring into the mix2 diversity considerations and more evanescent criteria—elegance, for example. These rules include respecting the sovereignty of other disciplines and deferring to the expertise of colleagues.” This deference to expertise has a chilling effect on anyone whose work is critical of established authorities or transgresses traditional disciplinary boundaries. “Going against the tide in any endeavor,” Lamont continues, “is often difficult; it may be even more so in scholarly research, because independence of thinking is not easily maintained in systems where mentorship and sponsored mobility loom large. Innovators are often penalized if they go too far in breaking boundaries, even if by so doing they redefine conventions and pave the way for future changes.”

If these problems are to be overcome, it is necessary to open the review process by expanding it beyond experts in the field or subfield to include people working in relevant programs in the Emerging Zones division. In practice, this would mean having a review committee that includes members of the person’s department and experts