The academic tenure system seems to have been in place forever, partly because many tenured professors are close to retirement and as a result, are used to doing things a certain way. But as the number of new professors who are members of Generation X (born between 1965-1980) begins to increase, many want to change the way tenure is determined as part of their broader focus on balancing work and their personal lives:

Gen X faculty members have radically different ideas about higher education should work, [study author Cathy] Trower said. And these younger faculty members are willing to give up both money and prestige to find institutions that provide “a good fit,” Trower said, potentially changing the way colleges recruit and strive to retain faculty talent.

Trower’s generation gap work is an outgrowth of her work on the push from younger faculty members for policies that are more “family friendly” and the anger many younger scholars feel over the way tenure standards have gotten so much tougher in recent years -- and are frequently presided over by senior scholars who couldn’t meet those standards today.

The article notes that some notable differences between older faculty and newer Gen X faculty are that older faculty think that strict confidentiality is essential for tenure case decisions while Gen X faculty feel that the process needs to be made completely open and transparent to ensure fairness. Also, older faculty are apparently not big fans of collaborative or interdisciplinary research while Gen X faculty are.

Gen X faculty also want to see their teaching abilities recognized and to count more heavily in tenure cases. And of course, Gen X faculty want more career and tenure-schedule flexibility so that they can devote time to their family as needed, while older faculty are more likely to expect their work to take total precedence over everything else.

As a Gen X faculty member myself, I completely agree that the conventional expectations regarding academic work and the tenure process are in need of some updating. Times have inevitably changed, and so has American society, since these current structures were put into place some 50 years ago.

If academia wants to maintain its status, prestige, and ability to make a tangible contribution to society, it needs to pay closer attention to what faculty want and what will keep them in academia, rather finding some other career that is a ‘better fit’ for them. We’re waiting . . .