Ten-year tenure clocks are bad

(Thinking about posting things I would otherwise tweet here. Gonna bring the mid-2000s back by sheer force of will.)

I think the case against ten-year tenure clocks is the same as the case against extending tenure clocks for parental leave (ie it’s far better than firing someone but far worse than just having standards that can be met by reasonable people in a reasonable period of time). Anyways my employer recently lengthened the tenure clock for all medical faculty to ten years, and now apparently they are considering expanding that further:

Already, Kirsch said, the School of Medicine has requested and received an extension of the tenure acquisition process from seven to 10 years for its entire faculty, where all but clinical faculty had previously had the shorter deadline. The provost’s office is considering letting other schools opt in to this extended “clock,” she said.

As I’ve said before, if the only way you can think of not to fire good people is to keep them precarious and subordinate for several more years, that is bad. Please don’t do this.