A Teaching-Intensive Tenure Track?

If you believe that the case for tenure is one of ensuring academic freedom and a secure employment in which to build a career, and if you believe that tenure is a right and not a privilege, then it becomes quite difficult to argue that those of us in the Teaching Track wouldn't benefit from the freedom to explore controversial topics in the classroom as well as the literature, and to know that one's job is secure from termination based on a whim, a personality difference, or because staffing needs change.  

In fact, the case for a form of tenure for accomplished TRT faculty is an obvious one, except for the rather obvious attempt at a counterargument that what research faculty do is more important all around than what TRT faculty do.  

Jennifer Ruth, Associate Professor of English at Portland State University, argues in a 2015 post in the LSE Impact Blog that the best way to mend the fractured state of academic departments at typical public universities, fractured in the sense of a two or three-tiered hierarchy of tenured research faculty, non-tenured contingent (read: teaching)faculty, and various adjuncts, along with the knock-on effects of weak faculty governance and gross inequities in pay and service demands, is to design and institute a teaching-intensive tenure track. 

Entitled "The Professor Divide at American Universities and How to Fix It — The Case for a Teaching-Intensive Tenure Track", Professor Ruth argues to:

[C]reate a tenure track for full-time faculty hired and promoted on the basis of excellence in teaching, and require that the vast majority of faculty be hired onto this track if not hired onto the other (original) one.

The recognized need for academic freedom of expression is not just a research-oriented endeavor. The ability to speak freely in the classroom is also critical.  So why should only research-oriented faculty have that security in the classroom, while teaching faculty do not?  Couple that with the freedom to push against administration within shared governance bodies, enjoyed by tenured faculty.  Is it proper for teaching faculty to have to worry about their next contract should they have something to say in shared governance?

Professor Rubin makes a case against rolling contracts, as well, in that they just do not provide meaningful academic freedom.  The possibility of termination based solely on viewpoint, still exists, whether it is immediate or delayed until the next contract renewal. 

The value to the university of highly accomplished teaching faculty, whose excellence and innovation in the classroom has never been properly and quantitatively measured above a few shiny awards and applause at small gatherings, would most likely shock many at all levels.  We inspire and help students create lives, careers, and legacies.  It's not a job to us.  It's a calling.  I say the system should value us like the students do.  Or at least, value us like "regular" faculty.

This is a good read.  Eight years old, already.  But still very relevant.