The Faculty Lounges

College tuition has risen four times faster than the rate of inflation in the past two decades. While faculties like to blame the rising costs on fancy athletic buildings and bloated administrations, professors are hardly getting the short end of the stick. Spending on instruction has increased twenty-two percent over the past decade at private research universities.

Parents and taxpayers shouldn't get overheated about faculty salaries: tenure is where they should concentrate their anger. The jobs-for-life entitlement that comes with an ivory tower position is at the heart of so many problems with higher education today. Veteran journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley, an alumna of one of the country's most expensive and best-endowed schools, explores how tenure has promoted a class system in higher education, leaving contingent faculty who are barely making minimum wage and have no time for students to teach large swaths of the undergraduate population. She shows how the institution of tenure forces junior professors to keep their mouths shut for a decade or more if they disagree with senior faculty about anything from politics to research methods. Lastly, she examines how the institution of tenure―with the job security, mediocre salaries, and low levels of accountability it entails―may be attracting the least innovative and interesting members of our society into teaching.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a contributing writer at The American Enterprise and a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and National Review. Her articles have also appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Weekly Standard, the New York Post, the New York Sun, the New Republic, Commentary, Crisis, the Public Interest, the New Atlantis, and First Things. Ms. Riley is also the editor of In Character, a journal of the John Templeton Foundation, and an adjunct fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Since graduating from Harvard magna cum laude in 1998, she has worked as assistant editor of Commentary, as well as an editorial intern at the Wall Street Journal editorial page and National Review. She has been the recipient of the Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellowship, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Journalism Fellowship, the Claremont Institute Publius Fellowship, and the Charles G. Koch Fellowship.