Let’s beef up US post-tenure review – especially for football coaches

Dana Holgorsen, the coach of my university’s football team, the Cougars, recently received a six-year contract extension worth nearly $27 million. It was a reward for last year’s 12-2 record, crowned with a victory in a post-season tournament called the Birmingham Bowl. Chris Pezman, the university’s athletic director, explained that it was “the right thing to do for the future of our programme”.

With his team facing a losing season this year, let’s call a timeout to consider this.

In the higher echelons of American higher education, it has become dogma that successful football programmes make money for universities. Accordingly, Houston’s administration has been pouring tens of millions of dollars into the Cougars annually – money taken not from gate receipts (non-existent) or television rights (negligible), but from external gifts and escalating tuition fees. The bonanza has funded a new $130 million stadium (whose mostly empty stands disprove the adage “build it and they will come”) and a $75 million Football Operations Center (don’t ask).

It is a fact that football programmes can generate eye-popping revenues. In 2019, for example, more than $220 million flowed into the coffers of the University of Texas from its team, the Longhorns. UT was one of only 25 of the more than 1,000 universities that belong to an athletic conference that made a profit, but Houston’s president, Renu Khator, is not alone in her continued insistence that to be “nationally relevant”, a university must have a successful football programme.

While Texas university presidents are outspoken on behalf of football, however, they have been mostly out-to-lunch on behalf of tenure. This makes for both the rub and resolution to the preposterous predicament in which Houston – along with dozens of other state universities – finds itself.

Earlier this year, Texas’ lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, announced that he will ask the Republican-dominated state legislature to end tenure at all public universities. This would help throttle the teaching of “critical race theory”, which Patrick believes threatens the emotional well-being of young Texans. Voters, he warned, pay academics’ salaries and, if they see fit, should be able to fire us.

Although the proposed law is now on the legislative docket, UT’s Jay Hartzell has been the only president to denounce it. In a letter to faculty, he warned that such a law would not only lead to an exodus of faculty to out-of-state institutions, but would also increase the risk of university administrators making “bad decisions for the wrong reasons” – namely, personal and ideological ones. The goal of a university, he insisted, was to guarantee that the “quality of research was excellent and held promise to have a positive impact on society in future years.”

The leader of the Texas Faculty Association, Pat Heintzelman, expanded on Hartzell’s argument, explaining that tenured faculty “have to meet the rigorous standards for teaching, research and service, and they still have post-tenure review afterward. They’re held accountable before and after they get tenure.” This last part, though, is not quite true. I, for one, know few professors who are held accountable, in any meaningful sense, upon receiving tenure. So I would like to make a modest proposal. Rather than eliminating academic tenure, let’s revamp and expand it as far as football coaches.

If Holgorsen were on the tenure clock, 2022 would mark his third-year review. This would allow a series of committees to review all the relevant materials – his past record, his current projects, his future plans – as well as reach out to experts in the field, read student (or fan) evaluations, and decide whether it was prudent to commit to tenure. What would be the returns, both financially and scholastically? For that matter, what would be the returns in terms of intangibles like school spirit and national reputation?

My guess is that they would decline to prolong Holgorsen’s tenure. The Houston Chronicle recently warned that the Cougars’ current season was “on the brink of collapse”. And one need not be a critical theorist to grasp that last year’s record was achieved against opponents among whom just three had winning seasons, or an economist to conclude that the inflationary expansion of bowl games has utterly debased their prestige.

By proposing an annual review of tenured faculty, Patrick seeks to launch a reign of terror against those who oppose the GOP’s antediluvian agenda. But this does not mean that tenured professors should not be expected, as Hartzell wrote, to do excellent research that has a positive social impact.

Of course, the phrase “positive impact” is terribly vague, especially when it comes to the liberal arts. But if tenured professors do not hold ourselves to some agreed standards, we will find ourselves in the terrible situation of being policed by demagogues like Patrick.

And if enhancing post-tenure review allows us to critically examine the value of our athletics programmes, all the better. One last Houston fact: the collective annual salary of the Cougars’ 40 or so coaching staff (catering to the needs of 100 players) is $5.5 million. One can only imagine the results if a fraction of that went to the university’s writing centre, where two dozen part-time “writing consultants” are paid slightly above minimum wage to teach the rudiments of writing to thousands of students.

Surely that Sisyphean ball game should be much the more valuable one to an educational institution.

Robert Zaretsky teaches at the Honors College, University of Houston. He also teaches at the Women’s Institute of Houston.