MacNeil, who chaired the campus committee that ultimately recommended readopting tenure, said not having tenure has impacted Chatham’s faculty diversification efforts, in particular. With diverse faculty candidates in high demand, he said, not having a tenure system puts Chatham at a disadvantage with respect to its peer institutions. Indeed, MacNeil said Chatham is the only university in the New American Colleges and Universities consortium, which it joined in 2020, without a tenure system.
Chatham president David Finegold, who supports the change, agreed with MacNeil, saying, “Across almost all of higher ed, every institution I know is trying to expand the diversity of their faculty. And Chatham is no exception in that. So when you have faculty candidates that have many options from other institutions, you want to give them every reason to choose you.”
Beyond recruitment, MacNeil said discussions with other faculty members revealed that senior professors felt more anxious about not having tenure than more junior ones because they craved more security from the institution around which they’d built their lives.