Antonio Loprieno is the President of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences | Picture: Andri Pol

In the academic world, tenure is generally awarded only from the level of associate professor upwards. It’s also regarded as the most valuable academic asset. The Swiss Science Council is recommending that mid-faculty positions are made open-ended too, while increasing the number of professorships is already part and parcel of our national university policy. But there is a more effective way of reaching these goals: on all levels of academia, positions should be given equal job rights, with every post both open-ended and also liable to termination.

Since the university reforms of the 19th century, such as those supported by Humboldt in Germany or Newman in Britain, the principle of tenured, permanent professorial positions has remained well established. This unique privilege is founded in part on our human preference for eliminating the risk of loss, rather than remaining open to the possibility of gain. It is also intended to protect professors from the dangers of political manipulation.

The tenure principle has proven itself, and any university that decided to abandon it today would manoeuvre itself into a disadvantageous position. A tenure-track position will always be preferred to a fixed-term but financially more attractive job. Yet limiting this privilege to the level of professors creates an artificial saturation of the market. The number of potential professors available is greater than the demand for academic excellence. Thus a situation is created that we rarely find in other professions, in which we can observe both competition and cartel-like conditions at the same time. But the more that the academy is urged to enter into partnerships with the private sector, and the more we headhunt so-called ‘Champions League’ professors from Harvard who then leave us after five years to go to Oxford, the more difficult it’s going to be to appoint a professor to a permanent position while an assistant who has created a start-up company can only stay in his or her university post for a five-year term.

The current flexibilisation of the labour market means we are probably going to have to accept a higher level of risk appetite, along with the suspension of the tenure principle on all academic career levels. This kind of liberalisation could help to mitigate the current level of neoliberal competitiveness on the market, and would respond to the desires of many young researchers, given the current pressure to perform before they can hope to reach a professorship. Why should excellent researchers be forced to retrain and switch career at the end of a fixed contract, while their professor is able to sit back and choose his next temporary assistants at leisure?