A fairly comprehensive view of current faculty-tenure issues and models in the US, from the perspective of the UK. Worthwhile:

"Some arbitrary volume of published papers, on some narrowly defined points of debate, is not necessarily more worthy than other activities," said Gee. Instead, Ohio State should value applied research that has an impact on people, he argued. "We can dare to say, 'No more' to quantity over quality. We can stop looking at the length of a vita and start measuring its heft."

Implementing the grand vision is challenging. Ohio State has more than 100 tenure-granting units, each with its own set of criteria. Donoghue says he welcomes a broader definition of scholarship, and hopes that digital publishing will be recognised. "But I still don't know what the president means by 'interdisciplinarity'," he says. "In the English department, we're baffled about how to interpret that."

This article by Scott Jaschik covers a recent address by Ohio State University president E. Gordon Gee to an ACE audience. It's interesting in and of itself, but even more so because of the many interesting comments by readers posted in reaction to it. The first comment starts out, "I smell the death of education approaching," and it gets even more interesting in later comments. From the Jaschik article:

Noting that the United States created land-grant colleges in the middle of the Civil War, E. Gordon Gee told his fellow college presidents Sunday evening that the current economic crisis is no reason not to consider bold and far-reaching reforms of the institutions. “I am calling for intentional upheaval at our colleges and universities just when fiscal chaos already places us on the edge,” Gee said here at the annual meeting of the American Council on Education.

The choice for higher education, he said: “reinvention or extinction.”

Gee didn’t dispute the seriousness of the economic crisis facing colleges, calling it an “ever-worsening fiscal quagmire.” But he said that higher education must resist the “first instinct” of such situations, “to hunker down, hide out, take refuge in the fox hole, and wait for the storm to pass.” The situation is sufficiently dire, he said, that colleges need to “reconfigure ourselves,” rather than simply trying to restore lost funds.

Specifically, Gee suggested that colleges abandon their traditional devotion to disciplines, rethink the way faculty members are hired, and embrace a more central role for community colleges in higher education.