I promised in my last post that I’d propose a couple of suggestions of what to do about the problem of tenure — and I will, but not just yet.

First, I want to bring up a problem connected to tenure that’s the opposite of the bully — the “softie.” As surely as tenure breeds bullies, it breeds softies — tenured faculty who wallow in the sweet, warm feeling of never taking a public stand on anything (even though they’ll talk endlessly, and with great sincerity, about everything). Softies can’t bring themselves to swat a fly, let alone make the difficult, painful judgment that a faculty member in their department does not merit tenure. Softies are people who were softies before they got tenure and grow even softer afterwards.

On their way up, they never offended anyone by their speech, scholarly work, or teaching. Even when confronted with ideas they know deep down to be idiotic, they always pronounce those ideas to be “very interesting and deserving of real consideration.”

Once tenured, softies become a little like people who live in cradle-to-grave welfare states. In enjoying lives without economic anxiety or risk, they develop a sense of gratitude and happiness toward the world in general (even though they may feel they owe no one, in particular, a thing).

For softies, the vote on a tenure case is such a harrowing ethical crisis that they almost completely lose their bearings. They can’t figure out any way to separate their emotions from their reason. In their empathy for the tenure candidate’s situation (one of obvious and intense stress, as all of us who have tenure know), whatever sense of duty they have to the principles that underlie tenure decisions disappears into the ugly personnel committee room air. Under the guise of “carefully weighing everything” about a candidate, “being fair,” and “assessing the work along with the university service and teaching,” their reasoning collapses into sentiment.

“Oh, what the heck,” they quietly conclude. “I can’t take this torture any longer. This candidate isn’t all that bad. My conscience is what counts and I’m going to follow my conscience.” Since they long ago forgot how to distinguish between conscience and feelings, in “following their conscience” they’re really following their feelings. No matter, in voting for tenure they get to add to their already plentiful warm and fuzzy feeling about themselves even more warm and fuzzy feelings.

As to the future students who will, over the course of the next couple of decades, be subjected to what the softie knows somewhere, deep inside, is a terribly inferior teacher and scholar, well, softies are dimly aware that they won’t be around to see it. “Besides,” the softie thinks, “This candidate isn’t all that bad, come to think of it. The work is typical of what’s out there — certainly, not any worse.” When a true pang of conscience rings, softies console themselves with the thought (not backed up by any particular evidence) that tenure spurs people to become both better teachers and better and more productive scholars.

In the face of the living, breathing tenure candidate, whose doleful gaze continually fixes on the softie’s face during the year before the tenure decision, the softie abandons all principles. The tenure candidate’s shared pictures of trips to Ecuador, stories about the partner’s illness, the two kids, and the recently purchased townhouse, haunt the softie right up to the moment the vote is cast. Relief comes only with a “yes” vote.

Abolishing or modifying tenure won’t get rid of the softie, any more than it will get rid of the bully. But it will greatly ameliorate the problems of both. When it comes to the softie, the all-or-nothing vote of tenure and its possibility for humiliating defeat for the candidate is much too much to bear. But if there were no institution of tenure, the softie might well find it’s not the end of the world, in facing a mediocre university professor, to use reason to publicly conclude, “I don’t think this work is any good.”