It’s interesting how defenders of the malfeasance of some in the for profit sector prpose as their defense that the “non-profits do it too.” And that makes it right?

Tell you what. Let’s imagine the world without Pell grants. How many for profits would disappear?

Thank you, Mr. Jenkins, for your clear argument for tenure in community colleges.  As one of two community college professors who were banished to a very small, remote site because we insisted on faculty control over curriculum (in our case, it was a private sector company who was invited in and was using materials and methods that were at best, unproven, and at worst, proven to be bad), I can attest to the importance of tenure.  I know that we would have been fired  if we had not had this protection.  As it was, we were mistreated for a couple of years until our lawsuit was settled, and then we were returned to the main campus with some additional benefits.  In my experience, faculty members at community colleges tend to be passive about speaking out under the best of circumstances, though they will state quite cogent arguments and possible solutions to each other privately about problems facing the institution.  Even with the collective voice of a Faculty Senate (my colleague and I were secretary and president of the Senate the year immediately prior to our punishment), faculty members rarely speak out, and, if they do, it is anonymously.  Without tenure and its protections, the community college can become a fiefdom of the president.

Honestly, Betsy, I had thought of adjuncts and their plight as a separate issue; but from what you and drassessment have said, I see that it’s not as separate as I thought. A case of unconscious parochialism on my part, no doubt. Mea culpa. Thanks to you both, though, for addressing the issue more eloquently than I could.

Rob

I teach politics part-time and my students cannot pin down my personal beliefs because I really do argue as many sides of an issue as I can. When I eventually achieve F/T status at a community college, tenure will be vital to the way I do my job. In addition to having collective control regarding issues such as curriculum delivery methods, I all too often have to present ideas that are controversial to some or even a majority of people in order that I fairly represent the broad spectrum of opinions in the public arena. If that freedom is sacrificed because I feel the need to bow at the altar of playing it safe, then I have done a disservice to my students and my discipline.

 
I certainly see your side, and those who left comments concerning the matter as well.  Yet, your argument is so one sided and skewed. I know you have good reason to be one-sided in your argument, but you’ll never accomplish your goal by failing to ignore the opposing side’s concerns for granting tenure to begin with.   

Tenure, in its current form, is something all professors relish.   But why? So you can tell administration to shove it whenever you like, with the argument of academic freedom as the shield? Or, by refusing to do things you don’t like nor care to do when asked, because you can use tenure as a sword?  Do you advance the same “free speech” opportunity you relish to your students by using anonymous grading? Probably not, and I’m sure they too would love to oppose your views from time-to-time but feel as if they can’t without receiving a bad grade.  

You are asking administration to grant tenure to a collective group on a large scale basis; thus, redistributing power to those who, afterwards, will have the least amount of risk to oversee.  It’s the administration’s butt that is at risk no matter how much power they have.  They report to the board, and they are responsible for meeting the overall needs of the institution. If they do not have the ability to accomplish that mission because of such restrictive items like tenure, then they will fail and be terminated.  Thus, their long term future could become tarnished and they could be forced to uproot their family to wherever they can find gainful employment. 
  
Do you see where this story is going?  Administration shares the same fear you have but with a different group in mind. Thus, if you want to receive something as great as tenure, then bring something to the table to give in return.  Just showing up and teaching is not enough to warrant tenure. You have to help quell any such fear administration has, or you need to redefine the term tenure to meet both party’s needs.  Otherwise, the only thing that will happen is – you’ll continue writing articles that advocate tenure for everyone, but never receive it. 

Best of luck in your quest.

I don’t see the fear point.   I see so much abuse of tenure at my school, that I have come (as a fully tenured faculty member) to disagree with it, or ask what modified approach can protect faculty from being let go for controversial ideas, such as conservative right-wing ones like mine, but allow them to be let go for being lazy.  I can’t tell you how lazy and good-for-nothing half of the tenured faculty in my department are.   Heck, I wish they had the gumption to express some controversial thought I disagreed with, it would show they had some life in them.  I would respect them more.  We have a bunch of highly paid tenured faculty working 10-15 hours a week, and not working at all over most of the Summer or over a one-month Christmas break.   The tenure thing is so abused.  And why protect faculty in a way that no other workers are protected?  I am just turned off by the whole thing and the ridiculous abuse I see.

neudy, your comments are really confusing, and I am totally missing your point(s). You say, consider the oppposing viewpoints. Ok, I’m ready to do that. What are they? You don’t list them.

You say, tenure is something professors relish. “Relish” to me means a pleasurable, sensual enjoyment. I doubt if professors “relish” tenure. For me, it is an honor that carries with it a burden of responsibility and a privilege that allows me to really BE a professor in the literal sense.

Administrators do not “grant tenure to a collective group on a large scale basis,” nor is the article asking for this. Most public community colleges already have a systme for granting tenure to their faculty. The problem the author describes is a trend toward TAKING TENURE AWAY from faculty. He provides some reasons why keeping tenure is beneficial.

Personally, I am sympathetic to the fears of administrators, who do not have the protection of tenure. However, those fears are not sufficient grounds for doing away with tenure for faculty, or for creating a system of tenure for administrators.

When you state ‘just showing up and teaching’ as not enough, you display your ignorance of what faculty really do, what their role is in the college, and what they are responsible for. Any faculty who ‘just shows up and teaches’ will NOT get tenure at my college. Maybe they’ll reapply at yours- or at softshellcrab’s.

Your demand that faculty bring something exceptional “to the table” in exchange for tenure, such as helping to quell administrator’s fears, is completely mystifying so I can’t really respond in a reasonable way, but you seem to be confusing some personal insecurities with general policy issues.

Your dichotomy is false, neudy. Mostly, it’s politicians–state legislators–who are trying to take away tenure in some states. You might want to read the earlier column I alluded to above, “Tenure and the Two-Year College.”

Rob

Here is the link to Rob’s article that he cites below; http://chronicle.com/article/Tenurethe-Two-Year/44474/ took me awhile to find it so I offer it here for everybody.

neudy, thanks for clarifying your main point for me. However, even if we replace “administrators” with “legislators” as the body capable of implementing the change we are discussing- removal of tenure from CC faculty- I am not sure that your suggestion would help, and here’s why.

The legislators who are seeking to remove tenure from community college faculty are for the most part Republicans and conservatives. I personally do not think that their reasons are based on any fears. In fact, it’s not clear to me WHAT their reasons are- however, if you look at the overall scope of the Republican party’s actions, one unifying trend that seems quite clear is how those actions serve to undercut traditional Democratic and liberal power bases and funding. Organized labor is clearly one of their targets. Academe is another. Removing tenure kills both birds with one stone.

The CCs are an easy target and starting point, partly because of the apathy of CC faculty towards tenure that Rob describes, but I have no doubt the campaign against tenure will spread to four year and doctoral institutions.

Unfortunately, in our public arena of political discourse, my fear is that we have moved far beyond any hope for an “amicable solution to meeting both party’s needs” mostly due to the ideological intransigence of the right and far right, and this issue is just one small piece of that hugely threatening national problem.

I do not offer extra credit, which I define as work performed in place of required-but-not-done work.  I tell my students that, in the “real world” (as they refer to it), there is no substitute for doing what is required by the job/boss.  I do, however, offer bonus points for doing things that (I think) will enrich their education/development and which bear some relevance to the course.  For example, a student studying cross-cultural ethics can earn bonus points for attending a foreign film shown on campus.

At my institution, as at most institutions, most of our FTES are taught by adjunct faculty.  This causes much uproar, as it does most places.  But in a lot of ways, those in “administration” have our hands tied to change this.  

When we hire a tenure-track position, we are essentially hiring someone for life.  That mean that, come what will, we have to pay that person.  According to our collectively-bargained contract, in order to lay off one tenured faculty member, we have to first lay off ALL adjuncts.  Not most, not some, but ALL.  Imagine, if you will, what a college would look like with NO adjuncts.  Like it or not, it would be a weaker college, as, especially in the career/technical fields, at least some of our adjuncts are hired for the right reasons – they bring a special, practical skill from the real world to the classroom, and they’re willing to share it with our students.  

This requirement – that we lay off all part-time/temporary workers before touching so-called “permanent” employees – is unique to faculty.  We can lay off classified folks like myself without eliminating all part-time/temporary classified positions.  We can lay off our administrative folks without eliminating all part-time/temporary administrative positions.  Hey – our administrative folks here are on annual contracts, and we don’t even have to give a reason for failing to renew them each year…unlike our adjunct faculty here, for whom we must show cause if we don’t re-hire them.  

So as we see our state funds dwindle, we’re somehow supposed to make a “permanent” commitment to our faculty by granting them tenure, but manage to pay for it out of “one-time” money…our “other” revenue streams, which we can’t count on being there.  Even though many of us would like to hire more “permanent” faculty, when the FTES drop, as they will when the economy turns around, and we don’t have the other revenue streams to pay for the tenured faculty member, we won’t be able to lay them off.

As far as I can see, creating tenured positions when you don’t have permanent funds to cover the expenses just isn’t fiscally responsible.  Especially when you can’t lay those folks off if you no longer have the money to pay their salaries…  And moving all of the non-faculty positions onto one-time funding won’t work, either, as faculty cannot run a college by themselves (although one or two of our profs seem to think they’d like to try, I think they’d find that they have great difficulty registering our students for classes and/or dealing with their financial aid paperwork).  

I certainly understand the desire to keep tenure.  And I do see benefit to tenure.  I just question whether or not the cost of tenure is worth the benefit…  

Finally, I will admit to being a bit resentful of the “need to feel safe to disagree with administration” justification.  I’m in institutional research, and there are certainly times when I’ve had to go out on a limb and challenge powerful administrators who were misusing data about controversial subjects, or present findings administrators didn’t want to hear (like that there’s no evidence supporting that someone’s pet project is actually helping students).  And I’ve certainly had to worry about my job due to disagreements.  Why shouldn’t I be granted “tenure” of some sort to protect me from retribution?  It would be good for the institution, after all, to have a research staff that was in a position to tell it like it is, rather than have an IR staff that feels the need to manipulate the data to show what administration wants it to show.  

Would those of you who support tenure for faculty support tenure for classified and/or lower-level administrators so that they, too, can feel free to disagree with their supervisors?  And so that they, too, can feel free to “adopt…unpopular points of view?”  These concerns are not unique to faculty, so why should faculty be the only ones who are protected?