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[pixelvainia]

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/education/article/Tenure-fight-is-brewing-at-Alamo-Colleges-2176253.php

[octoprof]

My favorite bit...

“We are trying to cut our expenses by getting the higher-paid people off of the payroll that have been there for years and years,” Rindfuss said. “A lot of the senior people were not retiring and kept hanging on.”

[pixelvainia]

I wonder if this the shape of things to come.

[jackofallchem]

I like the comment that they want to be able to write up a faculty member for 'grumbling'.  Really?  Who's being petty and childish here?  Don't give me any 'business model' here.  I had more freedom as a burger-flipper at McDonald's than that.  I grumbled, I complained, and I pointed out when ideas were stupid even to the store manager.  There was no talk of 'writing me up' for that.  Every employee in the entire world grumbles at the stupid and unreasonable things their superior does.  Every student in the entire world grumbles about the stupid and unreasonable things their students do.  That's life, get used to it.  It sounds like the administration and the trustees are the ones detached from reality.

[pixelvainia]

Sadly, I think this kind of piece influences public opinion, or has already.

[dale1]

I believe we'll see more and more of these kind of articles in the next few years.  Austerity seems to be here for a long time, perhaps a decade in total or more.

The public seems to view tenured and tenure-track positions as "gravy trains" and that no one deserves what is considered to be a "job for life." They're not willing to support unions or union-like organizations that protect workers -- even though those workers are doing critical work.

Faculty have done a terrible job of explaining their value, the importance of tenure-track appointments at all levels, and assuring quality for taxpayers and students.  Until they do those things, these articles will not go away.

[oldfullprof]

Yep, the good 'ol boy system in Texas is alive and well.  The community colleges are full of hayseeds who think like this:

A new policy calls for writing up tenured faculty for “refusal to obey a supervisor's lawful orders; patterns of disrespectful attitude ... including back talk or grumbling.”


I taught in one.

[larryc]

A new policy calls for writing up tenured faculty for “refusal to obey a supervisor's lawful orders; patterns of disrespectful attitude ... including back talk or grumbling.”

Damn.

There are so many problems with higher ed right now--tenure is not one of them.

[betterslac]

These two statements:

“Somehow, there is this idea that (the faculty) are untouchable because we are tenured and we can do whatever we want to. That's not right,” said trustee Jim Rindfuss. “There has to be some pecking order here.”

by a trustee and this

Tenured professors are typically given the latitude to decide what is taught in the classroom, and they govern the university in partnership with district executives developing curriculum and hiring faculty.

by the reporter

tells us how far we have come, in the minds of policymakers and the public, from the understanding that a college or a university is a faculty that has administrative and other appendages, to an understanding that those entities are administrative units with faculty appendages

"Pecking order" [with administrators on top], faculty are "given" academic freedom through the benevolence of administrators-- are the operative phrases here

[msparticularity]

What really annoys me about all of this is the laziness that underlies it: we are looking at a system filled with administrators who do not want to buckle down and do the actual dirty work involved in assessing tenured faculty effectively. Sure, there are some people who are tenured and who aren't doing their jobs. The thing is, tenure is not a job for life for someone who isn't doing his/her job, and there are already remedies for this. Eliminating tenure is just a shortcut for an administrative class that wants to always look good so they can move on to even higher-paid jobs.

[pixelvainia]

Faculty have done a terrible job of explaining their value, the importance of tenure-track appointments at all levels, and assuring quality for taxpayers and students.  Until they do those things, these articles will not go away.

That is supposed to be someone else's job.

[oldfullprof]

What really annoys me about all of this is the laziness that underlies it: we are looking at a system filled with administrators who do not want to buckle down and do the actual dirty work involved in assessing tenured faculty effectively. Sure, there are some people who are tenured and who aren't doing their jobs. The thing is, tenure is not a job for life for someone who isn't doing his/her job, and there are already remedies for this. Eliminating tenure is just a shortcut for an administrative class that wants to always look good so they can move on to even higher-paid jobs.

I'd half (not completely) buy the idea that faculty can somehow "assess" other faculty.  The idea that administrators can do it is pretty nutty, based on the ones I know.  Even faculty who've been promoted to administrator seem to lose all sense when they learn the "duckspeak," walk the walk, and so on. 

I'd actually prefer a system where faculty are assessed by other faculty only for promotion and merit.  Administrators would not be able to intervene, except on behalf of candidates.  Anyone tenured could hang on, for life if need be, just not get promotion or merit if substandard. 

My theory is that standardization is the enemy.  Professors good for some may be horrible for others. 

Ms. P, as a student of Feyerabend, you should be resisting standardization :).

[oldfullprof]

“There has to be some pecking order here.”  [Quoted from a trustee by Betterslac]

More like Peckerwood order.

[untenured]

My favorite bit...

“We are trying to cut our expenses by getting the higher-paid people off of the payroll that have been there for years and years,” Rindfuss said. “A lot of the senior people were not retiring and kept hanging on.”

This is an employment lawyer's dream quote, especially the second half.

[msparticularity]

Ms. P, as a student of Feyerabend, you should be resisting standardization :).

I do--vehemently. But one doesn't have to believe in standardization to recognize that some tenured faculty have, indeed, "retired on active duty"--that they are continuing to receive course reductions despite having completely discontinued any attempt at all at doing research. I don't have to believe in standardization, for example, to believe that someone who is receiving course reductions for research ought to be able to put together some kind of evidence of ongoing research effort. What this consists of ought to be quite un-standardized, depending upon the field and the particular project, but if one is going to claim to be a researcher, one really does need to be able to respond to the person who says, "So, show me what you're working on right now."

IOW, I buy Toulmin's interpretation of Feyerabend's larger point, which was not that we should discard all rules all the time, but that we need to understand that a set of rules does not exhaust the possibilities--and thus should not define and/or constrain the approach in advance.