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About the Author
Laurie Fendrich, a painter who lives and works in New York, is a professor of fine arts and the director of the Comparative Arts and Culture Graduate Program at Hofstra University. Her writing has focused on the place of art and artists in society and the education of young artists, but she has also written essays questioning the viability of beauty in a post-Darwin era, the meaning of abstract painting, and the tyranny of outcomes assessment. She will blog about university life, the arts. and culture.
About Brainstorm
Mark Bauerlein
Marc Bousquet
Laurie Fendrich
Dan Greenberg
John L. Jackson Jr.
Stan Katz
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
Brainstorm Alumni
Marty Nemko, guest bloggerBob Zemsky
Recent Posts
Mirror, Mirror, on and off the Wall | Comment [1]
Monsters of Achievement | Comment [11]
Where's Czechoslovakia? | Comment [27]
The Bad Cover | Comment [61]
Tickle Me Emo | Comment [16]
Featured Articles By the Author
The Secretary to the Rescue
After writing three posts on tenure, Professor Fendrich told me that she couldn’t bear to think about it any more. She’s gone off to see her aromatherapy expert, followed by a visit to a local tavern specializing in extra-large martinis. I was a little surprised, I admit, when she told me to just “go ahead and post whatever you write.” I’m wondering if what I’m doing makes a plagiarist out of Professor Fendrich. Anyway, I don’t care. She’s a nice boss and I want to help her out.
I looked over her three posts on tenure and saw that there were a total of 98 comments. That’s too many for me to tackle. But I can say this: Based on my experience with tenured faculty (as opposed to untenured ones and adjuncts), I agree with Professor Fendrich about fixed-term contracts.
Instead of all her crazy fussing with three-, five- and 10-year contracts, however, I’d simplify things and have nothing but one-year contracts. I’ll never understand why professors think they’re better than the rest of us and get to have jobs where they can’t ever be fired.
Other than that general observation, I have three specific responses to recent readers’ comments.
Living Well (in Manhattan) Is the Best Revenge
Joseph F Foster (hmmm, no period after the middle initial — just like Harry S Truman, I bet): I’ll take Mountain View, Arkansas, over Manhattan, New York, any day.
Holy cow. All Professor Fendrich did was write about how one of the perks of living in New York is being able to experience first-class cabaret. Granted, it’s real expensive, and isn’t what everybody would do with the money they get by taking out a second mortgage. But the Oak Room — like MoMA, the Met, the Morgan, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the New Museum, the Frick, the Hispanic Society, the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio, and the Studio Museum in Harlem — does help make New York an interesting place to call home.
That’s all she said. She didn’t say, “I’ll take New York over Mountain View, Arkansas, any day.”
But after Mr. Foster’s comment, Professor Fendrich was curious about Mountain View, and asked me to find out whether it’d be a nice spot for her to take a short vacation. And sure enough, it is. It seems to be, actually, a kind of Cancun of the Ozarks.
In Googling a little further, I found this odd comment from a resident: “Here in Northwest Arkansas, we’ve got a lot of foreigners milling around and settling. Indeed, it seems that many folks pack up their carpetbags and leave their homes in Iowa, Kansas, New York, California and other foreign spots and wind up living here.”
Being a Yankee, Professor Fendrich could tell she wouldn’t be real welcome in Mountain View. She said if she ever goes there she’ll make it a very short vacation.
Time’s Up For Tenure
AW: Now that Prof Lauri has her professorship, tenure and being a Director of something she can also apparently afford to live in and have a studio in NY and commute to Hofstra. Then she speaks forth about tenure?
Now looky here. I’ve known Professor Fendrich for a long time and I can tell you that when she and her husband arrived in New York, baby in tow, they hardly had two quarters to rub together. It was right at the end of the time when artists could still manage to find affordable live/work space in Manhattan.
When she first moved to New York, Professor Fendrich helped patch a living together for her family by typing listings for an art magazine, installing art for an art consultant (many times in the evenings, from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m.), and teaching as an adjunct — all the while living in a dark, walk-up artist’s loft on the third floor of a crumbling building that was cold in the winter and ferociously hot in the summer. And it was located on an unglamorous street that her friends affectionately called “Rue du Rat.”
OK, so it isn’t Horatio Alger’s story. But you can bet AW wouldn’t have wanted to pay that kind of artist dues.
As to getting tenure: Well, that’s the system her university and its faculty collective-bargaining organization have agreed to. If you’re full-time, at a certain juncture, it’s tenure or out. There’s no “Thank you very much, but I’d prefer staying without tenure.”
But just because she has tenure doesn’t mean she’s got to support it. If that were the case, nobody who came up through any system in any occupation would be allowed to try to change the system, and everything would stay the same no matter how bad it got.
To top it off, AW threw in a very mean remark: And of course the “meaning of abstract painting.” Most of the people who create this stuff have no clue what they are doing until a tenured professor explains it to them.
Even I, a secretary who’s never taken an art-appreciation class in her life, can spot the attitude communicated by calling abstract painting “this stuff.” By the way, I know how to spell philistine, too. Just so you know, AW, I happen to like Professor Fendrich’s paintings very much and I don’t need any tenured professor to explain them to me.
The last thing I’d like to mention concerns this back-and-forth business between “Anti-hypocrisy advocate” and “LuckyJim.” Since “LuckyJim” seems to agree with Professor Fendrich on most things, I naturally have a slight preference for him. But he does seem like one of those smarty-pants types who’s always got to score points.
But “Anti-hypocrisy advocate” needs to get a life, period. And also a new … what did my ex-husband call it? Oh, yes. A new moniker. You know, butter melts in all of our mouths.
Posted at 07:18:02 AM on April 21, 2008 | All postings by Laurie FendrichComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Previous: What Is to Be Done (About Tenure)?
Next: Art for Shvarts' Sake
On “Time’s Up for Tenure”:
While the blog host is apparently, as her secretary would say, “getting a life”, “Anti-hypocrisy advocate” is busily reviewing a recent CHE article on academic freedom and grading. (Who gets paid to write these blogs? ;-))
The April 25, 2008 issue contains a commentary by Lawrence White on the recent Stronach v. Virginia State University grade change decision in the Fourth Circuit and contrasts it to the 1989 Parate v. Isibor case in the Sixth Circuit : “Does Academic Freedom Give a Professor the Final Say on Grades?” http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i33/33a03901.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
First of all, the article’s author appears to have missed the fact that the administration in Parate v. Isibor was told it couldn’t alter the expression of a grade by the professor. The ruling did not prevent the administration from putting a different grade on the student’s transcript: “The actions of the defendants, who failed to administratively change Student ‘Y’s’ grade themselves, unconstitutionally compelled Parate’s speech and precluded him from communicating his personal evaluation to Student ‘Y.’” — Parate v. Isibor, 868 F.2d 821. (Pyrrhic victory — the administration got the last word.)
Further, the article underplays the gravity of the situation in the Stronach decision as opposed to the Parate v. Isibor case when it comes to the issue of tenure and academic freedom. The Stronach case is one of first impression in that Circuit, as well, and was decided in a suit brought under Title VII for retaliation.
The district judge in the Stronach case did not consider the tenured status of the plaintiff to be of any legal consequence whatsoever in his definition of academic freedom — even when citing as evidence for his position a First Circuit decision which clearly did (“See Lovelace v. S.E. Mass. Univ., 793 F.2d 419, 425 (1st Cir. 1986) (“To accept plaintiff’s contention that an untenured teacher’s grading policy is constitutionally protected . . . would be to constrict the university in defining and performing its educational mission.”)).
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Parate v. Isibor, however, did find throughout the course of its ruling that sometimes tenure makes a difference. Some excerpts from the decision:
- “Arguing from their First Amendment right to academic freedom, the defendants [the university administration] assert an interest in supervising and reviewing the grading policies of their nontenured professors.”
- “… because Parate is a nontenured professor, he can allege no First Amendment right to teach a particular class or to be free from the supervision of university officials. See, e.g., Hetrick, 480 F.2d at 709.”
As to Fourteenth Amendment violations (due process liberty interest), more from Parate v. Isibor:
- “The district court rejected Parate’s claim and found that, as a nontenured professor, he was subject to discharge without cause and was justifiably terminated at the end of his one-year contract.”
- “In Sullivan v. Brown, 544 F.2d 279 (6th Cir. 1976), this Court held that the transfer of a tenured teacher did not implicate her liberty interest under the Fourteenth Amendment because no constitutional right to teach a specific class exists.”
ERGO: Until the Supreme Court weighs in directly, depending on the circuit of the Federal court system and the nature and scope of the claim, a tenured professor in a public institution may indeed have more academic freedom than an untenured one — but not necessarily in deterimining the grade which appears on the final transcript (as opposed to on his/her faculty “grade sheet”).
N.B. The Sixth Circuit case dismissed the application of the Tennessee Board of Regents’ academic freedom clause (which Parate had also invoked) as advisory rather than “mandatory”.
However, such a dismissal would not be achieved in a state like New York where the SUNY Board of Trustees’ Policies: 1) are incorporated into Education Law in the state (as are the individual campus handbooks, by reference in the Policies);
2) contain an academic freedom clause without restriction as to tenure status; and
3) offer both state law and collective bargaining contract protection via concurrent language.
Notwithstandinng the above-outlined lacunae, the CHE article by Lawrence White does indeed do a great service in drawing attention to the increasing tendency of courts to place the constitutionally-based institutional definition of academic freedom above that of the individual’s academic freedom in the matter of grading (as the grade appears on the students’ transcripts, at least) — and thus grants further support to AHA’s contention elsewhere on this blog’s comment section that the changing of grades by administrations may indeed be proceeding apace in higher education.
“More power to the university administration” once all tenure is eliminated, eh?
AHA-Erlebnis
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 21, 12:39 PM · #
While the Secretary makes a good point that academics should not expect any more job security than anyone else, there is still a good argument for multi-year contracts for faculty. No matter where the Secretary lives, in a big city or a rural college town, there will be secretarial jobs available in a variety of situations-schools, accounting firms, doctor’s offices, etc. If a Ph.D. in physics packs up his/her family and moves from, say, Boston to Enid, OK to teach in higher ed, then gets laid off after one year, there won’t be another job locally, and another cross country move would be the only alternative. If you don’t believe that, just try telling a personnel director how your advanced degree will make you a good Home Depot manager.
— David · Apr 21, 06:08 PM · #
My, my, my. Once more, with feeling, for the CHE staff:
Lawrence White’s commentary was the second most-emailed CHE story today (Case in Point).
And the CHE doesn’t provide any means of dialogue on that posting so faculty residing in the 6th Circuit will just have to stay misinformed by the article as to what that Parate v. Isibor decision really gives them.
White: “Will they agree with the appellate court in Parate that a professor can assign grades free from administrative interference and second-guessing? Or will they adopt Judge Hudson’s somewhat attenuated conclusion in Stronach that even if a faculty member is entitled to assign a grade, a department head is nevertheless free to alter it?”
The only difference between the Stronach and the Parate cases on this point is that Stronach wasn’t forced to make the grade change himself.
The Stronach decision states: “The Sixth Circuit sided with the professor in his grading dispute with a university, but the lynchpin of the holding was that the university compelled the professor to personally change the grade. The court reasoned that ordering the professor to change the grade constituted compelled speech and violated the professor’s First Amendment rights. Parate is cited with fervor by Stronach, but that case does not reflect the law of this Circuit nor does it accurately mirror the facts surrounding Stronach’s dispute. Stronach was not compelled to change the grade at issue himself. Ranking university officials utilized their authority to change the grade without any action on the part of Stronach. The Sixth Circuit’s reasoning in Parate relied on coercion and hence would not apply in this case.”
In both cases, the administrations are permitted by the courts to change the grades themselves.
Parate v. Isibor states: “The defendants’ act of ordering Parate to change the grade, rather than the act of giving Student ‘Y’ a different grade than Parate desired, gives rise to the constitutional violation.”
White doesn’t appear to have read the complete opinions — too bad for CHE readers.
Anybody from the CHE staff reading this? Consider this a letter to the editor….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 21, 07:56 PM · #