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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.
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The Whole Truth, Sort of | Comment
Eyeball Marathon | Comment [1]
More of the Magic Mountain | Comment [2]
The Magic Mountain for Painters | Comment [1]
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly | Comment [1]
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The Soft Side of Tenure
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.”
Posted at 10:54:47 AM on April 13, 2008 | All postings by Laurie FendrichComments
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Previous: Time's Up for Tenure
Next: What Is to Be Done (About Tenure)?
Softies bear only a fraction of the blame for tenured mediocrities. Fad, fashion, and “diversity” are more serious offenders.
— Fred · Apr 13, 04:43 PM · #
This is true throughout industry, government, education, etc., It’s political correctness run amuck.
Those people who are afraid to take a stand and make any decisions based upon a fair evaluation of people’s actual ability and contribution should be immediately removed from any decision-making, as they are not fit for those positions.
— NYMOM · Apr 14, 09:19 AM · #
Yes. Isn’t it the case, however, that forgivable weaknesses are greatly magnified under unreasonable demands for strength? If a person has a hard time exiling amiable young colleagues, competent, even talented, if not spectacular, that is no great weakness or crime. What we need is a system where that judging individual is given a choice other than yes or no. Am I a moral degenerate if, opposing the death penalty I find a guilty man innocent? The professional and personal disasters consequent to not getting tenure should make any decent person hesitate before pulling the switch.
The solution is to get rid of the switch. I am no prophet, and I have no sure replacement for tenure. I have worked in the corporate world, however, and in that supposedly crass universe I have rarely seen anything quite as flawed—or cruel—as what we, in the enlightened academy, practice in denying tenure to competent and hard-working individuals.
Why not try this? Let’s try creating a system that lives up to our ideals instead of savaging them. If the humanities, for instance, are supposed to impart some sense of what is right and wrong, just and unjust, kind or cruel, then how can we leave the classroom to enter tenure meetings that often force us to deny the values we teach? And, having denied these values, how can we go right back to talking about the profundity of Shakespeare’s moral vision and sense of justice, or the ethics of Kant.
Bush and Chaney go to church every week. And before, after, and during the service, people suffer and die because of their policies. The two leave their churches looking happy and purged, as though reconfirmed as Christians, as though re-connected to a doctrine that originated in total gentleness.
Now, Gods, stand up for softies. If what they do is wrong and wrongs the institutions and students they represent, then it is still better than so much of what I have seen done by the not-so-soft. Take away the system debased and misused by both softies and hardies, a system that allows only consequences either too mild or too harsh, a binary system in a multi-variable world, a pass-fail system where failure is often the presiding presumption, and weaknesses and vices of both soft and hard will no longer affect the welfare of institutions, and that set of objects so often neglected in grand discussions of academic policy, individual academics.
— Peter D. Grudin · Apr 14, 02:35 PM · #
There are two ways, mutually reinforcing, within the current tenure system, to handle this perceived conundrum.
First of all, hiring committees need to ask themselves whether they have truly hired a candidate to a tenure-track who gives every evidence of the potential for tenurability in accord with the mission of that institution.
In my experience, BTW, this is not the standard approach used by hiring committees. They are usually focussed on “coverage” and “specialization” and all sorts of parts of the CV and put very little effort into evaluation of the “professional” as a whole. After all, they say to themselves, they have six years to find out. Instead, they should declare a failed search and re-advertise the position for another round of candidates.
Secondly, once that has been established (that the candidate to be hired truly gives evidence of all of the right potential — and isn’t just being taken on to “fill Chuck’s line after his retirement this spring”), then the most important processes of the tenure system must swing into play:
MENTORING.
This is, in general, almost non-existent in most institutions. It is the opposite of hazing. It works well only if the candidate has been properly screened for major weaknesses before hiring, and thus is always building on strengths to make them bettter strengths.
A tenured mentor thus has six years to guide the development of the career of the mentee toward tenure.
If the mentor should note major hitherto un-noticed weaknesses in the new colleague’s performance, the mentor is to assist the colleague to overcome them.
If the mentor finds that the mentee is unable to overcome the perceived weaknesses, then the colleague should be assisted to seek an institution with a better fit. For example, an R1 colleague weak in research should be assisted in finding a 4-year college position, etc.
This is what collegiality means and these are the obligations it imposes. And they are responsibilities which have been shirked by most of the tenured faculty in this country.
It isn’t a question most of the time of being a “softie” or not — it’s a question of the realization of the potential that was wasted or the hire which shouldn’t have taken place in the first place.
It usually isn’t “sensitivity” that makes a professor a “softie” — it’s the sense of guilt in not having mentored that person’s career appropriately, of a duty not fulfilled. And thus, the positive vote is little more than a selfish attempt to sleep better at night, after all….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 14, 04:41 PM · #
I taught in a department filled with softies and promotion/tenure meetings were confusing at best. This group refused to examine the falsehoods in an application and refused to check on credentials.
One of the real problems is that softies end up voting for tenure for other softie-types. Then, a department eventually has a critical mass of softies and discussions about tenure become a depressing ritual. My response was to leave this department and find a place where the dough-like softie is not even hired.
— Ann · Apr 15, 04:50 AM · #
Very nicely drawn strawmen: the bully, the softie, and the tenured professor. In these caricatures, we can see the role of the limits of our own powers of perception: We attribute vast internal moral character to explain specific, local actions, based upon our own interpretations of the significance of what we perceive to be materially germane. But even when we have vast material evidence to contradict our feelings about reality — for instance, we know that many tenured professors have been terribly harassed and fired, notwithstanding their tenure and our simplistic belief about its power — we continue to reduce real people into caricatures in order to gratify our own personal rhetorical, political, or emotional needs.
Prof. Fendrich recently blogged about perspective, and these posts about silly strawmen illustrates the fun, but limitations, of drawing in perspective. Well done, even if not intentionally so.
— Jesse · Apr 15, 06:30 AM · #
It seems to me unfair to call the general types Prof. Fendrich sketches “strawmen.” Obviously few actual people exactly fit either the softie or the bully type, but not every picture has to be an accurate portrait. In perhaps somewhat broad brushstrokes, Fendrich has painted a scene that seems generally faithful to the generic academic department. And I think it would be hard to improve upon her summary: “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).”
Tenure has its purpose, but is it really to save people from having to deal with the real world at all? I’m not convinced that abolishing it would be a good thing at all, but then, so far today, I haven’t encountered some tenured “radical” whose entire financial life is far more secure than mine will ever be.
It seems to me Fendrich has a gift for seeing academia both from inside and from outside, and portraying it accurately in essence, if not in every detail.
“Strawmen” seems unjustified to me.
— Dan · Apr 15, 07:48 AM · #
Softies are in some ways even more pernicious than bullies. At least with a bully, the stance is clear and the line is drawn. A softie flip flops in order to please everyone and to maintain his or her “standing.” In reality, the softie’s inability to make a decision costs not just the department involved, but the wider community. Being stuck with a mediocre colleague who is granted tenure out of pity does a great disservice to the students. It also undermines faculty morale. Fendrich is right. But I don’t think doing away with tenure will solve the problem. It seems to be inherent in human nature. And what can be done about that?
— mary · Apr 15, 10:17 AM · #
If colleges spent half as much money and effort on initial recruitment as they do on evaluation most of these problems would go away.
— PJ · Apr 16, 02:11 AM · #
Why does what passes as “really” intellectual must be what is “hard”? Why must the softie be seen as merely fooling herself when she explores ideas or decides in a particular instance to give someone tenure? This piece posits a black and white world where you are either a softie and thus morally bankrupt or a hardie and thus intellectually honest. Professor Fendrich can make such claims in part because in using a strawman, she can tell us what is “really” going on in his mind — that is “deep down.” In acting the part of an intellectual by exploring ideas, they are said to know “deep down” that these ideas are really “idiotic.” Later similarly Professor Fendrich knows that they act to give tenure even though “somewhere, deep inside, [they know the professor] is a terribly inferior teacher and scholar.” I could get myself worked up into thinking that there is a problem, if I thought in such ways, but I’ve never really witnessed this particular type. Nor do I particularly want to worry about whether academia — or a particular a caricatured academic — is becoming too soft. Such rhetoric is used too often in the culture at large to dismiss much that I value, like the imaginative exploration of ideas.
— Elena · Apr 16, 10:58 AM · #