 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
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
Michael Nelson, guest blogger
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
Brainstorm Alumni
Marty Nemko, guest bloggerBob Zemsky
Recent Posts
College Success Depends on the Dentist | Comment [3]
Welcome Back to School | Comment [1]
McCain's Misogyny | Comment [38]
One Hundred Years of Blogitude | Comment [2]
Back to the Future | Comment [1]
Featured Articles By the Author
Time's Up for Tenure
The time has come for tenure in academe to be either radically modified or, as I’d prefer, abandoned altogether. I’ve held this position from long before I was tenured and promoted to full professor, and nothing I’ve experienced since being granted tenure — neither the job security, nor the greatly increased power in affecting departmental matters, nor the access to the ears of the administration, nor inclusion on any number of high-level committees, nor anything else — has changed my mind. Simply put, tenure does more harm than good.
Defenders of tenure invariably cite its protection of academic freedom and free speech, and they’re not entirely wrong. In higher education, tenure does prevent administrations from firing a faculty member simply for teaching, researching, or merely saying something with which an administration disagrees. But tenure, while protecting the academic freedom and free speech of the tenured, exacerbates the lack of academic freedom and free speech of the untenured. Actually, tenure suppresses them.
Tenured faculty on a tenure-decision committee hold an almost life-and-death power over the untenured candidate. If power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, a tenure committee is a veritable Petri dish for moral and ethical corruption. Members can — and do — vote negatively on a candidate because they’re threatened by the competition of the candidate’s teaching or research, because the candidate has openly disagreed with them in faculty meetings, because the candidate lunches with a member of the faculty the members don’t like, because the candidate has a student following, because the candidate dresses funny, because, well, because of practically anything.
To the protest that most if not all of these reasons are not allowed to be factors, I’d reply that they’re ridiculously easy to conceal in the committee’s official business. Unless the candidate is a Nobel Prize contender with students hanging from the rafters to hear his or her lectures, the tenure case is de facto decidable on illegitimate grounds.
To the protest that most tenured faculty are decent, reasonable people who wouldn’t vote against a candidate for illegitimate reasons, I’d reply that in a good many colleges it takes only one or two negative votes (against, say, a half-dozen positive ones) for the committee’s recommendation to seem weak or invalid in the eyes of the next level of decision-makers. (“The decision to promote wasn’t unanimous,” the dean says, “and I don’t want to make this schism in the department permanent, so. . . .”) In short, the institution of tenure and the way it’s decided — good ol’ peer review — means that if a candidate makes one measly tenured departmental enemy for any reason whatsoever, that candidate is most likely doomed.
Tenure also kills free speech and academic freedom because it institutionalizes and encourages the bullying of untenured junior faculty. Those tenured departmental enemies sure don’t wait until the committee meetings during the up-or-out year to start getting their ounces of flesh. Although overt bullying may seem rather rare (it’s like rape in one of those cultures requiring multiple male witnesses for the crime to be taken to court), subtle and even silent bullying is pervasive to the point of universality.
Tenure turns otherwise upstanding junior faculty into servile yes-men and yes-women — or, worse, cowards. Junior faculty working toward tenure must develop the servile art of pleasing those who outrank them. (Where, by the way, besides the military, is the power gap between “officers” and “enlisted men and women” so enormous?) That leads them to suppress their real opinions and ideas. So much for the academic freedom and free speech that tenure is supposed to preserve.
And if their servility and cowardice does manage to get them tenure, these same faculty — like abused children who grow up to abuse their own children — quickly hoist the Jolly Roger of their own suppressed anger and humiliation and start bullying the next group of junior faculty — with, of course, complete impunity.
Bullied or abused junior faculty can file grievances, you say — to which I reply: Lots of luck. Grievance boards are either composed of tenured faculty (who tend to protect their own) or have but a few token untenured members who are, of course, conveniently bullyable; faculty senates don’t want to dirty their hands with individual grievances against colleagues; ditto for the AAUP, which is interested only in grievances filed against administrators.
For those who’d argue that corruption and bullying come from only a few aberrant tenured faculty members and that the rest are decent people of principle, I’d reply a) as I said above, it takes only one or two for corruption and bullying to be effective, and b) look around at the situation on the ground: I’ll bet there’s one or two egregious — albeit often subtle — bullies in every department on campus, including yours.
In addition to bullying, tenure creates the problem of tenured professors hanging around long past the point when, if they had any sense of honor, they’d retire. They cling to their lifetime jobs, medical insurance, their comfy offices, and their phone/fax/copier privileges; they fumble with crumbling, yellow notes for courses they teach by rote recital. They profess blameless inability to handle any necessary IT, including, half the time, simple e-mail. They won’t budge, and it’s actionable age discrimination in most places for a department chairman or a dean even to raise the subject of retirement. Meanwhile, students suffer their perfunctory teaching, and younger, more energetic, more passionate, more eager teacher-scholars can’t advance past this arterial blockage or, worse, can’t even find jobs. While tenure isn’t the only reason for the “adjunctification of the university,” it’s a big one.
But one of the worst consequences of tenure is the heavy price of Outcomes Assessment. If we’re going to be burdened with sinecured faculty members who have heretofore been “unaccountable” for life, administrators conclude, we can at least put them through the OA grinder. That is, under threat of being held responsible for disaccreditation, these non-fireable faculty can at least be made to insert prescribed “learning goals” and “learning objectives” into their syllabi. And they are being made to. That’s right: Outcomes Assessment has grown into Incomes Approval, i.e., the shaping of course content by administrative fiat. Where’s the precious academic freedom supposedly bulwarked by tenure? Where are the putative guardians (committees composed of or led by tenured faculty, faculty senates, or the AAUP) on this one?
Make no mistake about it: Outcomes Assessment and its less polite real objective, Incomes Approval, are killing academic freedom bit by bit, one idiotic “learning objective” at a time. Give it a decade or so, and the liberty bell of academic freedom will be reduced to the tiny tinkle of a sidewalk Santa begging for charity change.
A rough justice is at work here, however. Outsiders who pay the bucks to support academe are demanding that the insiders who take the bucks justify what they’re doing with the money. And it’s no surprise that outsiders with clout have the backing of taxpayers and tuition-payers. When those regular folk peer into the halls of ivy, they see a bunch of sinecures, more secure in their jobs than Austro-Hungarian royalty, practicing a freedom which, for anybody but themselves, is strictly academic.
What to do about tenure? Next time, I’ll have a couple of suggestions.
Posted at 09:05:35 AM on April 9, 2008 | All postings by Laurie FendrichComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
As someone who agrees with you that the majority of those who have tenure abuse it (but who believes that eliminating tenure is throwing the baby out with the bathwater), please share with us in your upcoming post the ways that you, tenured full professor, have used your own tenure to defend those down-trodden by abusive colleagues, etc.
How you have used your tenure to speak out and to enforce true peer review, produce minority reports to your administration to secure tenure for those improperly denied by committees, defend the academic freedom of all colleagues, adjuncts included, etc. — in short, how you with your tenure have NOT been a silent witness to the bullying in the ivory tower.
Once we have all learned about your own organizing efforts within the ranks of the tenured to combat and address these abuses, we can take some lessons as to how/why your extra-ordinary efforts in that regard have failed and led you to your conclusion.
Then we can also discuss how/why there are allegedly more advantages to having academic freedom held hostage at the whim of only the administration.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 9, 11:24 AM · #
A little food for thought – I teach about the Arab-Israeli conflict. I have many, many friends who refuse to touch it with a ten foot pole until after they get tenure because they know that without tenure and the protections it offers, they’ll be run out of town if they even attempt to have an honest conversation (without choosing sides).
— J · Apr 9, 11:41 AM · #
Agreed with the post’s argument… however. Eliminating tenure simply transfers the bullying up the line to administration. Been there (a non-tenure institution), seen that.
— Fred · Apr 9, 11:45 AM · #
Your points about the problems within the academic system are powerful, however I’m not sure that they are directly related to “tenure,” which should be about scholarship and teaching, but rather the power and non scholarly positions tenured faculty hold exclusively or disproportionately. Is there a way to remedy the “absolute power” problem without awarding tenure to those whose scholarship and teaching have earned them this position?
— M. · Apr 9, 01:21 PM · #
ah, AHA again: he (or she) who hides behind a nom-de-poster while hypocritically (ain’t irony grand?) demanding that fendrich lay out a personal history of service in the cause of the untenured before her comments on tenure can be seriously considered by him (or her). AHA might reply that his (or her) comments on fendrich’s comments stand or fall on their merits, in the text, alone, without an author’s true ID, let alone his (or her) personal history, being revealed. precisely! and the same applies to fendrich’s comments. their validity or invalidity doesn’t depend on whether fendrich ever threw herself under a bus for an oppressed untenured faculty member…or not. am i a hypocrite, too, for hiding behind my pseudonym? maybe. but i’m willing to take what’s posted here on its merits, without demanding to know, say, exactly what “anti-hypocrisy advocate” has ever done to deserve that appellation. (i suspect no one else calls him—or her—that.) FYI, i’m not really “jim” but i am lucky.
to J.: those untenured acquaintances who’ll “be run out of town if they even attempt to have an honest conversation (without choosing sides)” about the arab-israeli conflict before they have tenure, will be run out of town primarily by tenured colleagues on their tenure-case committees in their own departments, won’t they?
to fred: as someone who’s worked both within academe (adjunct, visitor, instructor-to-full-professor, department chairman) and without, i’d rather be bullied by somebody whose job is different from mine, who’s clearly a “boss” on the flow chart, than by a putative peer who puts an arm around my shoulders while sticking a forked tongue in my ear. of course, NO bullying is preferable, but if i have to suffer it, i’d rather it be from an administrator, where it’ll be less accompanied (i admit i can’t say totally unaccompanied) by the other vices fendrich cites.
— LuckyJim · Apr 9, 01:30 PM · #
LuckyJim, it must be many years since you worked only at the whim of administrators. Every vice this article cites as problematic of tenured faculty is just as easily attributed to administrators. (The same goes for the good—equally possible in tenured faculty and admins.) If we are going to put the tenure system under scrutiny and/or pull it apart (as it often deserves), can’t we at least seek a structure that doesn’t STILL depend on the ethics of the individual(s) in power rather than choosing one potential evil over another? I agree that one’s job shouldn’t depend on who you work with, but I also can’t agree that it should only matter who you work for. It hasn’t been that long since I have been in that position, so I recall its horrors, the joys, and how much it all depended on the boss all too well.
Also, in the absence of tenure, who do you ask to advise students? Shape curricula? The NTT faculty who may not have a job next year or the year after? And what will motivate them to do it? How much will that dedication balance student evaluations of teaching (what most adjuncts are hired and fired on around the country)? Doesn’t sound like a plan with any more guarentee of success than what we’ve got—just more job changing, perhaps.
The simple truth is we need a better system. For once, I agree with AHA—eliminating tenure is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Just “different” isn’t always better. We, as a profession, should be collectively smart enough to go for “better.”
— MJ · Apr 9, 02:17 PM · #
Okay, here’s a stylistic re-phrase of 1, with some new “material”:
Could we have a listing of the kinds of efforts the blog host has seen tenured faculty use to attempt to remedy the evils of the system? And which have convinced her that the system is irreparable?
(Heck, some people would never believe me if I said I’ve used all the organizing and opposition tactics I listed in 1 and more, occasionally with some real success — pseudonym or no.)
Anyhow — it’s just soooo disappointing to have these anti-tenure postings appear to be so oblivious to the origins of tenure, of its link to disciplinary definition and authority, etc.
In fact, since tenure is based in the self-governance of professionals, being anti-tenure (by definition, anti-academic freedom) is, in a real sense, anti-democratic — the corporatization of the university in the extreme. Human institutions are, well, human — so who’s to blame when the checks and balances are not invoked to “achieve a more perfect union”? Not the “Constitution” but those who failed to follow it.
Just because many/most faculty have refused to oversee assessment themselves, letting the administration step into the breach, doesn’t mean that tenure and academic freedom are at fault — specific faculty are at fault. Indeed, by raising the issue of the non-existence of such faculty committees at the host’s institution, the reader is clearly tempted to ask, “Why didn’t you form one?”
And if administrations are, indeed, guilty of these “Incomes Approval” tactics (in the absence of the faculty’s assuming their responsibilities), why should all obstacles to admininstrative hegemony be removed?
And to read of this wellspring of new-found trust in all these “enlightened despot” administrations which so few of us have ever seen or experienced. (sigh)
Argue for state licensure as an additional method of “outside” review (as in the medical profession), if you will. But if you’re going to list abuses then list the controls of abuses that have been tried and failed — and those which have succeeded, as well.
Again: “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” is no solution to water pollution.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 9, 03:04 PM · #
one more post, then i’ll go away…[applause]…for a while. [hisssss!]
there seem to be two main aspects to this tenure business: 1) how who gets it is decided, and 2) what happens when who gets it has a de facto lifetime job. (yes, tenured faculty do occasionally lose their jobs, but it’s usually because their whole department or school is disbanded, they’ve done something almost prosecutable in court, or they’re named ward churchill.)
how who gets tenure is decided looks fair on paper: in the first, and most crucial incidence, by a jury of one’s departmental colleagues, albeit just the tenured ones. banding together, this jury (the tenure committee) grants permanent job security to, theoretically, somebody who might otherwise be fired for bringing up the arab-israeli conflict or pointing out that the university has hired more vice-presidents than faculty lately. but in reality, the departmental tenure committee, after seven years of individual hazing, denies tenure to a candidate who publishes in favor of literary theory’s “thick description” instead of “deconstruction” (does anybody outside of department rivals care about that?), or awards it to one who agrees with the majority wanting to make an elective course a requirement just because it fills the auditorium. unless they’re on the real extremes, publication records and teaching evaluations tend to puddle in the middle; depending on how they’re interpreted and synopsized, they can be made to look equally like evidence for either thumbs-up or thumbs-down.
lifetime jobs, with no anxiety about termination—let’s see: the priesthood (it certainly does a great job), the career military (google “the right way, the wrong way, and the army way”), the mafia (where you CANNOT quit), the supreme court (where clarence thomas will be around for a looooooong time), the communist party in certain badly run countries, etc. other than in those fields or in academe, who in the world has a lifetime job? newscasters? pundits? hod-carriers? tax accountants? nannies? doormen? grain elevator operators? welders? magazine writers? electronics store managers? just about nobody, that’s who. so why should academics have it? because they deal with “ideas” and are especially vulnerable? really—more than newspaper reporters or aid workers or economic forecasters or interior designers?
ol’ jimbo here is told that he probably hasn’t worked at the “whim” of administrators for a while. not true; he has, and administrators aren’t any more whim-prone than faculty. actually, less—because they can lose their jobs. (of course, many administrators have “retreat rights” enabling them to go back to tenured professorhood, where they CAN indulge their whims to the fullest.) LJ here thinks that the problem is the reverse: that too few professors have worked outside of academe for a while. say what you will about his political prisoners, one of the things for which you’ve got to credit fidel castro is his requiring intellectuals take a shot at harvesting sugar cane.
finally, there is NO system that obviates dependence on the ethics of individuals, or that will afford one-hundred percent protection to every sincere, hard-working faculty member who might be just a tad…dare i say it?…mediocre. maybe at the university of lake wobegone, where all faculty are above average, but probably no place else.
well, finally-finally: maybe it’s time to throw rosemary’s baby out with the bathwater.
— LuckyJim · Apr 9, 03:52 PM · #
Ever heard of “civil service jobs”? You know, state workers at just about every job imagineable (from gardener and janitor to secretary, etc.) with the exception of “management confidential” in many a state of this union?
Yup. Tenure. For life. And after only three years probation usually.
Ever hear of school teachers? In many/most states?
Yup. Tenure for life. Often after as little as three years.
And these people generally have unions, like real ones that aren’t completely “company unions” like a lot of faculty organizations (run by faculty “entrepreneurs”, cf. below).
Now the “how who gets tenured” is supposed to be a checks and balances game (administration gets final say, usually, although there should be an appeal process).
One of the ways of convincing an administration of the quality of a candidate is through the outside reviewer process. Kind of makes a crony tenure committee look a bit transparent when major honchos at other, better campuses say “s/he’s a keeper.” But the candidate has to get to choose the reviewer(s)!
And as for never losing your tenured job, well, that’s the work of those “enlightened despot” administrators acting in tandem with the tenured faculty. Tenure doesn’t mean a job for life without qualification; it means the guarantee of due process.
When other tenured faculty refuse to reform, censure, or eliminate their “dead wood” colleagues, and when administrations refuse, as well (as even the current incumbent AAUP president, Cary Nelson, so approvingly reported in his debate with David Horowitz, simply denying them merit raises), well, it isn’t the system that’s broken — it’s the players.
As for adminstrators losing their jobs, just look up the names of some presidents who have been “let go” and you’ll find them at another institution: inter-locking directorates.
It has been said that organizing faculty is like herding cats. And many a faculty member takes an “entrepreneurial” approach to the job — cutting personal deals with an administration. No “collegiality” (in the sense of “collegium”, bound together), indeed.
It all boils down to whether this is a profession or not, whether the word “faculty” will mean anything other than “hired hand”.
Of course, this is all, as they say, “academic”. Just check out some of Marc Bousquet’s blog threads and you’ll see that the current “entrepreneurial” tenured faculty appear, by their complicity in the adjunctification of the university, to be doing themselves in.
And, yes, indeed, the baby will be out with that bathwater for sure.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 9, 04:35 PM · #
Really? Anti-Hypocrisy Advocate and Lucky Jim seem a bit tense here.
Anyway, I think that the point about the current tenure system suppressing academic freedom is genuine. Often times, individuals who are on the tenure track do have to be extra careful about what they say and who they say it to. The idea that your future rests in the hands of your peers, makes you a bit more reluctant to voice your own opinions unconditionally around them or in a classroom. The untenured individual walks a tightrope to gaurantee future employment to the detriment of academic freedom.
I’m interested in what Fendrich and others have in mind for alternatives.
But perhaps (as seems to be the case made by Bousquet) the problem of having tenured faculty will be worked out by IHEs just eliminating the tenured jobs unilaterally.
— Lucas Jackson · Apr 9, 05:31 PM · #
The tenure system should not be discarded simply because it is subject to abuse. In my experience, tenured faculty often vote ‘generously’ rather than ‘critically’ because they wish to avoid confrontation with their colleagues and lawsuits from the candidate(s).
If you don’t like the current use of adjuncts imagine a tenureless university, in which departments can be summarily closed when their enrollments ebb or to make way for the newest fad or the hobby horse of a particular administrator. “Adjunctification” enables administrations to react to budgetary crises and to unanticipated student curricular demand (or unanticipated student curricular indifference). Remove tenure and, in effect, all members of the faculty become adjuncts. If such a system were ever to be contemplated, the strongest faculty would negotiate for de facto tenure through long-term contracts or through coach-like, soft-landing contracts. With the ‘arms race’ for top faculty a version of the tenure system would be right back in place. The bottom line—which Professor Fendrich seems to be unaware of—is that tenure is a form of compensation. If tenure goes, the salaries of the top faculty will rise and you will get further ‘adjunctification’ to pay for them. The abuse of junior faculty in the tenure process is a different problem. If they were to be continued without tenure someone would still have to make a decision on the renewal of their contracts. Suddenly we’re back to the same situation, with the possibility of senior faculty abusing them in that decision. If the reappointment authority were ceded to the administration the administrators could abuse them. Removing tenure does not solve this perceived problem.
— Observer · Apr 9, 05:37 PM · #
10: Interesting and important point about the “tightrope.” A tenure-less university is a state of permanent (or five- or ten- or whatever-year contract) “tightrope walking” — and in the private sector colleges and universities, there won’t even be Pickering v. Board of Education to provide for some modicum of First Amendment freedom of speech.
Thank you, 11, for your many cogent points, not the least of which is your noting that tenure is a form of “compensation.”
Indeed. It is what has lured many an important researcher or Nobel laureate from industry, for example, for a far less-paying university professorship. And the academic freedom which goes with it has meant that basic (and not just profit-oriented) research could be pursued.
In fact, the weakening of tenure at a particular institution often has ramifications in the recruitment process for new senior (and often even junior) hires. Where perceived abuses have occurred in the removal of tenured positions (Bennington College with its abolition of even “presumptive tenure”, St. Bonaventure with its violations of the seniority system, etc.), the media coverage has ensured that their applicant pools reflect the controversy.
So, yes — bring on “the alternatives” for debate — but also (as requested in 1 and 7) the evidence that we really have no alternative but “the alternatives” to end the abuses of tenure!
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 9, 06:44 PM · #
I agree strongly with Laurie Fendrich and applaud her emphasis on the harm that tenure brings to junior faculty members.
Most important to me are: the financial considerations (the broad cost of carrying unproductive people on the payroll — a price that most of us would not be willing to pay for untenured-in-position deans and presidents); what tenure does to character (can you imagine a tenured John McCain or Martin Luther King or Teddy Roosevelt?); and the gap created between those protected by the slippery grease of lifetime tenure and ordinary professionals — editors, lawyers, doctors, senators, military officers, CEOs … No wonder academics rarely receive that call at 3 a.m.
By the way, I speak as someone who gave up tenure several years ago to run an exciting new research operation. It’s been swell, because no one else is tenured either.
— S. Britchky · Apr 9, 07:22 PM · #
Unproductive deans and provosts abound in academia. They are most often ensconced in the “assistant” or “associate” dean or provost category. However, sometimes they are the full dean or provost. Or vice-president or president.
At one of my former institutions, an about-to-retire professor was made acting provost in order to boost his salary for his retirement program.
Obvioulsy, “dead wood” still on the payroll are living proof of the non-productivity of the presidents, deans, etc. whose job it is to enforce a full and competent workload from all employees. Indeed, they should be held accountable for their cowardice in not initiating removal procedures unless forced to by media revelations of abuses.
For heavens sake, administrators usually are tenured faculty so the abuses, when they occur, are the same only accelerated and exaggerated because of access to power. So, to them we should grant absolute power without the checks and balances of shared governance?
Is a CEO from Sprint or Burger King as President really the future of higher education? It’s being tried. Talk about top-down management styles….
Of course, it would be necessary to home-school any children in the family lest “the slippery grease of lifetime tenure” of school teachers destroy their character.
Why, just look what tenure did to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s character, who was not only a tenured professor but the President of Columbia University….
Fascinating: Some people abandon tenure rather than organize for the enforcement of ethics and standards in the profession.
Does that say anything about character, I wonder?
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 9, 10:09 PM · #
I have been in the profession 30 years now, in an evangelical Christian college and now in an evangelical university. Two different tenure systems—one lifetime, the current offering five-year terms of tenure with review at the end of five years. The first system had many of the difficulties the author cites; the second, literally none of them. I am a dean, serving as the Provost’s nonvoting, note-taking representative (i.e., recording secretary) on the PT committee—a committee of six with two untenured faculty on it. There are no departmental or divisional promotion or tenure committees (200 full-time faculty in the institution), and the materials we review on each candidate—extensive portfolio with self-assessment, chair review, 3 peer reviews, six alumni reviews, full slate of course evaluations (and other information the candidate may choose to offer)—make the process pretty thorough and open. I’m not a huge fan of lifetime tenure, having seen its abuse and given it up for my at-will appointment in this new institution, and having seen the salutary effect of post-tenure review here. But the issues the author seems to focus on are not systemic, really, are they? They’re functions of the character of the individuals involved, and the system simply permits bad character to be expressed without check. What system will fix that?
— RJS · Apr 10, 04:56 AM · #
All this whining about tenure assumes people want to work in the United States. Since a dozen nations generate students entering college a LOT smarter than the US gets, teaching in those other nations is propelled by student dilligence unimaginable at Harvard. Tenure at Harvard condemns one to a lifetime of bad weather, bad traffic, and nasty faculty infighting, plus indulging, annually, the bozos who get admitted there.
— Richard Tabor Greene · Apr 10, 05:26 AM · #
1. Yes, civil service workers and schoolteachers do have their own forms of tenure, and it takes a whole lot of hearings to fire bad ones. They do get fired from time to time, however. Tenured college professors, on the other hand, are almost never fired, even if their malfeasances (missing classes, being late to classes, blowing off appointments, refusing to do any committee work, refusing to teach certain classes, etc., etc.) exceed that of fired schoolteachers. Tenure in higher education is like no other, and the “due process” necessary to fire a tenured professor is the equivalent of that necessary for, say, O.J. Simpson to win a libel suit.
2. “It isn’t the system that’s broken—it’s the players.” O.K., have it your way: tenure’s all right; it’s just that the professoriat is filled with goldbricks, scam artists, incompetents, and bullies. You know your colleagues better than I do.
3. “It has been said that organizing faculty is like herding cats.” It has been said, dear, that practically everything is “like herding cats.” I may be wrong, but I think there’s an international embargo on this phrase in force until August, 2010.
4. “…you’ll see that the current “entrepreneurial” tenured faculty appear, by their complicity in the adjunctification of the university, to be doing themselves in.” AHA cites this, I guess, as a bad thing. “…tenure is a form of ‘compensation.’ Indeed. It is what has lured many an important researcher or Nobel laureate from industry, for example, for a far less-paying university professorship.” AHA cites this, I guess, as a good thing. AHA, meet AHA.
5. “the candidate has to get to choose the reviewer(s)!” See how fair ol’ jimbo can be: I’ll say something favorable about tenure ajudication, at least at a few major research universities of my acquaintance. The candidate submits the names of, say, six outside references; the committee chooses three of them from whom to solicit evaluations. The committee then solicits three references from people it chooses. Not a bad way to get an accurate cross-section of evaluations, I’d say.
6. As to unsatisfactory administrators being fired: true, a lot of them aren’t. But they can be, and rather suddenly (I know of a couple of clean-out-your-desk-by-noon cases.) It’s just that often they’re fired only from their administrative posts and are bounced back to the tenured full-professorships from whence they came, employed, if they so choose, for life. When AHA cites “an about-to-retire professor [being] made acting provost in order to boost his salary for his retirement program,” he (or she) only adds to the case against tenure.
7. I didn’t say anything about granting administrators “absolute power.” Of course, if you keep tenure and merely take granting it entirely out of the hands of the faculty, that’s what you’ll get.
8. “Why, just look what tenure did to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s character, who was not only a tenured professor but the President of Columbia University….” There’s a cliché almost as unbearable as “herding cats”: “One swallow does not a summer make.” But it’s relevant here.
9. Non-sequiteur alert: “Some people abandon tenure rather than organize for the enforcement of ethics and standards in the profession.”
— LuckyJim · Apr 10, 07:43 AM · #
Let’s try a slightly different angle. The AAUP was founded not out of a desire to improve teaching or strengthen research, per se, but in order to redress and help prevent egregious cases where compentent scholars were ousted for lack of what we now generally call “academic freedom.” Tenure was proposed as a reasonable means of protecting faculty from the unfortunate consequences of speaking the truth (as they saw it) to others who found what was said deleterious. The original AAUP organizing documents, quite inspiring and candid in their formulation, spoke of “academic freedom and responsibility.” I contend that a significant part of the perceived and actual problems with the current process/model/practice of tenure is related to the AAUP and its members progressively codifyiing academic freedom without a corresponding codification of academic responsibility. It’s not too late. There have been several excellent books on the subject, including more than one by Neil Hamilton. It is not necessary to dispose of tenure or a strong defense of academic freedom to achieve many of the goals described above by other commentators. It is necessary to correct the current imbalance between academic freedom (which originally was conceived as a right of the full body of the faculty, not just individual professors) and the exercise of the freedom by individual professors and the collective faculty in a manner that models and helps to achieve responsible action by all members of the faculty, both the tenured and those not. That said, there will always be the problem of human weakness. No system will remove all aberrations, all pettiness, all instances of poor judgment, etc. Yet, with a more forthright return to the original principles of the AAUP, our chances seem better than they currently are to realize the goals the academy ought most to care about.
— Dick Yanikoski · Apr 10, 07:55 AM · #
Ms. Fendrich’s argument seems to engage in the worst sort of stereotyping of both tenured and untenured faculty.
— MC Smith · Apr 10, 08:14 AM · #
Actually, commentator 18, you’ve summed up my arguments — which are nothing other than AAUP 1915 statement arguments — perfectly and eloquently, as well.
Tenure is all about rights that have corresponding responsibilities — and the enforcement of those responsibilities.
Thank you for your posting.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 10, 08:20 AM · #
When college tenure started (Lovejoy, World War I, and all that), there were very few colleges and universities, compared to today, and the proportion of the population who went to colleges and universities was a minuscule fraction of what it is now. Back then there were so few opportunities in the US for those with the ability and training to be a professor, let alone an original-research professor, that it might have been understandable to write fairness rules insulating qualified people from dismissal at whim. Hell, graduate level education was only a few decades old here at that time, and positively vestigial, relative to our day. So far, duh.
Today the higher-ed universe is vast and still expanding rapidly. The US tenure system that began nearly a century ago helped some people (those who got protection that was not somehow trumped at some point). But the ways in which it is abused and manipulated loom far larger, in the empirical experience of anyone really looking at contemporary academia.
Also utterly patent is the extent to which the tenure system distorts the free market in advanced intellectual and professional skills. There is some amount of uncertainty and unfairness in any situation, and under any system. Trying to write rules (like those of tenure) that eliminate that reality have the actual effect of simply redistributing uncertainty and unfairness. It’s like stepping on a bulge in badly laid carpeting, and seeing the bulge pop right up in another part of the carpeting. Yes, the incredible and shameful adjunct abuse system is one obvious bulge.
It is totally true that people can abuse a free market, or freedom generally. The counterweight (and fix) is that the more dysfunctionally and inappropriately some people or institutions deploy their freedom, the more that actually opens opportunities for other people to do something more functional and constructive — such as hiring someone who was illogically mistreated or dismissed.
If you want more opportunity, increase the liquidity and flexibility of the system — don’t maximize its rigidity, with all of the constraints and considerations that those things impose on everyone involved.
No, life is not perfect, and life comes with no guarantee. Anyone wishing to formulate superior ideas through intellectual work, while demanding or expecting a priori exemption from those realities of experience, will almost inevitably view contemporary life and society from an extremely heteroclite standpoint, through bizarrely distortive lenses.
O that’s right, that is how many academics view things from their weird little eddy in the river.
If academics aspire to be right about things, and paid attention to, this is, um… how do undergrads put it?
Not a good plan, dudes.
— G D · Apr 10, 08:46 AM · #
All of these wonderful “tear down tenure” scenarios reflect little knowledge of the evolution of academic freedom in the courts and how inextricably linked to tenure that freedom has become in court decisions.
Let’s see, what’s that quote: “Those who ignore history will be condemned to repeat it.”
Well, in this case, those who abandon the history of tenure will be condemned to the lack of the free speech rights of academic freedom — sanctioned by the courts.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 10, 09:04 AM · #
Rather than abolish tenure, we should tenure all right now. Most of the adjuncts I know at very different sorts of colleges and universities are tenure-worthy, I think. No one who is clearly not tenure worthy now or who could not reasonably be thought tenure-worthy in six years should be professing in colleges or universities. It has been suggested to me that my wish to tenure everyone now might actually have the effect (tenured) Prof. Fendrich advocates: when everyone has tenure, the power of tenure will decline markedly, something like the way the perceived and actual power of US citizenship and enfranchisement has declined with its modern extension. (E.g., the effects of the Patriot Act and the “loss” of Al Gore indicate the ways we permit lots of people citizenship and the right to vote while evacuating the power of citizenship and the franchise.)
— Jesse · Apr 10, 09:28 AM · #
In may colleges, a new form of salary compensation is diminishing the significance of tenure anyway.
We were recruiting a faculty member from UCLA; it turns out, despite having a full tenure line to his appointment as a Professor at UCLA, only 35% of his salary was guaranteed by his tenure appointment. The remaining 65% was from compensation due to grants.
This model is more and more common – tenure only grants you an office and a small fraction of your stipend. The rest has to be competitively earned.
I’ve personally witnesses nearly all of the negative examples cited here. Tenure committees use their power to influence junior faculty – for good and ill.
— Stephen · Apr 10, 09:49 AM · #
Tenure protects nothing but mediocrity and undermines the intergrity of what should be a noble profession. Does it really protect academic freedom? Can anyone show the research that illustrates this? Academic freedom is important — but let that be decided in court rooms. That’s what law suits are for. No tenure decision is ever based solely on merit. It is ALWAYS personal. (KC Johnson and collegiality, anyone?) The only people shortchanged in the process of education are the students. And by the way, instead of clinging to tenure like a lifeboat, why don’t some of you people actually address issues of real substance: ridiculously low salaries; the reduction of real jobs in favor of the overuse of adjuncts; the new model of students as customers – you are being turned into a service industry; and work load creep. All that tenure power and you’ve managed to accomplish extactly nothing but what? The freedom to work as little as possible if you so choose.
Very few people in the world have the luxury of lifetime employment. Why the hell should teachers? People are fired every day – for reasons that are less glamorous than academic freedom. Give up tenure and get rid of the enormous mediocrity that weighs down education. You may win back a little respect.
— SFS Clark · Apr 10, 10:07 AM · #
The “soft money” subsidized salary isn’t new, actually, but it is, indeed, a pernicious form of tenure erosion.
In fact, way back in the seventies, I recall Hanna Holborn Gray, then Acting President of Yale (later President of the U of Chicago) very clearly proclaiming that Yale did not erode tenure in that manner; it guaranteed the entire salary of all tenured faculty, whether or not they brought in “soft money.”
Now, that’s speech (and research) better freed from the influence of money — for the professor need not absolutley produce the results “paid for” by industry or government for fear of defaulting on the mortgage if/when the money runs out.
However, I am not sure whether faculty on research lines (as opposed to full tenure lines) have had the same protections. But then again, the word “faculty” has always implied the teaching function, and academic freedom has always explicitly linked the teaching function to the research function (one cannot teach what one has not researched/learned oneself).
Again, institutions which provide full tenure protections will end up “raiding” those which do not.
As for letting academic freedom “be decided in the court rooms,” let me repeat:
If an individual has no tenure, then “standing” in the courts is becoming diminished, and the decisions are weighing in against the individual and for the university. It is the university and not the untenured individual who has the academic freedom in many Federal courts.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 10, 10:25 AM · #
Is it really too revolutionary to require competence and productivity from every worker at every stratum? By this I mean, professors, administrators, civil service employees, unionized labor, CEOs, et al.? Should not merit be the metric and fair compensation be given in reward of work provided?
The answer, of course, is YES. It is too revolutionary.
So productive and honorable tenured faculty will work alongside the slackers who coast along doing relatively little, while adjuncts are paid too little to teach well. Unions will guarantee equal rights and compensation to those who perform with distinction and those who are at the blurry edge of competence (with some grumbling about those who perform too well, and thereby raise expectations in general). We do not now enable full freedom of speech for civil servants nor even regular employees in industry. Our society is full of inequities of expectations and compensation. How is it that ANYONE actually EARNS millions of dollars per year?
But this is just sour grapes from someone who has never been tenured, although many would agree upon inspection of my CV that I would be tenurable. I have never found a real home in academia, despite various appointments in psychology, anthropology, physiology, and pathobiology; and yet, as soon as I stopped trying for the tenure track and moved to positions outside academia, I was never again unemployed nor underemployed until I retired.
I have mostly lived my “academic” life from outside the academy, through collaboration with those who are on the inside, and this has worked pretty well for me. But, there is a twinge of envy, no doubt, and I sometimes entertain thoughts that too many academic positions are occupied into perpetuity by people who are not worthy—not really committed to productively advancing knowledge. But, it is what it is.
Oh well…. Mine has been, and continues to be, a pretty fine life, remarkably free of regrets.
— Joe Erwin · Apr 10, 10:25 AM · #
Please, the First Amendment reads “Congress shall make no law” and not “the employer shall make no law.”
Ergo, the fullest protection of free speech is in the public university, not the private one. For the faculty and the students, and all employees.
Everyone forgets a famous SUNY-Alfred/Alfred University court decision back in the 60’s, I believe. The students had organized an unruly demonstration; the administration censured or expelled some of them. The students went to court.
Well, Alfred is a hybrid institution and some of the students were enrolled in the SUNY programs of Alfred and some in the programs of the private Alfred University.
The court vacated the sanctions against the students enrolled in public SUNY-Alfred and upheld them against the students enrolled in Alfred University.
The only thing that would protect the faculty at Alfred University is the limited definition of tenure-and-academic freedom in the courts.
Only in America would a Senate vote to give up its Constitutional right to declare war to the President — and only in America would tenured faculty ask to give up their academic freedom to their administrations.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 10, 10:38 AM · #
You can say that again, Professor Fendrich.
I want to add two items to your list. Just as history is often written by the victorious, the reputation of tenure is sustained by those who have it. Those who are denied tenure cannot protest against the system; they can’t even go undwerground. Their voices are effectively and often permanently silenced on any campus, because, of course, they have had to leave. Dead men and women tell no tales. Their votes cannot be counted, because the candidates are no longer there.
One might argue that this is just as well, that the losers will often be biased against the rules of the game. But I would reply that the winners are almost always biased in favor of those rules.
Candidates for tenure at most places must get a grade of “A+”. A grade of “A” might not be good enough. And yes, it is true that one or two members of a department can make that “A+” unattainable, and true, too, that subjective factors almost always figure into tenure decisions, even when the judges are well-meaning and are oblivious to their own biases.
When Shirley Jackson wrote “The Lottery” she was a woman well versed in the oddities of academic life.
It hardly needs to be said that a candidate who gets a “B+” will not get tenure. Ditto, and a fortiori for the candidate with a “C” or a “D”. But note that these candidates, by and large, pay no greater penalty than the candidate the the grade of “A”. All are treated equally, expelled from the community, out of a job, and, in bad markets, often out of the profession.
All this makes the idea of tenure unsupportable. That doews not, however, give us a system to replace it. Until someone comes up with such a system, I have little hope that this monstrosity will see its end soon.
— Peter D. Grudin · Apr 10, 11:10 AM · #
In response to Lucky Jim (post#5). Increasingly, outside forces are interjecting themselves into tenure decision related to scholars of the Middle East. There were three very prominent ones this year that even made the mainstream media. The chill is palpable. So, no the “being run out of town” is not being done by colleagues. Read anything written by Alan Dershowitz this year and you’ll see what I mean.
— J · Apr 10, 12:13 PM · #
Tenure is going away anyway. What percent of teaching is done by term or part-timers now?
Anyway, the whole discussion is off base, I believe. Tenure is the price society pays for allowing faculty to follow their research interests over very long periods without immediate payoff, or even any payoff in most cases. But if one academic in a thousand discovers/creates an idea or intellectual product with serious ‘public good’ benefits’ – it’s worth it. If that seems a stretch – how many Nobel prize winners were on short term contracts? How many discoveries came after years of what seemed unproductive work?
— PJ · Apr 10, 10:38 PM · #
It seems to me that education and research have ceased to be ends unto themselves in our culture. They are now considered by many to be mere means by which the ‘one true end’ (i.e. profit) may be achieved.
This view of education and research has lead to the increased corporatizing (is that a word? It should be) of colleges and universities. Now, these institutions, while technically non-profit, are in an ‘arms race’ for students and high profile researchers, research grants etc. Attracting those things (in part) takes the form of building new facilities, which takes money, which takes a ‘profit’-minded perspective.
— a different Dan · Apr 11, 08:56 AM · #
I have tenure, but my partner did not get it. The bullying and humiliation she underwent before and after were crushing. I think this article has raised many good points about academe that should be discussed in our faculty senates one by one.
I also concur wholeheartedly about the Outcomes Assessments imposed by administrators and sometimes backed up by state legislatures. The promoters of assessment run big businesses that reap heavy profits from this and yet the mandate for accountability is so great that people fear to stand up to it. It wastes our time, compromises academic freedom, costs huge sums, and has very little evidence of giving students a better education.
— Kathy · Apr 11, 03:10 PM · #
This refusal of the faculty to take responsibility for — and themselves direct — Outcomes Assessment has led to the “outside” interference. (However, if tenure is abolished, the administration will not be the “outsider”, it will be the BOSS.)
When the Pew-funded AIR study of college student literacy, released in January 2006 (http://www.air.org/news/documents/Release200601pew.htm), found that 20% of 4-yr institution graduates and 30% of the 2-year institution graduates surveyed “have only basic quantitative literacy skills, meaning they are unable to estimate if their car has enough gasoline to get to the next gas station or calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies” AND faculty resist doing any assessment, well, what do they expect?
DIY — that’s the answer. DIY. Faculty, all over this country, said NO.
Abolish tenure and far more than Outcomes Assessment will be “directed from on high” and/or from without. Consider “directed” OA a dry run for the tenureless institution of the future. With “management-directed” OA, faculty are trying it on for size. How does it feel?
Commentator 33 provided us with the right approach in the first paragraph of her posting: all of this “should be discussed in our faculty senates one by one.”
Indeed. That is called “shared governance” and it is the basis of the tenure system.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 11, 04:31 PM · #
Let me see if I’ve got this straight:
Faculty operating under a system of tenure and “shared governance” have been doing their jobs so badly that, as of just a couple of years ago, only a fifth of their four-year grads and a third of their two-year grads could figure out if their cars could make it home on the amount of gas left in the tank. So the solution is keep the system that allows the sinecured goldbricks and incompetents who taught and governed us into this mess to stay undisturbed in their jobs for life if only they’ll create their own little lists of “learning objectives,” “learning goals,” and 147 things their students “will” do, and check the boxes on the forms.A few niggling questions, though:
* Do these dire stats in arithmetic extend to readin’ ‘n’ writin,’ too?
* Is not some of this attributable to the failings of high schools—even middle schools and grammar schools?
* Do not conscientious faculty (who, we hope, constitute the majority) practice ongoing, de facto “outcomes assessment” all the time, by finding out what students learned, or didn’t learn, in their courses and making the appropriate adjustments?
* If faculty have indeed been teaching effectively but just not collecting data on that effectiveness, wouldn’t the problem simply be how to gather a coherent “assessment,” and NOT figuring out how to reverse a horrible “outcome”?
*If, on the other hand, even the rewards of tenure and the morale of shared governance haven’t been able to get faculty to teach effectively, then why on earth would anybody want to trust those same faculty to go DIY with OA?
* Why are administrators—most of them drawn from the ranks of the professoriat and most of them bound to return to it before they retire—so universally thought of as villains in these posts?
* If administrators are as villainous as these posts make it seem, how did they get that way—genes, the job, crushing failure in their careers as scholars, alien abduction? (Note: the ranks of administrators are waxing female very rapidly, so ditch that reflex image of Col. Klink when you’re trying to figure out what makes the asst. provost such a creep.)
* Just curious, but what’s Anti-hypocrisy advocate’s gig? I’ll prime the pump by saying I’m an out-of-academe former full professor who was everything from an adjunct to an instructor to a visitor along the way—all in the fuzzier end of the humanities at both mid-tier and “flagship” universities. Never been an administrator. White male, so I accept the slings and arrows, etc. Would love to know similar about AHA, if it wouldn’t blow his/her cover.
By the way, I don’t think Woodrow Wilson was ever president of Columbia, was he?
— LuckyJim · Apr 11, 09:35 PM · #
Of course — sliip of the fingers. WW was president of Princeton. (Whatever was I thinking? A sibling’s alma mater, no less.)
Do feel free to go to the link provided in 34 to read the summary of the Pew-AIR study. Reading-based literacy wasn’t too much to write home about, either (if you’ll pardon the puns).
Clearly there’s enough “blame” for students’ poor performance to go all the way around — higher ed inherits students with poor skills from the K-12 system and then often does little to improve them.
The sky-rocketing cost of a college education keeps the majority of post-secondary students working up to 30 hours a week in paid jobs, often at/for the university itself — a serious obstacle to good academic performance. So, blame the administration for the sky-rocketing costs which are the result of their excellent management skills — and which certainly aren’t due to the high wages and benefits granted to adjuncts.
Given that up to 70% of all faculty are contingent, it’s a fair bet that tenured faculty haven’t produced this undergraduate mess by themselves, of course. Contingent and tenure-tracking faculty often inflate grades out of fear of the student evaluations used by the administration to make retention decisions. (In a tenureless institution, this pressure would likely only increase, of course.)
As more and more administrations interfere with the faculty grading process, changing protested grades (or withdrawing students from a course after the course has ended — a clever ploy which has passed muster in more than one Federal court), the increasingly corporatized and consumer-oriented university is mass-producing — well, one begins to get the picture.
BTW Faculty who think that none of their grades has ever been changed should think again. Usually the computerized or hand-scored grade sheet is not tampered with; the student’s actual transcript would have to be viewed to see the change. I have so many colleagues, with and without tenure, whose grades have been altered, at different institutions, that I’ve lost count.
The one thing that American higher education does pretty much the best in the world is graduate education — which, ironically, foreign students take the best advantage of, with their often superior first-degree preparation.
Assessment, by the way, is generally of programs not of individual courses; however, individual courses are often retro-fitted to form the desired progression to the “outcome”: in the end, general education, or “a major”, for example.
Thus, for assessment to function properly, it must be a truly collegial function in which the faculty of a discipline/program/department agree upon desired norms and outcomes as well as the curricular plan to achieve them. In other words, top-down assessment is doomed to fail as a corrective of both real and perceived ills.
And as for my “gig”, just think of me as Zorro ;-).
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 11, 11:48 PM · #
I’m with AHA on the cost of a college education. But it’s too pat to palm the blame off on the administration’s lack of management skills. (If that’s where the blame does lie, that’s an argument for bringing in real managers—from big non-profits as well as the business world—with MBAs and the like, instead of promoting anthropology professors to vice-president.) Private colleges cost a lot by their nature. Sure, Harvard could dip into its endowment and practically pay people to attend, but most private colleges don’t have that kind of cushion. The high cost of public universities is fairly recent (I can remember when they charged only nominal “fees” instead of tuition) and it’s entirely due to state legislatures refusing to tax enough to make hefty tuition avoidable. Legislatures are elected, of course, but we wouldn’t want to say that the current situation represents the will of the people, would we? Nope, got to be a conspiracy.
According to AHA, contingent and untenured full-time faculty get to plead “guilty with an explanation” (they used to let you do that in traffic court): good grades for crappy student performance for fear that bad student evaluations will cost them their jobs. Which prompts a couple of questions: 1) OK, their students don’t deserve the A’s they’re handing out, but how come they still can’t figure out the gasoline riddle? I mean, these faculty are still actually teaching, aren’t they? 2) Why is there no appreciable drop-off in grade inflation with tenured professors?
Accrediation may be of programs and not courses, but OA of individual courses is what the accreditors use to decide whether to accredit or not. (And these accreditors, incidentally include a large number of tenured faculty from other colleges, doing it for…the bucks? the c.v. line? the power? the thrill of being a quisling?) As for “a truly collegial function in which the faculty of a discipline/program/department agree upon desired norms and outcomes as well as the curricular plan to achieve them” (an airy lift from an as-we-go-forth commencement speech if I’ve ever heard one): that’s what faculty already do in their curriculum committees. It’s just that the OA industry wants, impossibly, the “outcomes” in courses in biology, poetry, French literature, ceramics, and physical therapy to be measurable on the same chart so that it’s intelligible to the likes of Margaret Spellings. A procrustean bed, I think they call it.
If American undergraduate education is so bad, how is American graduate education so good? Americans are still the preponderance of graduate students. How did they manage to figure out how much gasoline it takes to get to class? Just smarter by nature? Stayed awake in class? Were taught by fearless tenured faculty and not those quivering adjuncts? (Note: a lot of departments and colleges love foreign graduate students not so much because they’re better prepared, but because they arrive pre-subsidized and pay full retail.)
If retroactive grade changing is as rampant as AHA says it is, then it’s the biggest scandal in higher ed since the advent of the “athletic scholarship,” and AHA should get credit for breaking the story. Seriously, it’s worth at least a whole bunch of academic Woodwords and Bernsteins going out there and digging, and a special issue of the CHE at the very least, when they come back with the dirt.
I wish I had a clever comeback to the “Zorro” remark, but I don’t. Good one. But we now know, however, that AHA either comes from enough privilege to bankroll a Princeton education or that the family is flooded with smart genes. Pride goeth before the unmasking.
— LuckyJim · Apr 12, 07:36 AM · #
There are some excellent points in comment 37.
For public education, the support of the state legislature is indeed crucial — and they have been asking for proof that their dollars are efficiently used before upping the payments. More evidence of the corporatization of the university.
However, it’s an almost counter-intuitive fact that, for many poorer students, private education is more affordable. The way the financial aid packages are established, the bright but not financially secure student often has a better chance of not having to work so long at a paid job if s/he enrolls in a private institution. This view would also seem to be supported by the longer times to graduation in many/most of the publics. But again, this is not under the tenured faculty’s control.
As for that grade inflation, well, I was saving this point for later: yes, indeed the grades of tenured faculty are inflated as well, for at least three reasons (not necessarily in order of importance):
In large lecture classes, tenure-stream faculty use student TAs to grade other students — and sometimes even undergrad TAs to grade other undergrads. Indeed, there’s another scandal waiting to break — in fact, I’ve asked Marc Bousquet to ask around at the MN conference this weekend. That brings us back to the point about contingent labor’s grade inflation.
The second reason for their grade inflation is pressure from the administration on student retention via grading pressures (you bet someone should break that scandal — even AAUP, which solemnly reports on those court cases where administrations got off scott free changing grades, haven’t had the guts to survey the membership, even, on the issue).
The third reason brings us back to the administration which usually autocratically controls both salary raises and merit raises, with faculty committee recommendations usually only advisory in nature, by law, custom, or collective bargaining agreement (this helped Kovacevich to win her pay discrimination case against Kent State, BTW).
That brings us back to those wonderful administrations — which don’t have the courage to initiate dismissal proceedings against “dead wood” faculty, but do indeed exercise the power of the purse against faculty they don’t like (and this is often retaliation for the exercise of their academic freedom and free speech).
Interesting point about CEO’s from industry. When I mentioned specific industries in comment 14, I wasn’t making that up. The Missouri system now has a president of one of the campuses a former CEO of Sprint, and Monroe Community College is rigging the committees to give the nod to the head of a Burger King franchise. So, stay tuned: higher ed is on the verge of a corporatization spree beyond our wildest imaginings. Don’t forget that the First Amendment doesn’t apply in industry — so those “values” of bottom line uber alles will not bode well for academic freedom in a tenureless institution.
Sure, accreditors look at courses — but as part of the programs. Indeed, some individual programs (e.g. chemistry and the ACS, TEAC and NCATE for education, ACSB for business) have accreditation processes for themselves which operate on a form of peer review with standards. (N.B. TEAC and ACSB do not have absolute standards but rather relative ones: tell us your goals and we’ll tell you how well you’re achieving them). These sorts of accreditations easily trump a single course’s OA weakness in the larger institutional accreditation game.
As for those outside accreditation teams (yeah, been there, done that), they generally operate on expenses reimbursement only. BUT they are almost exclusively chaired by college and university presidents — so guess who gets to write the final report of the team’s review?
American graduate education is so good in comparison to the more serious shortcomings of graduate education in other countires. It’s a comparative standard. In general, the secondary level supercedes ours in most industrialized nations (and often includes a thirteenth year and a strict standardized examination which measures/ensures general education knowledge). After that, the variability of quality sets in.
For example, for a time, at least (it may still be the case), the German doctorate was not considered the equivalent of the American PhD by the American College of Registrars because the research level and standards of the German doctorate were inferior to those in most American graduate schools. (One must remember here that the German system has a second post-doctorate thesis requirement, the “Habilitation” which qualifies one for a university professorship when one is available and the candidate gets the “call”/“Ruf”).
One more “dig” on that grade change scandal that is burgeoning behind the scenes: one might wish to consider that the AAUP’s new propensity for hiring more than one former college president to positions of leadership (e.g. Bowen, the last AAUP General Secretary) might have something to do with the investigatory neglect of this particular “inconvenient truth.”
As for the Ivies and wealth and “smarts”, well, you also forgot “legacy admissions” — just thought I’d add that for the sake of completeness.
And, by the way, the legendary Zorro, while a strict egalitarian, had some blue blood in his veins — which helped him to understand some among those enemies of freedom far better than they themselves could imagine.
AHA-Erlebnis
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 12, 08:46 AM · #
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?
Easy to say all that from her lofty position while administrators, half of them being incompete dolts can terrorize adjunct and contract professors – savng sacks of money in the process.
Has Professor Laurie (before her tenure) ever had an argument – OK, make it a discussion – about what she talking about in her specialties with an administrator with an MBA from NYU?
“Viablity of beauty in a post Darwinian age”? Meaning what?
“Tyranny of outcomes assessment.”? Meaning what?
And of course the “meaning of abstact painting”. Most of the people who create this stuff have no clue what they are doing until a tenured, professor explains it to them.
— AW · Apr 14, 01:14 PM · #
If “Prof Lauri” were an adjunct instructor, lived over a garage near school to save commuting costs, and made what Andrew-Wyeth-like art she could on her office desk because she couldn’t afford a studio, what she says about the debilities of tenure would STILL be as true, or not, as they are. Argumentum ad somethingum.
— LuckyJim · Apr 17, 02:46 PM · #
“Nauseam” indeed.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 19, 03:57 PM · #