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Friday, August 17, 2007
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Inauspicious Start UD sometimes wonders how the extra-professorial world reacts to the things academic insiders write to each other. Here, for instance, is the first paragraph of the first column by a guy who's writing a series of pieces about tenure for the Chronicle of Higher Education: Everyone on the tenure track should get tenure. I think so not because I'm either an academic socialist or a delusional optimist. Rather, I hold that if you have the brains, skills, guts, initiative, and self-awareness to survive a serious, accredited doctoral program at a research university (sorry, mail-order Ph.D.'s don't count) then you should be able to get tenure -- somewhere. Tenure's already at least a puzzle and at most a scandal to many Americans. It's a secretive process ("[M]any faculty votes are secret -- and only revealed by a lawsuit," the columnist notes.) by which the overwhelming number of tenure-track assistant professors at American colleges and universities are granted lifetime guaranteed employment. From the point of view of many people outside of universities, tenure looks bizarre. Maybe it is. Maybe people who argue for a radical revision of tenure, people like Richard Chait, are right. Chait's been arguing for years that universities should retain tenure in some instances, but also introduce a wide range of other forms of contractual employment. This reasonable and well-grounded view has generated hysteria among academics, whose view, as Chait says, is give me tenure or give me death. Yet he points out that In reality, about one-half of all American faculty members (when part-timers and adjuncts are included) do not have tenure, a fact that calls into question the unbreakable bond between academic freedom and tenure, and more than justifies efforts to find other ways to guarantee academic freedom for all members of the faculty. Ironically, under the current system, many junior faculty members feel that the quest for tenure and the perceived need to accommodate the preferences and prejudices of senior colleagues significantly limit their academic freedom. Chait notes the irony of intellectuals who in other circumstances insist on rational argumentation suspending this insistence when the subject of tenure arises. He calls for "no unexamined assumptions, no unsubstantiated claims, and no blind allegiance to convention" as the academy considers the question of tenure. ...Which brings UD back to that opening paragraph in the Chronicle, a model of unexamined assumptions and unsubstantiated claims. Everyone on the tenure track should get tenure. Uh, why? Because if you've "survived" (the word tells you how excruciating graduate school is) a "serious" (whatever that means) and "accredited" (standards for school accreditation are so notoriously high) university you must be so smart and brave as never to have to worry about being fired. Think of all the universities in the United States, tons of them with so-so, not very selective Ph.D. programs in shaky fields. Think of how seldom anyone fails their dissertation defense examination. The reality is that our schools produce many weak Ph.D.s, and that in many cases the granting of tenure for these people is the final link in a chain of automatic approvals. It's just that this one has permanent implications for the university that has hired them. It's truly unhelpful for the Chronicle writer to launch his series on tenure with a blind assurance that all must have prizes. |