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Sunday, May 29, 2005
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TENURE: CURSE OF THE RULING CLASS "I just want to know," Morris Zapp asks an Italian university professor in David Lodge‘s Small World, "how you manage to reconcile living like a millionaire with being a Marxist." Fulvia, who was smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder, waved it dismissively in the air. "A very American question, if I may say so, Morris. Of course I recognize the contradictions in our way of life, but those are the very contradictions characteristic of the last phase of bourgeois capitalism, which will eventually cause it to collapse. By renouncing our own little bit of privilege, we should not accelerate by one minute the consummation of that process, which has its own inexorable rhythm and momentum, and is determined by the pressure of mass movements, not by the puny actions of individuals. Since in terms of dialectical materialism it makes no difference to the 'istorical process whether Ernesto and I, as individuals, are rich or poor, we might as well be rich, because it is a role that we know 'ow to perform with a certain dignity. Whereas to be poor with dignity, poor as our Italian peasants are poor, is something not easily learned, something bred in the bone, through generations." Most Americans avert their eyes from the ugly business of ostentatious privilege within academia, as they avert them from the larger ugliness of American ostentation. We don’t like it when Peter Singer tells us we’re selfish shits who should give most of our money to Oxfam. We want to drive luxurious gas guzzlers and have second homes, and we’re not at all keen on arguments about who suffers and how they suffer because of our desires. Academics may talk of higher things, but few are any different from ordinary Americans in this species of bad faith, and the tenure system - a spectacular and unique privilege in this land of privilege - arguably makes them worse than ordinary Americans. Many American university students, for instance, have had the experience of taking a class with a Fulvia. Their anthro professor is a firebrand feminist, a woman of the left who expresses her disdain for greedy privilege-mongering Republicans with their manicured golf courses and gated communities. She dresses down - printed gunny sacks or lived-in jeans - and wears no makeup. Gradually, however, her student discovers that she drives a Range Rover, lives in a big house, has her children at Andover, and is married to an attorney who helps rich people hide their assets. Gradually the student comes to resent the aura of complacency this woman carries with her, a complacency born of lifetime guaranteed comfortable employment. Indeed it eventually occurs to this student that one might prefer the unhypocritical wealth and prestige acquisition of that ugly Republican to the shameless dishonesty of this professor. “The information society,” writes David Brooks, “is the only society in which false consciousness is at the top. For it is an iron rule of any university that the higher the tuition and more exclusive the admissions, the more loudly the denizens profess their solidarity with the oppressed. The more they objectively serve the right, the more they articulate the views of the left.” When Ward Churchills and Timothy Shortells happen at universities -- there must be a word for this, along the lines of “bimbo eruption” -- dimbo eruption? dumbo eruption? -- it rivets national attention to the increasingly-difficult-to-justify tenure system. People realize all over again that it doesn‘t matter how dim or how dumb he is -- if a professor has tenure, tant pis. Take a story like this, in an Oregon newspaper: “ INSTRUCTORS ENJOY STRONG JOB SECURITY Rules protect professors, even those with criminal records Statesman Journal May 23, 2005 Tenured professors are guaranteed a steady job as long as they keep a few things in mind: Show up for class. Do your work. Don't violate any laws or policies. Even when those requirements are not met, however, administrators must prove that a professor is neglectful or breaking laws or violating policies -- or in rare cases, is deemed incompetent -- in order to strip him or her of tenure. Actually firing that professor, especially a union-represented, tenured professor, can turn into an arduous and time-consuming task. "It is extremely rare for a tenured faculty member to be terminated," said Ben Rawlins, the general counsel for the Oregon University System. Instead, a professor usually receives a lesser punishment, and universities keep secret their investigations of misconduct, citing exemptions to Oregon's public-records laws. Parents and prospective students have no way of finding out whether a professor in the state university system has a history of sexually harassing students. Parents and students also cannot find out whether a professor has been accused of, found guilty of or disciplined for sexual harassment. At the seven universities in the state system, faculty disciplinary records are considered confidential. The tenure system, which for years has been seen as the best way to preserve academic freedom, prevents school administrators from dismissing professors unless they commit a particularly egregious offense. Union representation often compounds the difficulty of firing a tenured professor. Those conditions provide a climate that keeps professors, including those with criminal records and reputations for sexually harassing students, on campus. That can put students at risk. Officials at Western Oregon University did not try to strip professor Gary Welander of his tenure, even after the Statesman Journal reported that the 59-year-old had been convicted of sexually abusing a child when he was a Portland-area elementary teacher. As a professor of teacher education, Welander mentors and instructs future teachers and is permitted to visit public elementary schools where his students teach. WOU administrators disciplined Welander earlier this year after a former WOU student filed a $12.6 million lawsuit claiming that he sexually harassed her. He currently is serving an unpaid, one-term suspension. Confidential records Privacy laws restrict university administrators from talking about sexual-harassment complaints against professors. Students who file claims, however, are free to talk about their complaint unless they sign a confidentiality agreement. Former Portland State University graduate students Fang Zheng and Qiong Li agreed to keep quiet about their sexual-harassment allegations against a professor as part of a financial settlement offered by the state. University administrators will not disclose whether any punishment was taken against the professor, Yih Chyun Jenq. Jenq also agreed not to discuss the claims against him. He still teaches at PSU. In Welander's case, WOU officials refused to publicly release findings of their inquiry into his conduct. Requests for other related documents were deemed "personal/personnel" and exempt of Oregon's public-records law, said Judy Vanderburg, the affirmative-action officer and director of human resources at WOU. … The punishment will cost Welander nearly half of his $65,232 salary, he said. He plans to return to his teaching position at the Monmouth campus in the fall. … Earning tenure and having union representation further strengthen a professor's job security. By then, if university administrators learn of a professor's criminal record, they likely will be unable to dismiss the professor unless another serious offense is committed. … Former WOU English professor Dean Bethea's case perhaps best represents the rarity of a tenured professor who is fired. Bethea was convicted in 2002 for assaulting a student during an off-campus party. The university's faculty union represented Bethea for months as he fought to save his job. In the end, the university's decision to fire him was upheld by an arbitrator in August 2003, slightly more than a year after the incident occurred.” “Why,” asks Victor Davis Hanson, “does this strange practice linger on?” If it’s there to guarantee free and unfettered thought, he writes, why is thought in our universities monolithic? “Why then does uniformity of belief characterize the current tenured faculty? Contemporary universities are among the most homogeneous of all American institutions, at least in attitudes toward controversial issues of race, gender, class and culture. Faculty senate votes aren't just at odds with American popular opinion; they often resemble more the 90 percent majorities that we see in illiberal Third-World stacked plebiscites.” Tenure, further, has contributed to the maintenance of the university as a strikingly unjust hierarchy: “Our universities are also two-tiered institutions of winners and losers. Despite the populist rhetoric of professors, exploitation occurs daily under their noses. Perennial part-time lecturers, many with the requisite Ph.D.s, often teach the same classes as their tenured counterparts. Yet they receive about 25 percent of the compensation per course and without benefits. Universities cannot remove expensive tenured "mistakes" or public embarrassments, but they can turn to cheaper and more fluid part-time teaching.” As for job security, “the warning that, in our litigious society, professors would lack fair job protection is implausible. Renewable five-year agreements — outlining in detail teaching and scholarly expectations - would still protect free speech, without creating lifelong sinecures for those who fail their contractual obligations.” No, what tenure has wrought is “a mandarin class that says it is radically egalitarian, but in fact insists on an unusual privilege that most other Americans do not enjoy. In recompense, the university has not delivered a better-educated student, or a more intellectually diverse and independent-thinking faculty. Instead it has accomplished precisely the opposite.” Max Boot agrees: “Churchill and his professorial colleagues are beneficiaries of the most ironclad protection for mountebanks, incompetents and sluggards ever devised. It's called tenure. To fire a tenured professor requires a legal battle that can make the Clinton impeachment seem like a small-claims dispute by comparison. Even if there is clear evidence of wrongdoing, professors are entitled to endless procedural safeguards against being fired. The University of Colorado wanted to offer Churchill a generous financial settlement to leave voluntarily, but that idea has been torpedoed by regents angry at the idea of buying off this buffoon. An epic struggle looms in which Churchill and his numerous faculty defenders will nail their colors to the mast of ‘academic freedom.’” He also agrees with Hanson on the intellectual freedom argument: “The rigid ideological intolerance of American universities makes a mockery of tenure's primary justification: It is supposed to allow scholars to pursue their work without outside pressure. Professors like Churchill are all too happy to take advantage of this freedom to mock off-campus pieties. But few dare to disagree with the received wisdom of the faculty club, where the political spectrum runs all the way from left to far-left. The primary practical effect of tenure is to make universities almost ungovernable. Those ostensibly in charge — presidents and trustees — come and go; the faculty remains, serene and untouchable. This helps to explain some of the dysfunctions that mar big-time universities, such as the overemphasis on publishing unintelligible articles and the under-emphasis on teaching undergraduates. Armies of junior faculty and graduate-student drudges have been enlisted to assume the bulk of the teaching load because most of the tenured grandees think that instructing budding stockbrokers and middle managers is beneath them. And there is almost nothing that administrators can do about it because mere laziness is no grounds for removing someone with a lifetime employment guarantee. The solution is obvious: Abolish tenure. Subject professors to the discipline of the marketplace like almost everyone else. But of course this is an idea too radical to be seriously entertained on campus. Comparing the United States with Nazi Germany, as Ward Churchill routinely does, doesn't raise an eyebrow among the intelligentsia, but suggesting that there may be something fundamentally wrong with a system that rewards a Ward Churchill is considered too outre to discuss.” Amy Ridenour concurs: "Rarely do I criticize another for being old-fashioned, but I find the very notion of tenure distastefully medieval. Literally. In the Middle Ages there were few institutions offering scholars the opportunity to ponder -- not just few alternatives to universities, but very few universities, period. If that were the case today, perhaps tenure for the purpose of protecting academic freedom would make some sense. But it isn't, and it doesn't. A simple question: If professors at universities need tenure to feel free to think, how is it that think-tanks do so well without it?" That’s one side of it, and UD has more than a little sympathy with these arguments. But then there’s this, from Winfield Myers: “Recently, a friend who teaches at a major state university told me that he and some of his colleagues -- all tenured full professors, all known to be conservatives -- would have been gone ‘long ago’ were it not for the protection that tenure affords. It's the only thing keeping him in his job, he said, and despite the abuses it can bring, nothing else could protect like-minded scholars from being tossed out by the left-wing majority. I think he's correct in this, and that conservatives who want to see tenure abolished should think through the implications of opening up academe to an even more thorough scrubbing of conservatives or libertarians than we've already seen. Granted, tenure is abused -- massively -- by both the entrenched left and the drunk, the lazy, and the incompetent. I've known dead wood who fit some, or even all, of those descriptions, and their presence on campus is a disgrace. But until some way is devised to protect professors whose politics are deemed beyond the pale by sanctimonious left-wingers, tenure works to preserve their careers. Perhaps some means can be worked out that would allow universities to fire those who should never have been granted tenure to begin with, or who have abused the system since winning their lifetime positions. Surely, some means of holding professors accountable can be devised that would allow a sense of responsibility and obligation into campus life while protecting the minority of true radicals -- those who uphold high standards and who lean to the right. Reform is long overdue in higher education; let's just be careful not to leave embattled conservatives vulnerable.” Thomas Reeves says the same thing: “What about the protection of intellectual freedom? In fact, there is more to academic life than just the knee-jerk leftist reaction that is often celebrated in the media. Genuine thought goes on everywhere in academia and can be viewed in learned journals and books and heard in untold numbers of seminars and lecture halls. (The University of California System spends $30 million a year on scholarly journals.) Many of the best professors spend their lives seeking the truths of the universe, nature, and human conduct; indeed, that’s why they entered the academic profession. When the responsible scholarship of serious and qualified scholars clashes with conventional thought, it should be protected, for in that way alone do we advance. Heresy has long played an important role in history. Ask the historians of science. Today, on campus, conservatives are heretics, often challenging the established principles of orthodox leftist ideology with scholarship and bold thinking. It is a dangerous business, for the people who talk the most about diversity and tolerance are rarely in the mood to welcome dissent. As an abundance of literature shows, and experience verifies, conservatives are often persecuted on campus. They must sometimes mask their beliefs in order to be hired. But tenure, once achieved, protects them. Eliminate that protection and watch conservative heads roll, both at the hands of administrators and fellow faculty members. Instead of arguing for the elimination of tenure, conservatives should be defending it strenuously, for without its protection the heresy of thinking outside leftist orthodoxy would be eliminated. Tenure may need adjustments; conservatives should demand more objectivity and fairness in the process. But let us not abandon what has long served us well. Today, the tenure system enables free minds to step beyond the iron curtain of political correctness without fear of serious reprisal. Tenure is not one of the major problems in contemporary academia. Indeed, it is a blessing for those, all across the ideological scale, who are interested in thoughtful scholarship. Intellectual freedom is among the most valuable features of Western civilization, and we threaten it at our peril.” UD tends toward the defense of tenure for intellectual freedom reasons; but she thinks that tenure as it now plays out at a number of high-profile campuses is a symbolic disaster for a professoriate which already looks to many Americans hypocritical and over-indulged. |