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Monday, January 02, 2006
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A Pallid Brief for Tenure Via Cliopatria, this opinion piece in the Boston Globe defending tenure isn’t very convincing. What jumps out right away is the absence of any reference to the actual reason tenure exists - the protection of intellectual freedom. Not a word about it. Instead, this curious polemic spends a lot of time describing the non-controversial way in which tenure-track candidates are scrutinized for hire. It then says, rightly, that the trend toward replacing tenured and tenurable professors with non-tenurable adjuncts is a bad thing because adjuncts are ill-paid and have little incentive to be dedicated to their schools beyond the classroom. But this point doesn’t defend tenure so much as the reformation of job conditions for contract faculty. It’s perfectly possible to have, for instance, longterm but not permanent professors who are paid well and have excellent work environments (sabbaticals, good salaries, reasonable course loads, etc.). Nor, with the scandalous college literacy study fresh in everyone’s mind, does it do any good to state flatly that “Tenure, and the commitments it demands of faculty members who have earned it, remains the best system we have for ensuring the highest quality education for our college and university students.” I mean, I suppose you could say those rates wouldn’t have dropped if we hadn’t been dropping tenured faculty, but I doubt it. It’s not adjuncts’ fault that curricula are crappy, grades inflated, etc. It’s also a curious statement to make given the biggest news out of this year’s MLA convention: the organization’s acknowledgement that precisely those commitments demanded of tenured faculty - most notoriously the insistence, in many departments, on the regular excretion of obscurity-bound monographs - are pointless and destructive and must end. |