Even though the trend is difficult to fight, we still have to fight it. The defeatism represented in this interview is one of the factors that made the tenured professors do nothing while their institutions increasingly turned to the “corporate” model.

We should also remember that the boundary between tenured faculty and administrators is quite porous. Many deans are tenured professors to begin with. And if not, they often will be after they step down.

Voice of Cynicism, at 7:50 am EDT on June 11, 2008

An Approaching “Tipping Point”

The thought I did not read in this interview, and suspect is not in the book due to the tone of the interview, is the approaching tipping point for contingent faculty. This “tipping point” is when the increasing numbers of contingent faculty and the gathering angst over their abuse get sufficiently large that they collectively decide to take more control over their destiny. Consider a university or community college with 70% or 80% contingent faculty. These contingents may be paid 50% of the tenured salary per class, have few if any benefits, and no real job security. When the words “We value our adjuncts” start to ring hollow, when salaries are so low an adjunct must choose between food and health insurance, and the service pins at the year-end banquet are seen as a joke, what do you suppose will happen? It will take the example of one contingent labor leader organizing their members, gathering allies in the community, and shouting the equivalent of “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more!” to scare the pants off of administration and open up a “flood gate” of labor activity. And what do you think will happen when we have that first real contingent faculty strike? People don’t want to talk about it, including some contingent leaders who lack vision or courage, but it will happen. And when it does, the university or community college will shut down. Who will teach Modern Physics, Chaucer, or World History when the contingents are on the picket line? Will tenured faculty join them? And what do you think the students will do? You can dismiss what I’ve said, but the tipping point IS approaching. Plan on it.

Barry Edwards, Oregon COCAL, at 9:30 am EDT on June 11, 2008

Not so sure

Professor Donoghue absolves faculty of responsibility for the proliferation of adjunct workers by saying that “[a]t most institutions, professors have a lot of input in the hiring of other professors, but not in the hiring of adjuncts, either the people themselves or the terms of their contracts.” I don’t know that Donoghue’s experience has been, but I must say that this statement doesn’t strike me as at all accurate. Department chairs hire adjuncts, assign them to courses, and renew their contracts. They are more intimately involved in the process of hiring and firing adjunct instructors than anyone else.

It’s easy to blame administrators and corporate management styles for this problem. But it must be acknowledged that professors themselves are not without responsibility. Far from undermining working conditions for tenure-track faculty, the use of adjuncts has often allowed faculty even at institutions without PhD programs to insulate themselves from teaching large numbers of lower-level “service” courses. Without adjuncts, the work experience at most colleges would be quite different.

All the talk about how adjunct labor has weakened the profession masks the reality that those lucky enough to obtain tenure-track work have done quite well under this system. This is not a defense of it, and indeed I think it’s telling that when faculty address this issue the discussion tends to be more about them than about the real harm done to students and to institutions when large numbers of classes are staffed by powerless, demoralized and literally impoverished instructors. If you’re curious about the causes of grade inflation and diminishing standards, look no further.

Sid, at 9:35 am EDT on June 11, 2008

Why Tenure? Since you asked....

...I can tell you that one argument in favor of tenure is that it protects academic freedom, something of special importance in a place where the job can and should involve challenging people to hold their most cherished beliefs and values up to scrutiny. There is a natural and unfortunate backlash to this, particularly in America, where students and their parents gripe that one should not have to reflect on or challenge one’s own thoughts or beliefs or arguments—indeed, this is the core of the Horowitz position that cloaks itself in the words “academic freedom", leading to much confusion for outsiders. This backlash is an occupational hazard for faculty, and they do not deserve to be caught in the bind of on the one hand being charged with challenging minds to think more deeply, analytically, and ethically and on the other being scorned by insular students and parents who can’t be bothered to engage in the very experience they signed up for, those same people being the ones who lobby for the good teacher’s dismissal for daring to do one’s own job.

Gorgias, at 10:15 am EDT on June 11, 2008

Facts matter

” .. Among the professions, only the clergy and the officer ranks of the military seem to be immune to the erosion of tenure or its equivalent ..”

Excuse me — my West Point graduate-neighbor just left the career Army. He speaks of many things — but particularly of rampant “political correctness” and dense political bureaucracy. No sign of “tenure.”

My Protestant minister-neighbor is currently in the middle of a battle between pro-traditional values (93%) and pro-gay marriage (7%) groups. If his summer attendance lags, he could be out. No sign of “tenure.”

IMO — any “last professors” should look at themselves, regarding how their lives turned out. Obvious gross over-production of humanities PhDs, obvious gross over-production of colleges, lack of deeply-felt alumni support (think Ken Burns) — who’s at fault?

Frank, at 10:20 am EDT on June 11, 2008

Tenure or ?

Years ago, I left a tenured position. It was either that or leave my marriage. I spent the next 13 years as an adjunct in one of those research universities where famous faculty teach one class a year (!) but the adjuncts teach only four—a dream position for most adjuncts. What I learned during that time is what I suspected as a doctoral candidate: when the colleges and universities stopped acting in loco parentis to the students, the retired business and military types taking over the administration were so relieved that they began to think of other ways to lighten their responsibilities while making money. The faculty were and are the next inevitable targets.

ProfNoMore, at 10:45 am EDT on June 11, 2008

Tenure Inside: Save tenure by getting students to value it

What if most ranking lists were driven in part by percentage of tenured and tenure track faculty?

What if colleges advertised their high percentages, and what if higher ed in general pushed the notion that students get a better education from tenured and tenure track professors than from adjuncts?

Then students and parents and legislators would demand that tenure stays.

At the very least, we would have a set of institutions at the higher end that distinguish themselves by having more tenure track faculty. This higher end would be large, not just Ivy league private schools. It would pull up the lower end as even they would try to not to have too few tenure track faculty. This is just marketing the “brand” of tenure. Such marketing works. Remember “Intel Inside” to sell Intel chips inside of all kinds of computers? This is “Tenure Inside".

I understand there is a snobbishness in this argument — it says that adjuncts aren’t as good as tenure track, which adjuncts will argue is unfair. And it says that schools with many adjuncts aren’t as good as schools with mostly tenure track, which schools full of adjuncts will say is elitist.

Well, our profession’s sympathy for the conditions of our contingent workforce, and the contingent workforce’s demands to be treated as equals have contributed to lowering the standard to which we hold our institutions.

It’s time to proudly tell the world that tenure means better.

Urban Prof, Assoc Professor, at 11:00 am EDT on June 11, 2008

Tenure as a New Mode of Corporate Discipline

For the last 19 years, I have taught part time at Eugene Lang College, a division of the New School. Until very recently, tenure at the New School was restricted to the institution’s Graduate Faculty (also known as the New School for Social Research). The institution was overwhelmingly adjunct-dependent, with adjuncts comprising over 95% of all teachers. Now we are seeing increased full-time hiring and, with it, a decision to “extend tenure across the university.” I have observed the ensuing mayhem with great interest from my perch as a unionized long-term faculty with reappointment rights under a path-breaking adjunct contract that began in 2005. Many full-time teachers in my division are in a panic as they confront the tenure review process. We have a large, hard-working arts faculty and many of these people are not considered “tenurable” because of tenure standards that are thought to be skewed in favor of traditional scholarship rather than artistic productivity or dedicated work in the classroom. Institutional support for junior faculty is sub-minimal; one such faculty member recently pointed out the likelihood that the only teachers who will be able to be productive enough to pass a tenure review may be those who are brought in with tenure from other institutions that do offer meaningful research support, course reductions, and so on. Many faculty are complaining bitterly of a lack of transparency in the tenuring process. The result has been the creation of a climate of highly politicized anxiety, even paranoia. Full-time teachers have gotten the message that they need to “watch what they say, watch what they do,” or they will be out the door. In such an atmosphere, few tenure-track faculty dare to question the increasingly corporate direction of the university, which lacks any effective governance structure. (There is a relatively new Faculty Senate, but it serves in a purely advisory capacity to the President and Provost.) It is very hard to believe that people who have been so effectively disciplined early in their careers will become effective critics of the corporate university model if and when they do finally grasp the prize of tenure.

I have often remarked that my contract-based reappointment rights give me, an adjunct, more effective academic freedom than is enjoyed by most of my full-time colleagues. I agree with author Marc Bousquet and several previous comments in this space that ORGANIZED contingent faculty must lead.”

Jan Clausen, Union Maid at Eugene Lang College-The New School, at 11:40 am EDT on June 11, 2008

WHY TENURE?

IHE Reader, your subsequent comments show that you had already made up your mind about this question and that your original request for arguments in defense of tenure was merely rhetorical. I’d still like to respond, and let me begin by conceding something: You’re right to note that the academic freedom argument, though valid in some instances, is ultimately quite weak as a justification for tenure. It can’t stand on its own, though it’s not as trivial as you make it out to be.

One of the best reasons for tenure comes from your original post. Here you make clear your belief that faculty should be evaluated by scores on student evaluations and by how much their enrollment numbers go up. Most college administrators certainly share your belief, and in the absence of tenure, they will no doubt continue to do so.

This argument makes sense if you see the function of colleges and universities as being the same as that of for-profit corporations. Traditionally, however, colleges have not been founded for the purpose of generating private profits. They are intended to deliver a service to the population — the best education possible — and I think we could agree that whatever practices serve this end are the ones colleges should pursue.

It would be difficult to argue that colleges could serve the purpose outlined above without a tenured faculty. As an educator, I need to be as impartial as I can, both in evaluating my students’ work and in evaluating the work of peers in my field. This is how standards are maintained. If my employment is contingent on the approval of teenagers who know nothing about my discipline (as you’ve suggested it should be), I can’t be the impartial judge of their work that I need to be in order to serve them best as an instructor. If I’m afraid of reprisals from more prominent members of my field, and therefore refrain from pointing out the inadequacies of their work when these arise, I can’t do my part to maintain the quality and rigor of scholarly knowledge. In other words, tenure and the work of a college professor are so bound up that you can’t take away the former and expect that the result will be education in any real sense of the word. We need to be free to give students and colleagues bad news when necessary because without this freedom, we’ll feel pressure not to tell them when they are wrong. This kind of pressure ultimately degrades the quality of academic work.

Finally, I must say that many of your assumptions about tenure and those who have it are simply incorrect. Tenured faculty are still rewarded for performance or penalized for the lack of it. They can be fired for misconduct or released when their departments cease to attract students. I suspect that when critics of tenure present the public with their vision of lazy tenured professors — “dead wood” as you say — they’re really describing inadvertently what they would do if they suddenly found themselves in such a position (or their exaggerated notion of it). The fact is that the hardest working faculty members at the three institutions I’ve taught at were older full professors. You don’t get tenure unless you’ve spent many, many years investing vast quantities of time — typically well over a decade if we include graduate school — into teaching, scholarly publishing and service, and in the process come up with evidence that your work is of value to your field. The drive to do good work doesn’t simply go away once the threat of being capriciously fired recedes into the background; for most, it becomes more potent than ever. Far from seeing the kind of security tenure affords as the special privilege of a select few, I do think that other industries could learn from our example. It’s a mistake to assume simply because this is the norm in most lines of work that the only way to get workers to perform well is to constantly terrorize them with the loss of their livelihood. Critics of tenure seem to imagine that you can run an organization well with an approach consisting of all stick and no carrot.

Sid, at 12:20 pm EDT on June 11, 2008

missing

I think an important part of the argument is missing. Many workers (like my parents who are baby boomers) used to take a job with a company and stay with that company their whole lives and that is no longer the case. Now a days, most young people stay at a job less than 5 years. I am 33, I finished my PhD at 27 and am in my 4th job in higher ed administration and have worked for two universities. I don’t want tenure, I like flexibility and mobility, that is what I value. The younger generation isn’t staying with companies or positions very long in the corporate world and I would bet that if you looked at the numbers more young faculty are moving around to different universities than in the past. Regardless of all of the other arguments, I think the change in workers’ (even PhDs’) attitudes about work and job security will have a major impact on the decline in tenure or tenurable positions.

Higher Ed Administrator, at 12:20 pm EDT on June 11, 2008

A third way

I’m glad Jan Clausen mentioned contracts and surprised that no one else did. They’re a promising option.

I spent nearly 30 years as a tenured prof and never stopped feeling very fortunate that I had actually caught the brass ring. But as time wore on, the fit between myself and my university grew worse and worse. The university grew more research-obsessed, corporate, and indifferent to student welfare as I became more and more deeply committed to new disciplines and subject areas that I had never been hired to teach. The result was that while I was professionally very active, my institution refused to acknowledge my contributions, with tenured colleagues claiming it was impossible for them to judge the quality of my work.

I stuck it out and recently retired — the first moment I could. Instead, I should have resigned years ago, but I was seduced by the security of tenure. Besides, there just isn’t a lot of mobility in the academic job market. The result is that I spent years being unhappy, and my institution spent years being unhappy with me.

How much better if we were all — profs and “adjuncts” — on long-term contracts with decent conditions and benefits. Periodic contract renewal would loosen up the logjam of the academic job market and make resorting possible, so that people who had grown away from the priorities or values of their current institution could look for a better fit and have some chance of actually finding an opening where someone else was ready to move on. Tenure conveys great privileges, but it also can damage the people who are lucky enough to get it in all kinds of ways: moral, professional, psychological. If we’re honest, fellow tenured profs, we should humbly admit that and help the ENTIRE academic community to establish a better alternative.

Beatrice, at 12:45 pm EDT on June 11, 2008

He’s absolutely wrong about other jobs

What about grade school and high school teachers? They are not casual labor. It is interesting that they are undervalued in one sense but have highly secure positions.

It is the education unions that make this possible, I suspect. The professorate would do well to unionize. However, the power of private universities and the security of their faculty will prevent professors from unionizing across the board. Public university professors need to unionize immediately. They should probably throw in their lot with primary and secondary ed teachers. If they are smart, they will. But professors ae rarely practical.

We should get rid of adjuncts and give people secure multi-year teaching contracts at decent salaries. The per class pay system is a travesty.

It’s unclear what to do about the fact that universities cannot staff their courses and still meet their bottom line without exploiting people in the most shameful way. Or is this the problem? This is what I wonder. Can universities continue without adjuncts? Is it the public underfunding of universities that started this whole thing to begin with?

I see no alternative to a two tier system though if universities still hope to do research, with teachers on the bottom and researchers on the top. That is, if I am right that the whole problem is there isn’t enough money to both teach students who enroll and keep the university running.

Anon, asst prof, at 1:50 pm EDT on June 11, 2008

why tenure? higher ed admin say s it all

I don’t mean this to be a denigration of higher ed administrator and what he or she wrote or does, but being a faculty member who is a bit closer to being over the hill at 50, I think the mobility described in that post, the sort of mobility often sought by administrators of all ages (career building it could be called) is one of the reasons faculty need tenure. Faculty are often the ones who stick around, the ones who dedicate themselves to the institution.

If an administrator comes in, builds his or her vita, and moves on after a few years, who is left with the aftermath, not always good? Primarily faculty and students. Faculty have to be in a position to stand up to transient administrators who may have more than the institution’s long-term well being on their mind. Not so many faculty are looking to pad their vita and move on to greener pastures, only to do so a few years later. We stick it out. We make the institution what it is over the long haul. We are the institutional memory that resists when the newly arrived dean or vp from tries to enact the failures of the past.

It’s not just the controversial thinking within the disciplines that need the protection of tenure. Institutions need people, faculty, who can stand up to potentially and obviously detrimental moves without fear of retaliation or job loss. I’m all for tenure for the benefits it brings to faculty, to the classroom and to the institution. Transient and career building administrators must have a countervailing force within the institution, and that’s the role of tenured faculty.

bradley bleck, instructor at Spokane Falls CC, at 2:00 pm EDT on June 11, 2008

Or the last professors to hide under their desks

OK. So we throw up our hands now and give up?

If education is business, treat it like business. Cut production, inventories, and access and make the product more valuable.

Anyone who has any taste for it should find other work now that pays a decent wage. For everyone’s sake, reduce the academic labor glut. Computer-based literacy can not replace us: it can only offer some convenience but will not substitute for face time with a passionate, learned, and committed professor. Electronically delivered education is too susceptible to profit motives at every step—and like any corporate product—like your red round tomatoes, for example—it runs the risk of declining quality and contamination.

If you must teach, you have a labor problem: get a union and be ready to go out on strike. But cover yourself: build non-academic consultancies around your specialties and charge like you mean it. Stop contributing time, effort, and resources to anything else. Never, ever stoop to attend an “adjunct appreciation” event: we’re not volunteers, but our persistence as contingent faculty in the face of abuse is the greatest gift we give our communities, our nation and our world. Equal pay for equal work is all the appreciation we want, need—or demand.

Rebecca, Contract Professor at Too many to list here, at 2:40 pm EDT on June 11, 2008

Whoa, hoss!

This has been an interesting thread. But this?

” .. They can be fired for misconduct or released when their departments cease to attract students ..”

Well .. theoretically yes. After spending upwards of $2,000,000.00/case.

https://www.cu.edu/content/backgr...sal-cause-proceedings-ward-churchill

Res ipsa loquitur.

L.L., at 4:25 pm EDT on June 11, 2008

Sorry About This Professor Langenberg

Needless to say, Don Langenberg, you are not missing a thing.

Just for the Hell of it – a euphemism for “I don’t have a life” – I decided to review the comments of those who “took up” IHE Reader’s request for assistance in finding “a good essay in favor of tenure.” Lest I fall into the class of everyone else – since apparently no one provided him with a citation – go here ...

http://www.essaytown.com/topics/academic_tenure_essays_papers.html

but, by the way, expect to shell out about ten bucks a page for the pronouncements of the self proclaimed “experts.”

In any event, here’s a summary of the respondents to Reader’s request:

1. T-bone tells us, “Tenured faculty members have an important role on campus and often perform functions and duties that cannot be performed by adjunct faculty members (e.g., serving on curriculum committees, faculty governance, outreach activities, etc.).

Oh, wow, that explains it all ... although I’m thinking we could outsource those responsibilities to Kelly Services and (academic) life would go on pretty much as it does right now.

2. Gorgias resorted to the tired old hack that “it protects academic freedom,” but several others shot that down, saying the number of times tenure protects someone who is controversial is so close to zero, that hardly justifies it. I would like to add that most of the controversial perspectives protected by tenure are not ones that challenge social mores, but ones that are completely off the wall; e.g., “In this course I will argue that Intelligent Design and Darwinian Evolution share a logical foundation based on scientific inquiry.”

3. Urban Prof says no more than “It’s time to proudly tell the world that tenure means better” and s/he has a cockamamie strategy for using the parents of prospective students to seal the deal. Whew!

4. R.F. says “Those judged to ‘add value’ of some special kind are awarded tenure. Which is not to say that it is a perfect selection process. It is not.”

If this were not silly enough in its own right – as if there were not thousands upon thousands of aspiring faculty who were denied tenure who would have added a tremendous amount of value in their own right – he goes on to make comments about non-academic job retention that make it obvious that s/he knows next to nothing about employment practices in the private sector.

5. Sid, who agrees that the academic freedom argument is weak, says “[higher education] is intended to deliver a service to the population — the best education possible — and I think we could agree that whatever practices serve this end are the ones colleges should pursue. It would be difficult to argue that colleges could serve the purpose outlined above without a tenured faculty. As an educator, I need to be as impartial as I can, both in evaluating my students’ work and in evaluating the work of peers in my field. This is how standards are maintained.”

So, unless I’m mistaken, those who have what it takes to be tenured have cornered the market on impartiality ... especially when it comes to evaluating the work of students (and peers). I hesitate to reveal my prejudices here – after all I am claiming only to summarize the comments of others – but I have seen so much academic bullshit – and I mean intellectual pap of the first order – eagerly embraced by the tenured colleagues of the tenured authors of the bullshit – and much of it at the so-called elite universities — it’s difficult for me to subscribed to Sid’s thesis that the tenured are any more impartial – not to mention any more intellectually astute — than the non-tenured.

In addition, Sid is impressed with the number of really hard working old timers amongst the tenured faculty of his acquaintance ... and I suppose that’s what distinguishes them from the indolent who don’t make it through the tenure process.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi8zyp1je9Y&feature=related

Sid’s pronouncements extolling the virtues of tenure are not confined to academics. He says, “Far from seeing the kind of security tenure affords as the special privilege of a select few, I do think that other industries could learn from our example.” Omigod, that’s what I’ve always aspired to be, the fully tenured Rush Limbaugh Deep Frier of Burger King Whoppers. I can see we have a lot to learn from academe!

I could go on ... not that those inspired to respond to IHE Reader’s request for an essay did so. An old friend of mine – indeed, a real scholar with a brilliant mind who was denied tenure by a department of individuals I considered to be mediocre at best, once told me that one could do 150% what the powers-that-be told you was expected of you and still be denied tenure, hit the nail on the head. There is as much – probably more – that is political in the tenure process than is purely of a scholarly nature.

A great many of those whom I witnessed getting tenure during my very long career as an academic did so by disguising their real goals, ideals, and intentions during the tenure process – because the strategies for getting tenure are widely known – and by the time the process was over and they were tenured, they had no idea what their basic intellectual character was or what their original scholarly aspirations were. They were completely co-opted by a very sick system of selection.

I am reminded of that wonderful George Orwell quotation, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet regime, or any other regime [including higher education], and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.”

So forgive me Professor Langenberg, but I remain ...

Frizbane Manley, at 6:05 pm EDT on June 11, 2008

None of what Peter mentions depends on tenure. On the contrary. Those stated values are all best advanced by term contracts that balance academic freedom and security with safeguards against abuse, incompetence, sloth, and irresponsibility that tenure fosters.

JBM, at 8:25 pm EDT on June 11, 2008

missing the point

All of this is interesting and true but in my view, this sort of argument misses the point, which is: why has higher education largely moved to a casualized labor force? What distinguishes the erosion of professional closure among faculty—and physicians—as compared to the clergy and military officers? I don’t think it some nefarious plot on the part of managers; managers need something to manage. And what’s to manage are students, lots and lots of students. It is far too expensive to"educate” 28K students the way one used to educate 18K or 10K or 5K. No institution and no state can afford to do so.

Faculty got behind the expansion of higher education because it was in their interests to do so. More undergrads meant moregraduate students and more time for research and writing. And this led to the overproduction of professionals, which creates the pool of people ripe for becoming part of the casualized labor force. We are still overproducing PhDs in the humanities, even as research professors enjoy very pleasant teaching loads.

As sociologist Randall Collins has argued, teaching unintellectual students is the price we pay for life on the “research frontier” and that price can be distributed equally or not. We have chosen to distribute the price unequally.

To rail against corporatization or the managed university withoutacknowledging one’s own culpability in creating and perpetuating this system is, well, at least for me, not compelling.

Sharon O’Dair, Professor at University of Alabama, at 9:50 pm EDT on June 11, 2008

flexible labor

The changes described here fit within the general and global shift since the 1970’s from the Fordist to the Post-Fordist regime of “flexible,” “mobile” labor. For those engaged in academic work, a sector which is catching on late to this trend, this means being “flexible” about things like salary, health benefits and job security, and mobility between several colleges or community colleges to make ends meet. In academia as in corporations, the point is to reduce labor costs at the price of rendering workers’ livelihood precarious. My point is that professors are not alone here, this is an expanding global regime where those at the top cut costs to benefit at the expense of those at the bottom, so the struggle against this corporate logic has to be broad and robust in keeping with its global nature.

Tom, at 5:05 pm EDT on June 12, 2008

We should not give up

There is something all professors can do to fight the corporatization of the university. We can refuse to participate in rankings. I was asked to rank Comparative Literature departments about ten years ago, and I refused.

We can refuse to participate in discussions that pertain to our own department’s prestige. When the subject comes up, we can civilly remind out colleagues that prestige is not our purpose in life, but teaching and creating knowledge is.

We can also support the adjuncts in their quest for better pay and job security. We can support their unions. We can even join them in their unions. We need to narrow the gap between professors and adjuncts, just as we need to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor in the United States.

The Last Professors will give us much needed ammunition. Let’s use it and never give up.

Katherine King, Professor at UCLA, at 11:50 am EDT on June 15, 2008