Deliberate Cruelty in Higher Ed

When I was told by the then-chair of the College of Charleston English Department that I’d “done nothing wrong,” and yet I would not be advancing to a finalist position for a tenure-track position, I knew he was telling the truth.

Not only had I done nothing wrong, but I’d done a lot of things right. I’d been successfully teaching at CofC as a visiting instructor for five years, teaching the same classes I’d be tasked with as a tenure-track faculty member. I’d published multiple books during my time there. I was writing weekly for Inside Higher Ed and as a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. I was heading up a small special project of a campus faculty colloquium collectively reading books on higher education, sponsored by an associate provost

I had a strong track record of both teaching and publishing at my previous stops, I …

Oh, what’s the point of reciting these things? Of course I’d done nothing wrong. Of course I—like dozens of others—was qualified for the position for which I’d applied. I’d proven I could do the work that would be asked of me by previously having done that nearly identical work for over 15 years.

The non-tenure-track creative writing faculty at Stanford University who are being purged through the whim of a handful of their tenured colleagues have also done nothing wrong. In fact, as a recent deep dive into the situation at The Chronicle of Higher Education has shown, they did everything right—to the point that their collective labor had built an undergraduate program that had grown from 25 annual classes to over 100.

The headline on the piece says, “At Stanford a Change to Creative Writing Feels Personal,” a nod to the fact that the firing of these experienced faculty and replacing them with a series of revolving temps makes zero sense against the institutional goals articulated by the leadership of Stanford. It is so obviously the wrong thing to do that the choice to do it must be personal.

Or maybe it is merely impersonal, as it was in my case, and as it is in the cases of the Harvard non-tenure-track faculty who are advocating against the eight-year cap on non-tenure-track employment at the university.

As reported by Ryan Quinn of IHE, Sara Feldman, a Yiddish instructor who is on her sixth of eight years, called the practice “cruel, destructive and frankly ridiculous.” She is correct.

Let’s face it, it is cruel.

It certainly felt cruel to be dismissed by people I’d worked alongside, with whom I’d broken bread, with whom I was quite friendly, if not quite (yet) friends. The messed-up thing is that at the time, I said that I understood the decision, but in the intervening years, I’ve come to see this as a failure on all our parts, the kind of repeated failure that has allowed the profession to be hollowed out, subject to administrative whim and consultant-driven operations divorced from the values we claim higher education represents.

Nontenurable laborers are often not treated like they are people. Working for per-course wages that are poverty level, and without access to benefits like health insurance, in the hope that they might one day join the elect is a moral injury for both those subjected to it and those who do the subjecting.

I wish at the time I’d had the confidence or wherewithal to question what was being done to me more aggressively, not the individual decision to choose others as finalists so much as the acceptance of this system that allowed so many of us to be treated as not fully human.

The “churning” of faculty is, truly, a deliberate cruelty. To give someone eight years to build a life, a teaching practice, a presence in a community, and then to just say they’re out, even as the labor they have been doing still needs doing, is frankly ridiculous, just Sara Feldman says. What has happened to allow such ridiculousness to be normalized, or in the case of Stanford, affirmatively pursued in a way that guarantees maximum disruption not just for the lecturers, but students as well?

The rationale for these purges is that they are necessary to make way for new cohorts of people that will one day also be treated cruelly. What a system! If there isn’t sufficient room for new scholars and teachers, perhaps we should consider mandatory retirement for tenured faculty, either 30 years tenured or age 65, whichever comes first.

I can hear the howls of complaint. But … but … but … academic freedom! Oh? Word? You’re telling me academic freedom is an important component for doing the work of institution? How does that apply to the teachers and scholars who, in many cases, are doing the vast majority of the work without such considerations?

Given that higher education institutions are supposed to be in the business of enhancing human flourishing, it seems incongruous to have policies that are deliberately, repeatedly, so cruel. That these policies are so common as to be unremarkable does not make them less cruel.

I couldn’t say if the members of the College of Charleston English Department were surprised when I said I would not be coming back in the visiting line I’d been holding, and which remained on offer. They shouldn’t have been surprised when the administration above them repurposed the line I’d had to another department (or perhaps to no one at all).

After all, I was a line, not a person.

Personhood apparently comes with tenure, and in the case of Stanford creative writing, once you are a person, you forfeit your humanity when it comes to deciding the fate of the untenured nonpersons.

So many of the problems of higher ed would be easier to solve if we make things personal, don’t you think? One of the consistent mistakes I made early in my teaching career was to treat students as students, rather than individual people going to school. I had absorbed a sense that we should be setting our humanity aside in the service of a pursuit of … what exactly? Knowledge?

What a joke. When I started to see students as people, my teaching became much better and student learning improved.

Anyway. College of Charleston had the power to do right by me (and dozens of other NTT faculty), no matter what claims there are about systemic constraints. It costs nothing to treat people as human.

Stanford and Harvard and any other elite institution that decides it’s appropriate to flush dedicated, high-performing faculty because they have not reached the—let’s face it—arbitrary bar of tenure eligibility are doing the wrong thing.

It would be some progress to at least be able to agree on that much.