Dec. 8, 2006

Rethinking Tenure — and Much More

A year ago, a special committee of the Modern Language Association outlined the makings of a revolution in the way English and foreign language professors might be hired, evaluated and promoted. The panel talked about doing away with the “fetishization” of the monograph, making tenure expectations more clear, rethinking the way outside evaluators are used in reviews, and much more. The ideas the committee put forth attracted praise from professors and administrators alike — even before the panel finished its work.

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On Thursday, the panel released its final report — and it isn’t backing away from its call for dramatic change. If anything, the panel is going even beyond its public suggestions of a year ago, declaring that its recommendations about professors also suggest a need to rethink long-held assumptions about graduate education, extending even to the form of the dissertation.

Many of the changes sought in the report would by necessity be determined campus by campus and department by department. But MLA leaders signaled that they are determined to push their agenda. The association has meetings scheduled with deans and presidents next month. Workshops are being planned for department chairs. Members of the panel that produced the report — very much an A-list of the profession — pledged to lobby their colleagues.

Domna C. Stanton, a French studies professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center who led the panel, said at a briefing that she envisioned the report making it possible for professors — including junior scholars — to raise all kinds of issues that have been festering and that need attention. Broadly, she said, this effort is about “separating” the idea that publication is the only valid form of scholarship and focusing department goals on the real missions of their institutions.

The panel — the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion — urged departments to:

Create “transparency” in hiring and promotion, so that junior faculty members know what is expected of them and are not surprised by changing expectations as their tenure reviews approach.
Define scholarship broadly, including the “scholarship of teaching,” scholarship produced by teams, and work that is not presented in a monograph.
Accept “the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media,” ending the assumption that print is necessarily better. (And to the extent that some professors and departments don’t know how to evaluate quality in new media, “the onus is on the department” to learn, not on the scholar using new media, Stanton said.)
Focus on scholarship, teaching and research — and not collegiality — as criteria for tenure.
Consider their missions in setting standards for tenure, and to consider whether they are adopting research-oriented missions that don’t reflect the reality of the kind of institutions where they work.
Limit the number of outside review letters sought in tenure reviews, pay those who provide them, and limit the kinds of questions asked so that they are appropriate for the institution and the position.
Improve the process by which junior faculty members receive guidance on their careers.

The MLA created the panel in 2004, amid widespread anger and anxiety among younger scholars and others about a career path that seemed blocked and a system for sharing scholarship that seemed dysfunctional. A simplified version of the complaints would go like this: Young scholars need to publish books to get jobs and tenure. University presses can’t afford to publish books any more and are raising the bar for publication. Libraries don’t have money to buy the books the presses do publish, forcing the presses to make more cuts, making it still more difficult for young scholars to win tenure.

While the MLA task force found plenty of problems in the system, one thing it did not find was the feared “lost generation” of scholars who had been denied tenure. The association conducted a survey of 1,339 departments on their tenure policies and processes. A key finding was that the actual rates of tenure denials in these departments are quite low — around 10 percent. But while junior professors in English and foreign languages were apparently incorrect in thinking that many were being rejected for tenure, they weren’t incorrect that the rules and system had changed.

Relatively small percentages of new Ph.D.’s were found to be finding tenure-track positions and getting through the process at the institutions that initially hired them. And many were never finding tenure-track positions. So it’s not that careers were being derailed at the point of a tenure vote, but that they were never getting that far.

The panel also found that there is a clear reason why so many junior faculty members perceive that the bar is higher: At many institutions, the bar is higher.

Among all departments, 62 percent report that publication has increased in importance in the last 10 years, and the percentage ranking scholarship as being of primary importance (over teaching) doubled, to just over 75 percent. While those figures might not be surprising for doctoral institutions, the report notes a “ripple” in which the standards for research universities end up elsewhere. Nearly half of baccalaureate institutions now consider a monograph “very important” or “important” for tenure. And almost one-third of all institutions are now looking for significant progress on a second book. And Stanton noted that while research universities provide support for writing books (in terms of expectations about courses taught or providing research support), many of the institutions now looking for a more detailed publication record provide little if any such assistance.

The MLA’s report also contains ample evidence of the mismatch between what panel members call “the tyranny of the monograph” and the realities of scholarly publishing. Recent years have seen top university presses shift away from the kind of publishing that tenure committees want to see — with Stanford University Press cutting in the humanities, Northwestern University Press cutting back in translations, and Cambridge University Press discontinuing French studies. For books that get published, readers may be few. Press runs that used to range from 600-1,000 are now more likely to be 250.

Many of the recommendations pushed in the report represent attempts to reconnect the tenure and promotion process with the excitement that the committee members see in much of scholarly life today. One undercurrent of the entire report is that for all the flaws in the current system of evaluating faculty members, there is no shortage of appropriate ways to do so.

Take digital media, for example, which the report notes is “pervasive in the humanities” and says “must be recognized as a legitimate scholarly endeavor.” While faculty members are engaged in digital scholarship, departments appear unable or willing to evaluate it. Of departments, 40.8 percent at doctoral institutions, 29.3 at master’s institutions, and 39.5 percent at baccalaureate institutions report having “no experience” evaluating digital scholarship. More than half of all departments report having no experience evaluating monographs in digital form.

The report notes that the impact goes beyond the unfairness to those whose important digital work may be ignored when being considered for tenure — to creating disincentives to do such work. “The cause-and-effect relations work in both directions here: Probationary faculty members will be reluctant to risk publishing in electronic formats unless they see clear evidence that such work can count positively in evaluation for tenure and promotion,” the report says.

Making sure that motivations are properly aligned also applies to the committee’s endorsement of the concept of Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities for the Professoriate, the late Ernest Boyer’s 1990 call for moving beyond the traditional teaching/research dichotomy. Boyer argued that there is a science to teaching, and that the same sorts of tools that have promoted traditional research can be applied to teaching. As relates to tenure and promotion, the MLA panel wants to see more of an emphasis on a range of activities — teaching tools, textbooks, curricular designs — as evidence of significant contributions of a professor to a field.

“We are trying to separate scholarship from publication alone,” said Stanton. “They have been too aligned. There are scholarly components of teaching and of service.”

Donald Hall, a professor of English at West Virginia University, said that he considered the recommendations to broaden the definition of scholarship “the most revolutionary” in the report.

And Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the MLA, said it was particularly important for departments outside of research universities to consider this concept. “This is about aligning values” of what an institution is about and its tenure expectations, she said. At teaching institutions, Boyer’s definition of scholarship makes more sense than a “how many books have you written” definition, several panel members suggested.

Even within more traditional publishing, however, panel members said that they wanted to encourage change. For example, while group work is common in the sciences, it is relatively rare for humanities scholars — in work submitted for tenure — to feature work done with colleagues. Panel members said that there should not be any bias against such work.

Together, panel members expressed hope that by ending the use of the monograph as the “gold standard” for tenure, they could promote a variety of positive changes in the profession. But if the monograph is to be reconsidered, the report says, what of the dissertation, which the authors call “a larval monograph.”

Along with rethinking the dissertation, the report suggests, it is time to rethink “the entire graduate curriculum.” While each institution will need to think about its own mission in graduate education, the next generation of scholars — if they are to produce new types of scholarship — need to be trained differently, the report says.

Feal said one goal of the entire report was “contextualizing” the way graduate education and academic careers have been defined. The role of the monograph is relatively recent, she said, and realizing that current models haven’t been set in stone can encourage reform.

As the panel has been sharing its ideas over the last year, the broad themes have attracted significant support — even from other players whose roles might change in the academic world envisioned by the MLA panel.

Peter J. Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses, praised the MLA for imagining structures that would “open up new possibilities for younger scholars.” He said that university presses have seen publishing monographs as “among our responsibilities” but that he didn’t see any problems if fewer scholars focused on them.

Change in the relationship between publishing and tenure will come, Givler said, but it may come a little more slowly than the MLA would like. “I think there is going to be change, but it is going to be generational,” he said. Most of the ideas in the report will resonate with assistant professors, Givler said, and “when they get on tenure committees,” the pace of change will accelerate.

Others, however, said that the MLA is catching up to the ideas that are already out there among the rank and file. They predicted that the report would find a warm reception with many who have seen scholarship change — ahead of the systems by which colleges hire and promote.

Clark Hulse, dean of the Graduate College at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said he saw the MLA pushing departments to accept their responsibility for evaluating scholarship, instead of assuming that anything published by a university press is good and any scholarship that couldn’t find a traditional publisher must be bad.

“We need to have the courage to deny tenure based on a bad published book and to award tenure based on a great manuscript,” he said.

As to considering different forms of scholarship — in dissertations and for tenure — Hulse said that the thought most deans would “be eager to embrace these changes.”

Today, he said, “all dissertations are produced electronically,” and most start off as a series of linked articles, so the idea that they must follow a traditional book format doesn’t make particular sense. Whether a dissertation ends up in print or ends up being a series of articles is “almost a trivial question,” he said.

What needs to be preserved isn’t the monograph or dissertation any one form of scholarship, he said. “What I think is sacred is the creation of a substantial and coherent and significant body of work.”

— Scott Jaschik

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Comments

Maybe not “radical” enough

The MLA should, on one level, be commended for some of its forward-looking recommendations.

However, the MLA seems unwilling to acknowledge the deep changes that ought to take place within the field of English studies. In short, English needs to move beyond the notion that interpretive literary study constitutes the core of the discipline. Ph.D. programs in English need to stop over-producing literature specialists while they under-produce composition and rhetoric specialists.

The MLA would also be wise to forge more concrete and meaningful alliances with CCCC (the Conference on College Composition and Communication) and AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) with the ultimate goal of incorporating creative writing and composition/rhetoric more meaningfully into the larger discipline of English studies—not as afterthoughts or “add on” options, but rather as central and essential parts of the disciplinary core.

Tim Mayers, Associate Professor at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, at 6:30 am EST on December 8, 2006

“Focus on scholarship, teaching and research — and not collegiality — as criteria for tenure."...are you serious? Collegiality is not important? Surely, in a field where most people are bright and quite capable of producing research and teaching, collegiality should be THE key critera. Who wants a non-collegial colleague, in permanence, for goodness sake?

And, also, for the nth time....permanent contracts as in Europe and Australasia are fairer and provide more junior openings than the one-shot-at-tenure system. Looks like the MLA is not brave enough to consider abolition of the institution itself.

SP, at 7:00 am EST on December 8, 2006

Organizing Change

The broad coalition of organizations that Tim Mayers suggests above would also be able to advocate for progressive change. I’m not ready, like some, to chuck tenure, but I’d be open to post-tenure review procedures with real consequences, provided teaching, “creative” writing, digital scholarship, etc. become respectable activities that qualify one for tenure & promotion.

Joseph Duemer, Professor at Clarkson University, at 7:45 am EST on December 8, 2006

This is the Solution to What Problem?

As is usually the case with these wholesale calls for reform, the MLA report contains some good ideas and some not-so-good ideas. But in many ways, it seems to be a response to a “problem” which, it turns out, doesn’t really exist. If the rejection rate in tenure and promotion cases is only 10%, then it sounds as though tenure expectations must be pretty clear, after all.

Look, we were all assistant professors once, so we all understand how it feels to endure that level of vulnerability. When I was untenured, I wanted clear, “transparent” standards for promotion. I also resented (at least a little) the fact that I had to meet a higher standard than my senior colleagues did years earlier.

Since then, I’ve come to realize that there’s only so much transparency possible in this process because every candidate’s file is unique. It is simply not practical to tell a junior colleague exactly what he or she needs to do to achieve tenure. Sometimes a file that looks qualitatively and quantitatively strong will be shot down by enternal letters from experts who testify that the work is too narrow or otherwise insignificant. And sometimes, an apparently flimsy file will be saved by the glowing testimony of those same outside experts.

As for the standards being raised over time, would we really want it to be any other way? That’s called progress. Departments and institutions strive to get better, enhance their national and international reputation, and, yes, move up in the US News rankings. There is nothing wrong with that! Whether we like it or not, potential job applicants pay attention to these sorts of things when deciding where to, and where not to, apply. Moreover, the best prospective students (and their parents) care, as well. If we want to hire outstanding faculty and attract top-notch students (and I assume we all do), then we would be foolish *not* to try to strengthen our programs and their reputations.

As to the specific recommendations, some are quite good. We can always improve our mentoring of junior faculty. Further, we should definitely strive to find ways to judge the quality and impact of

Unapologetically Tenured, at 8:50 am EST on December 8, 2006

Oops, accidentally hit the “send” button

...work appearing in digital form. And paying outside reviewers is a very good idea, as is limiting their number (within reason).

On the other hand, one should be careful about eliminating colleagiality standards entirely. All departments (or nearly all, anyway) “focus on scholarship, teaching, and research” more than colleagiality. Of course they do. But there should be a mechanism for departments to rid themselves of truly malevolent forces who significantly disrupt department life, regardless of their professional accomplishments.

While I agree that more credit should be given to those who contribute to the “scholarship of teaching", let’s not put the cart before the horse. No department (at least no research department) is going to move in that direction until they can be sure that by rewarding such scholarship, they are not jeopardizing their standing in the profession.

Finally, I am skeptical of calls to tell departments “to consider whether they are adopting research-oriented missions that don’t reflect the reality of the kind of institutions where they work". That could easily be interpreted as a call to limit the upward mobility of ambitious departments that would like to improve their own standing in the profession. In an age when colleges and universities are increasingly requiring their units to seek and attract external funding, such a recommendation might simply be a recipe for the rich to get richer and the poor to stay poorer.

Anyway, that’s more than enough from me. I look forward to other responses.

Unapologetically Tenured, at 8:55 am EST on December 8, 2006

Public Engagement

This is a great start on rebuilding trust with the public regarding how tenure is awarded. I urge that an additional criterion be recognized for those with a gift for relating to the public — public engagement. Universities need faculty with different gifts and skills. To leave out that which helps create bridges to the public is a lost opportunity. Higher education is a public good. Let’s reward those gifted at connecting to the public.

Steve Schomberg, at 10:25 am EST on December 8, 2006

RE: Rethinking Tenure

I applaud the MLA committee for its valuable work. The report goes a long way toward dispelling myths about the profession and focusing attention on the real problems—especially the over-production of Ph.D.s and the “fetishization of the monograph.”

It’s good news that only a relatively small percentage of tenure-track faculty members fail to achieve tenure. It’s terrible that so many new Ph.D.s fail to find tenure track spots at all. Sooner or later the profession is going to have to address the over-production of Ph.D.s. While graduate programs function in many instances as “cash cows,” the ethics of awarding degrees to students who then likely will not find jobs in the field needs to be carefully considered.

I agree that faculty need to be better trained to assess the merits of publishing in less traditional venues. Unfortunately, as it becomes harder to publish academic print monographs, their prestige will only increase.

In any case though, the MLA report is a good start and hopefully will stimulate dialogue.

Jeffrey Weinstock, Assistant Professor of American literature at Central Michigan University, at 10:40 am EST on December 8, 2006

Transparency and Change

My institution is in the middle of rewriting its promotion and tenure guidelines, and, contrary to Unapologetically Tenured, there is a lot that can be done to make the process more transparent. Clear delineation of the responsibilities of all the parties in the process helps as do up to date criteria. Even more important is persuading committees and administrators that they have to follow the institutional documentation and not base their judgments on their own personal agendas. Failure to do so is one part of the reasons tenure has a bad name. My impression is that Deans are generally willing to make changes in the tenure process and that the real difficulties come with faculty committees who see no reason to change or who are of the opinion that if they made it through they can subject others to the same tortuous process.The bottom line is that what universities expect professors to do has changed drastically in the last few decades. They need to be judged on the basis of how they fulfill all those expectations and not on only one part.

Phred, at 10:55 am EST on December 8, 2006

Open Access?

I don’t want to discount the many positive recommendations in this report. However, it’s not clear how really in touch the task force is with the crisis in scholarly publishing when the words “open access” are conspicuously absent from the entire report. Perhaps the MLA should have talked with SPARC and the ARL in thinking about this. If humanities professoriate transfers their emphasis on publishing to journal articles without encouraging open access publishing, that will greatly increase the amount of spending libraries will have to do on serial publishing and paid electronic database access and decrease the availability of funds for purchasing books. If we want to give academic presses a chance, we need to make sure that we are not becoming more dependent on commercial journal publishers.

Charles Lowe, Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University, at 10:55 am EST on December 8, 2006

This is an interesting report and the MLA is to be commended for finally taking some sort of substantive position on the changing nature of the academy and the profession. But I can’t help but feel that it is somewhat lacking, that it is addressing the symptoms but missing out on the disease. Which is to say that there is a clear sense that things are changing and we need to respond, but why they are changing seems, beyond a very narrow and limited sense, rather underdeveloped.

Sure, presses don’t publish as many monographs because libraries don’t buy them as much. But what has brought about this change in library spending? Libraries are in part unable to buy as many monographs because larger and larger percentages of acquisition budgets go to purchasing journals. The costs associated with access to electronic resources also similarly impact spending. Libraries are forced into such a situation because the scholarly model of the other part of the university, the sciences, is built almost exclusively around the journal as the venue for scholarly work. Libraries cut access to these journals at their peril as many university administrations, seeking to replace dwindling public funding, emphasize the sciences for their capacity to generate revenue; they need these both to provide the infrastructure that attracts and retains faculty doing ‘profitable’ work and to provide the mirror wherein faculty might find their profession, and themselves, reflected. There is considerable pressure in the sciences, as in the humanities, to publish even to the point of some publishing what they later admit was unnecessary. This helps to drive both the persistence of a large number of journals and the exorbitant prices publishers charge for access to them.

Ultimately, MLA needs to reach not just beyond the notion of “interpretive literary study” as a professional model, as Prof. Mayers astutely observes, but it needs to reach across campus and outside the disciplinary divide to make common cause with other concerned and effected communities, to a marketplace whose demands for profit exceeds any sense of reasonableness and to look to the impact that public support, and perception, of higher education have on this situation. Otherwise, this ultimately will amount to little more than rearranging deck chairs on a deck that is slowly slipping away.

Tom, at 11:25 am EST on December 8, 2006

the problem is bigger and starts earlier

The MLA is composed of very smart people, making a sincere attempt to deal with the dysfunction and bias that plague academic hirings, promotion, and tenure. But as both Stanley Aronowitz, and the late Bill Readings have noted in their substantive books, the problem is bigger than tenure procedures and starts earlier.

Both Aronowitz and Readings write about the corporate university, where students are processed like so many widgets (Theda Shapiro’s term). In such an environment, faculty are becoming increasinlgly positioned as “seasonal workers” (Aronowitz’s term), and so tenure is in fact disappearing as academics are separated into workers and a much smaller cadre of “managers". If you think about it, this is indeed happening at many colleges and universities.

This state of affairs places grad students and recent PHD’s into the position of being almost like migrant workers, and THIS, I would argue is a problem that departments and graduate programs need to look at very seriously. What can be the intellectual and ethical justification, for recruiting people to work as our assistants, all the while training for them for jobs that do not exist?

Should we downsize voluntarily and/or should we radically rethink what the Masters and Doctorate degrees signify? How can we educate those who want to pursue higher degrees, and at the same time be honest with these students about their “professional” future?

And finally, how can we rethink and resist the corporatization of the university from within it? These are, in my estimation, some of the questions we need to be asking.

Stephanie Hammer, professor at U California, Riverside, at 11:45 am EST on December 8, 2006

Viewpoint of a mathematician

Speaking as a professor of mathematics at a research university, I would like to comment on the MLA recommendations:

Create “transparency” in hiring and promotion, so that junior faculty members know what is expected of them and are not surprised by changing expectations as their tenure reviews approach.

(This should certainly be the case. But this does not mean that standards should not increase with time. Rather, given the usual rate of change, this should not be issue for a tenure decision at most six years after an assistant professor is first hired.)

Focus on scholarship, teaching and research — and not collegiality — as criteria for tenure.

(I can’t imagine a quality institution where this is not the case.)

Limit the number of outside review letters sought in tenure reviews, pay those who provide them, and limit the kinds of questions asked so that they are appropriate for the institution and the position.

(I don’t know how many outside review letters are the norm in fields covered by the MLA, so I can’t comment on that, but common practice in mathematics is a minimum of 3-5 letters, as far as I know, and that seems reasonable to me. I would be interested to know the norm in English, for example. Every institution I know of has a form letter sent out to reviewers so appropriateness is something to be determined at the institutional and not the department level, and in fact the minimum number of letters is also an institutional requirement as far as I know, though individual departments can establish their own higher minimums, again as far as I know. I do not know of any cases where outside reviewers are paid, and do not think this is *at all* appropriate.)

Improve the process by which junior faculty members receive guidance on their careers.

(All insitutions should strive to do this. Some do a better job than others.)

Define scholarship broadly, including the “scholarship of teaching,” scholarship produced by teams, and work that is not presented in a monograph.

(Research into the teaching of mathematics is not an acceptable substitute for research in mathematics, period. In mathematics, most papers are single author, but a nontrivial proportion have multiple authors, so this is a situation we are used to. And the vast majority of research is published as journal articles rather than in monographs, so we are used to basing our tenure and promotion decisions on such work.)

Accept “the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media,” ending the assumption that print is necessarily better. (And to the extent that some professors and departments don’t know how to evaluate quality in new media, “the onus is on the department” to learn, not on the scholar using new media, Stanton said.)

(Not really relevant to us in mathematics. There are some electronic-only journals in mathemetics, but that doesn’t seem the sort of distinction being made here.)

Consider their missions in setting standards for tenure, and to consider whether they are adopting research-oriented missions that don’t reflect the reality of the kind of institutions where they work.

(Seems like good sense. Institutions that don’t support research shouldn’t expect research. But institutions that do support research should, with weight in tenure and promotion decisions that are commensurate with the mission of the institution.)

math prof, at 12:10 pm EST on December 8, 2006

What about out of field options?

MLA has done a great service by endorsing these arguments. While being too radical would likely upset people, some additional changes (like emphasizing Rhet/Comp or Lit AND RhetComp) would also be good.

In particular, I would like to see more movement on the status of PhDs who don’t get tenure track jobs. Many PhDs in other areas work happily outside of academia. The shift in the graduate programs should also include a shift in how a PhD in English and in the core humanities is perceived and used. Not all PhDs must become teachers and earn tenure. Yes, that is what most or many want, but in friendly conversations many will say, “I don’t know what else I could do.” Many of them want and need to teach, but not all. I’d like to see MLA argue to develop an understanding of the possibilities of working out of field. Many research entities aren’t in universities (government, corporate) and they need bright researchers to work on innovative projects (how to access data, how to organize data). University Presses clearly need help in finding ways to publish electronically for a profit, which could help revitalize other areas. Academia itself needs more administrators who understand the humanities and how the humanities differ from the hard sciences (easy grant money, deliverables).

Having a PhD prepares students for a variety of fields. Connecting and respecting those other career options should be part of MLA’s mission and I’d like to see that in the next report.

Untenured, at 1:25 pm EST on December 8, 2006

What effect?

Is this making, a mountain from a mole-hill?

In the various areas that I’ve taught in — engineering, technology, business — I’ve never about a monograph being required. Peer-reviewed articles, yes — but not a monograph.

Let’s keep some perspective on this. A few facts would help, too.

Pu-Lun, Prof. at Technology, at 2:40 pm EST on December 8, 2006

My Opinion?

Abolish tenure all together!!!!

Just My Opinion, at 4:10 pm EST on December 8, 2006

If new hires are expected to meet higher standards than their seniors had to meet in order to gain tenure, why are the seniors guaranteed employment for life? A stronger argument against tenure has never been offered: institutionalized mediocrity from your “best” members is exactly what a university does not want.

Michael, at 5:31 pm EST on December 8, 2006

Message to Michael

“A stronger argument against tenure has never been offered: institutionalized mediocrity from your “best” members is exactly what a university does not want.”

OK, sports fans, let’s see how many things we can find wrong in just this one sentence.

1. The writer assumes that just because departments wish to improve over time that their current faculty must therefore be “mediocre". News flash: ALL departments strive to improve (this is a good thing)! The standards for tenure at Harvard are different than they were thirty or forty years ago. That doesn’t change the fact Harvard’s senior faculty are highly distinguished.

2. The writer appears to know nothing about how academic careers progress. While some senior faculty may become less productive in terms of their research output, they often perform much of the heavy lifting that allows universities to function. Senior faculty chair departments, serve as directors of graduate and undergraduate programs, devote more of their time to teaching and student-centered activities, serve as public intellectuals, etc., etc. To put it another way, these senior colleagues do the work necessary to allow the young up-and-comers to concentrate on their research and make a name for themselves. And, of course, many senior faculty also remain very active in their own scholarship.

3. The author seems to think that academic freedom is only an issue for junior faculty doing cutting-edge research. In fact, the need to protect controversial projects and dissenting voices applies to all active faculty members at all career stages.

I could go on, but my fingers are getting tired and I know that nothing I say will persuade the rabidly anti-tenure folks who, for reasons that make no sense to me, continue to frequent a website devoted to higher education.

(Quick disclaimer: yes, yes, yes, I know that there are people who abuse tenure. In my experience, they are very few in number. And please trust me when I tell you that those of us who take our jobs seriously despise those people every bit as much as you do. Probably more.)

Unapologetically Tenured, at 8:20 pm EST on December 8, 2006

Collegiality is Central

These are some excellent recommendations. However, I believe collegiality should be more emphasized — how could the MLA call for it to be minimized?? Tenure is about a person being a team member for decades. How can you call for more collaborative research/teaching. etc. on one hand (where it is imperative to have collegial people) and then slight this all-important characteristic?

Newbie Prof, at 8:30 pm EST on December 8, 2006

Would this make you happy?

” .. I know that nothing I say will persuade the rabidly anti-tenure folks who, for reasons that make no sense to me ..”

Of course. Those who have been abused by tenured radicals — and there are plenty, sir — should just keep paying higher taxes and shut up.

Well, that dog is not going to hunt.

Perhaps you would be happier if they just stop posting and quietly increase their demands for measurable results (e.g., less whining, more relevant teaching) from academia. To the point the sub-marginal are forced out.

Would that make you happy? Hope so. Because it is going to happen, sooner than you think.

L.L., at 7:45 am EST on December 9, 2006

What’s tenured radical? How might one abuse you? Why do you think tenure protects people from the consequences of abusing others? This makes no sense to me at all.

I assume the term “radical” refers to someone’s opinions. Tenure is supposed to protect the free expression of scholarly opinions, so being radical is an appropriate use of tenure protection, not an abuse of it. Tenure does not extend to interpersonal relations, so if someone is abusing another person in some way, tenure is irrelevant. Tenure does not protect a person who violates the rules of the university, for example.

If you have truly been abused, not simply subjected to an opinion with which you disagree, complain to the department chair.

Tenure exists to protect individuals from those who will claim to have been abused by their “radical” ideas, absent any behavior that injures others. Without tenure, the witch-hunt will return. We have only to look at David Horowitz to understand why tenure exists and is still important.

I would like to see all part-time, temporary, and adjunct positions abolished except in cases of demonstrated emergency. They do far more to weaken education than any of the things addressed by the MLA. We have dual tracks, with extreme scrutiny of those seeking tenure and very little scrutiny of the quality of teaching for those hired outside the tenure track. We have students who graduate without every having taken a class with a permanent faculty member (in their major). Why isn’t there more uproar about this?

Perry, at 12:45 pm EST on December 9, 2006

Nice start—keep going

I applaud the MLA’s initial forays. Here are some quick comments:

• The definition of a professor (which is really what “tenure” defines) should be reevaluated. • Tenure should be defined according the mission of an institution. Brand institutions, like Harvard’s model—which is the standard, prevailing one—should not be imposed or adopted by other institutions (land grants, cc, etc.) • The tyranny of the book should be reconsidered. Blogs anyone? • Teaching should be considered (see brand comment above) just as much or more by a large segment of the institutions• Barring any significant alternations, tenure needs to fade away.

Comments on the comments: • “Unapologetically tenured” voices an old-school view of the world. It is out of date and should be recognized as such. • Many commented that 10% non-tenure achievement rate actually indicates that the current system is working failed to take into account the following quote: Relatively small percentages of new Ph.D.’s were found to be finding tenure-track positions and getting through the process at the institutions that initially hired them. And many were never finding tenure-track positions. So it’s not that careers were being derailed at the point of a tenure vote, but that they were never getting that far. 10% of not all professors eligible is really a much larger number. My personal story testifies to this being a much larger number. • I also agree with “untenured” that the MLA should also consider promoting and positioning PhDs for other fields of work. Again, my personal story argues that with the over-production of PhDs (a separate thread of attack), the necessity of going outside of the academy to provide a living wage is imminent and immediate. I have moved to instructional design for software installations for fortune 100 companies. I can, in this capacity, make three-to-five times the wage as I would as an adjunct or tenure-track professor. I would rather, though, be in the classroom.• “Digital work” needs to be recognized and expanded. Published monographs (either collections of single-authored) are unnecessarily limiting the exposure of quality ideas. This will be addressed, however slowly for some of us, and needs to be embraced by the MLA and academy at large.

Piss Poor Prof, at 5:31 pm EST on December 9, 2006

What Must Be Done?

If anyone reads the posts above, it becomes clear that the consensus among those not complacently defensive about having already accepted tenure is that there is a desperate, abusive system of exploiting grad students as cheap labor and as bodies who leverage $$ to fund senior professors.

Several cycles of swelling and diminishing state budgets have had no effect on the trend of exploiting adjunct labor in the last few decades. Thus, a reasonable senior prof teaching grad students today should understand that she is inherently abusing them even as she teaches.

It’s clear that some concrete action needs to be taken. A graduate students’ national union has been very slow in the making, partly because college admins act like Walmart execs. The MLA has refused to act as an organizing force. For those of us on the bottom of this mess, action is hardly possible. I, for one, am not staying in the profession, such as it is, very much longer.

But I can add one more ounce of bitterness, just for fun: If the senior profs lack moral standing by recklessly exploiting their grad students, they lose their claim on our respect a second time by negligently and complacently avoiding acts of change. At this point, if I meet a professor who tells me he teaches graduate students, I have a hard time shaking his hand.

Daniel Mozes, Adj. Assistant Prof. at Lehman College, at 5:35 pm EST on December 9, 2006

“Old School” and other Tired Cliches

Leaving the name calling aside, I think I’ll pass on P.P.P.’s vision of Higher Ed 2.0. If we ever cheapen tenure to the point that blogs are given the same weight as scholarly books, then even I will be calling for its abolition. The “tyranny of the book” is the tyranny of accomplishment. That’s a good thing. As to the idea that research should be de-emphasized in “teaching schools", I’ve already given my views above. The implicit suggestion that good research and good teaching are somehow inconsistent is a canard, belied by the success of hundreds of professors on both fronts.

As for getting rid of tenure, I still have yet to hear anyone on this comment thread explain how academic freedom will be protected in a post-tenure world. But then again, I guess academic freedom is simply an “old school” concept.

And I guess I won’t be extending my hand to Professor Mozes since I do, in fact, participate in training graduate students. Furthermore, I’m proud of that fact. I sleep well at night knowing that my program provides students with numerous career options and opportunities. I would urge all of you who regard grad school as exploitation to read the following:

http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/dep...g/?article=phdmythology&GT1=8749

A couple of the “money quotes", as the new school kidz like to say:

“Ph.D.s have unemployment rates that are... between 1 and 2 percent in recent years.”

“The fact is that Ph.D.s will earn $1.3 million more than baccalaureate holders, over their working lifetimes.”

Actually, Professor Mozes, look at the comment just above yours. P.P.P. reports that his income is (or will be) 3-5 times higher than that of a tenure track prof. The Ph.D. is a great deal and most recipients are able to obtain it tuition-free (and often with a stipend).

In the meantime, my department is interviewing three candidates for a tenure track position to start next fall. I’ll let P.P.P. tell these outstanding young scholars that their career goals are “old school” and “out of date".

Unapologetically Tenured, at 8:35 pm EST on December 9, 2006

A better solution, for the truly talented

” .. If you have truly been abused, not simply subjected to an opinion with which you disagree, complain to the department chair ..”

FYI: I did. The tenured cried and whimpered like infants. Lawyers were suggested. The matter is pending, like an over-hanging sword.

What a courageous crowd, the tenured radicals who won the tenure lottery. Since they are so talented and brave — requiring them to be self-supporting should be easy for them. They have invited termination of their public tax subsidy. Looking forward to witnessing their private-sector success, like the Chinese Communists who worship “market-Leninism.”

Good luck, courageous (formerly-tenured) radicals.

L.L., at 8:35 pm EST on December 9, 2006

The real issue

I commend both Stephanie Hammer and Daniel Mozes for looking more closely at what I agree is the underlying problem, the growing disease, of corporatized academia and the ever-increasing practice of hiring “contingent” faculty – the latest numbers nationwide have universities hiring on average 47% of their faculty as adjuncts and part-times. This is not just a problem for graduate students and newly-minted Ph.D.s Rather, it is a problem that plagues many who love academia, who have stayed on campuses across the country despite the migrant worker status, for years struggling to make ends meet so that they don’t have to give up the work they love.

The problem is not just re-thinking the tenure process. It is finding a way to take our universities back from the grip of the corporate model. It is finding a way to demand that our faculty receive the professional respect, the professional salary, the professional options that they deserve for the abilities and dedication they bring to their work. The tenure issue is a symptom. Somehow, our tenure committees and our tenured faculties have fallen prey to the illusion that the pie is quite small, and that it must be guarded ferociously. The reality is that the portion of pie available to all faculty IS quite small….but that is because more and more of it is being reserved for the Administrators.

This has little to do with the fact that we are graduating too many Ph.D.s It has more to do with what Daniel Mozes refers to when he likens university administrators to Wal-Mart Execs. At Temple University, our recently-departed president was paid a combined salary and expense-account allowance near $400,000, AND he was provided with a condo overlooking Rittenhouse Square (one of the most expensive and elegant areas of downtown Philadelphia) in a brand new high-rise….a property valued in the millions....which I hear that he KEPT when he departed his position. All the while, Temple maintains an enormous body of adjunct faculty, paid barely $1,000/month for their two-course “maximum”, who have no real professional stature – no office to themselves, no voice in the departments for which they teach – they are even denied access to letterhead, office equipment, support staff and telephones. Benefits? None, of course. Job security? You must be kidding. I give this example because it is one I am most familiar with, not because I think that Temple is unique – unfortunately, it is representative of what is happening nationwide.

As tenured faculty retire, they are most often replaced with part-times and adjuncts. The voice of the faculty is slowly being silenced. The power of the faculty to influence anything of significance regarding the operation of the university is being destroyed from within. The mere idea of “faculty” as an involved and influential body, partners in the operation of the university is losing validity. The life of the mind, the world of thought that a university once provided no longer exists. Part-time hires are rushing from one campus to another, desperate to earn enough to pay their bills. Students are being denied access to their educators and mentors unless they are able to catch them on their cell phones. The campus is becoming a wasteland, its buildings standing as sad monuments to an ideal that is dying.

I think that the MLA as well as all other membership organizations which claim to represent faculty should stop rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and realize that unless they use their power to call attention to – and end — the most serious problems, we are all going down.

Debra Leigh Scott, Adjunct. Temple University

Debra Leigh Scott, Adjunct Faculty at Temple University, at 7:30 am EST on December 10, 2006

The Real Issue of Exploitation

I think Professor Scott has it exactly right. The real problem with exploitation in American universities is not in the way we treat grad students, but in the way we deal with contingent faculty. The increasing use (and abuse) of adjuncts diminishes higher education for everyone.

My point, of course, is not that adjuncts are inferior teachers or scholars. Most of them are well trained and highly qualified. The problem is that the combination of low pay and job insecurity necessarily limits the time and attention they can focus on their students. Part of being an effective teacher is the ability to build long-term relationships with your students, and many adjuncts are denied that possibility. In addition, adjuncts—as opposed to the tenure track faculty they are replacing—contribute almost nothing to the research and service missions of departments.

I certainly understand the concern that by accepting grad students into our programs, we are helping to maintain the oversupply of Ph.D.s that allows administrators to continue the exploitation. But I don’t believe that this is, at its base, a supply and demand issue. As Professor Scott points out, the issue is the corporate mindset of many university administrators and boards of trustees.

As Ph.D. granting departments, we should probably do a better job of informing applicants of the realities of the job market. But as other have pointed out, it is useless to tell a prospective grad student that the chances of landing a tenure track slot are one in five if she is convinced that she will be the one (and of couse she may be right!). Beyond that, however, since there is sufficient evidence that the Ph.D. is a gateway degree to higher income and likely professional employment (see my post above), I see no reason why programs should be shut down.

With respect to adjuncts, most tenured faculty do what they can, although, as Professor Scott points out, our influence over university governance is relatively small and shrinking. Most of us do argue wherever and whenever possible for the conversion of temporary lines to permanent ones. But we also have departments and programs to run, and if our only option is to hire adjuncts we will do so.

In the meantime, I can’t for the life of me figure out how this problem will be alleviated by getting rid of tenure. Does anyone honestly believe that if all faculty are made contingent, the life of the college professor will improve?

I realize that I am not a disinterested observer here. I have tenure (and unapologetically so), so it is clearly easy for me to argue in favor of the current arrangement. But the truth is that, despite what some of the sillier contributors to this comment thread might like to believe, I’ll almost certainly be grandfathered in under even the most extreme set of reforms. Even more likely, the destruction of tenure, even if it does occur, will probably not be complete for another generation, well after my retirement.

So while my comments are not unbiased, they really aren’t self-serving either. I’ll be fine either way. I just want to do my part to save the greatest system of higher education the world has ever seen from the corporate-minded administrators, the naive libertarians, and the philistines who insist that students are “customers", education is “product", and professors are “employees".

Unapologetically Tenured, at 2:35 pm EST on December 10, 2006

An Overdue Complaint

I would like to complain about something that has nothing to do with the MLA Task Force on the Evaluation of Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, and then complain that the MLA convened a Task Force on this question instead of some other question I’m more interested in. I haven’t read any of the other relevant reports the MLA has issued in the past seven or eight years, like the one on scholarly publishing or the one on professional employment, and I also haven’t read the MLA recommendations on the conversion of part-time faculty lines to tenure-track lines or on the ethical treatment of adjuncts and full-time non-tenure track faculty. But I want to condemn the MLA for not requiring me to read these documents before I commented on this site.

Most of all, though, I want to complain about the very worst form of exploitation in higher education journalism: the exploitation of IHE comment trolls. I have to sit in a tiny windowless room here in Akron, Ohio with two other people. We are given a range of handles: L.L., B.D., Chuck, Art D., etc. We are not paid by the word; we are paid a flat fee of three dollars an hour. We have to produce twenty comments per day, thirty-five if there is a story about David Horowitz. We have no idea who employs us; he has instructed us to call him “Charlie,” but we know him only by his gravelly voice. And the safely tenured big gub-mint poobahs of the MLA have never raised a word of protest about our plight. Their day is coming, though, and coming soon.

All IHE Trolls Combined, at 8:35 pm EST on December 10, 2006

Unapologetically Tenured seemed to take it upon himself to be the voice of Received Tradition. So be it. But, don’t use my example as an argument that the system works. Yes, I stated that I can make far more outside of academia than within. I can and do. But, had I known the real job situation, I would have certainly made different choices. As it is, my literature degree had not helped my ultimate career choice one bit. It has often been a detriment…”what do you know about IT?” they ask… In my job I am self-taught. Derrida need not apply.

As to opening up the tyranny of the monograph…I did not argue for blogs (although there are some that are, arguably, more informative than serial publications), but how about a more streamlined distribution of peer-reviewed online content? Take out the expense of printing (and the publication lag) while retaining the review aspect? WIKI’s, they may evolve into something akin to this—the technology to allow a small-user base for WIKI’s is there, which could result in a peer-reviewed, online databse.

Really, UT, you are exhibiting a reactionary stance that does not speak well of you (or the larger Received Tradition).

Finally, with 60% of positions non-tenure tracked, you are in a minority position already. Enjoy it. It looks, if forces remain constant, to be dying.

Piss Poor Prof, at 2:31 pm EST on December 11, 2006

Whatever...

“Really, UT, you are exhibiting a reactionary stance that does not speak well of you...”

Well, no, actually I’m just expressing an opinion with which you disagree. There is a difference. But if attacking me personally somehow makes you feel better, knock yourself out.

Unapologetically Tenured, at 5:15 am EST on December 12, 2006

Forgot to add this complaint

I and my other M.A. friends are working in terrible, blue-collar jobs. It is not our fault. No one told us, there would be 200 to 500 applicants for every teaching position open. Even worse, we had to move back in with Mom and Dad.

So — we complain constantly. We think, if we complain enough, college presidents will leave their country clubs and raise enough money to get us average-paying, tenure-track jobs that don’t have to do with Starbucks, Food Lion, or the Elite English Academy of Osaka, Japan. We’re tired of teaching English to six-year-olds.

Oh, yes — when the college presidents get us our tenure-track jobs, regurgitating with others have written — we’ll still keep complaining about working conditions. Give into once — we’ll keep complaining. We’re not allowed to do that at Starbucks.

Never our fault — ever, at 12:20 pm EST on December 12, 2006

UTenured, to be fair I will flag my blog to which you are recently mentioned.

Google Burnt Out Adjunct. I wouldn’t want to write behind your back.

Piss Poor Prof, To be fair, at 9:45 pm EST on December 12, 2006

No Thanks

P.P.P., thanks for the heads up, I guess, but I really have no interest in seeing whatever further insults you’ve posted about me on your blog.

Repeat after me: It’s not about you. It’s not about me. It’s about the ideas. Let’s try and see if we can’t keep it that way.

Unapologetically Tenured, at 5:20 am EST on December 13, 2006

Not Radical Enough, Part 2

This has been an interesting discussion thus far.

I agree with UT (and others) that scrapping the tenure system would make little sense. There’s an argument in favor of tenure that I haven’t yet seen mentioned in this discussion: Tenure—because it offers some measure of both job security and academic freedom—allows those who wish to reform academia from within to work more effectively. Granted, tenure also offers protection to those aiming to protect the status quo, but to blame tenure alone for the persistence of the status quo is, to my mind, either mistaken or dishonest. The presence of tenure may, at some institutions, slow the process of meaningful reform. But the abolition of tenure would essentially destroy the possibility of reform from within.

I disagree with UT, though, about whether or not there exists a problem to be addressed. UT claims the MLA report addresses a problem that does not really exist. I believe there certainly is a problem, but that the MLA fundamentally misunderstands it.

On a related note, while I do not disagree with those posters who have pointed to “big picture” issues (the corporatization of academia, the treatment of contingent faculty in general, etc.) I think such explanations allow the MLA to wriggle off the hook and escape culpability for its own role in perpetuating and aggravating this crisis. It’s true that the erosion of tenure and the increasing use of contingent faculty are problems that go beyond the purview of the MLA and of the discipline of English. But it’s also true that the economic caste system in English departments (unlike in most other academic departments) is aligned with an intellectual caste system, and that the MLA is thoroughly complicit in the maintenance of this intellectual caste system. Simply put: In most English departments, literary interpretation rules the roost. It dominates the curriculum for English majors, and it constitutes the sole legitimate purpose for English studies in the minds of the majority of the faculty—especially the full-time faculty. Composition—the course deemed so important by universities that virtually every student must take it, often during the first semester of study—is deemed so unimportant by most English departments that its instruction can be farmed out to contingent faculty, graduate students, and in some cases, anyone with a master’s degree and a pulse. Because so many regard composition teaching as a “service” performed for the university by the English department, English departments themselves (many of them, I should say, as there certainly are exceptions) have been able to resist the powerful ways in which composition scholarship might compel them to re-think their curricula and re-think the fundamental nature of the discipline itself.

One might even argue that some of the contingent and adjunct faculty in English departments themselves bear a degree of blame for perpetuating this crisis; I’m thinking here of those who hold positions teaching composition in hopes of remaining in academia long enough to “move up” to positions teaching literature. Contingent faculty in other disciplines often take poorly paid and insecure positions (for which their degrees professionally qualify them) in hopes of ascending to better-paid and more secure positions for which their degrees also professionally qualify them. Contingent faculty in English often take poorly paid and insecure positions (for which their degrees do not professionally qualify them, as when people with degrees in literature take positions teaching composition) in hopes of ascending to better-paid and more secure positions for which their degrees professionally qualify them.

Although (as I stated in an earlier post) there is much to admire in the MLA’s new recommendations, not one of these recommendations—not one of them—acknowledges the intellectual caste system in English departments (in which literary interpretation is positioned at the top and the teaching and scholarship of writing are positioned at the bottom). If the MLA will not acknowledge this problem, its recommendations will bring about only cosmetic changes, if in fact they bring about any changes at all.

Tim Mayers, Associate Professor at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, at 9:32 am EST on December 13, 2006

The laws of economics will bite you in the...

butt when the ever-declining numbers of grad students in humanities (esp. English) goes down to 0.

Would YOU want to invest 10+ years preparing for a job that doesn’t exist?

It won’t be long before the English professor will go the way of the horsebuggy maker.

KathyM, at 1:20 pm EST on December 14, 2006

Au contraire, mon ami…it is personal.

You are “Unapologetically” presenting yourself as a representative of a specific group. The top of the pyramid, as it were. You are part of what this whole discussion is all about. But, I will refrain from commenting on tone and comment on the tenor of your ideas.

Tim Mayers hits upon the elephant in the room. English departments are a caste system with lit crit the Brahmins. If you disbelieve, ask yourself this simple question: what are the three reasons for my English department to exist?

Your honest answer would include waxing elegiac about exposing young minds to ideas, texts and cultures far from their own. English is a mission field of Reader Saints amid a crowd of Philistines, Rubes and other undesirables. With patience and Keats, they too may know the enlightenment of Big Thoughts rendered poetic/prosaic.

Does UT speak for this view? Yes. Quoted from above:

As for the standards being raised over time, would we really want it to be any other way? That’s called progress.

Higher standards, as defined by the Received Tradition, means a monograph contribution to the study of literature. A professor must aspire to be Bloom in order to succeed. Little Elbows gets, well, elbowed out. “Scholarship” (read “progress,” read “virtue” and “light”) comes from aspiring to be like the “successful” R1 programs. Skill-based comp adjuncts are deceived in their idea that Virtue comes from eloquence. No, tenure comes from participating in a closed circle of “reading” approaches and insights.

Community Colleges, Land-grant U’s? They are not to hinder their ascent into Readers of Literature by getting clogged down in composition, writing or other pedestrian pursuits. You want to teach at a “real university”? then avoid anything that takes away from research time (reading what other have thought about the works of still others—or better yet, how to read the writing of those writing about the works of others) like teaching because Success is a Darwinian scramble to achieve Recognition/tenure. Once received, you can sit back, tsk-tsk the melee below and thank the lucky stars you were smart enough to escape, resting assured that you achieved all of the success by your own merits alone.

My final though in this comment stream. UT asks:

… I know that nothing I say will persuade the rabidly anti-tenure folks who, for reasons that make no sense to me, continue to frequent a website devoted to higher education.

Perhaps there are those who feel (I am beginning to think more and more that they feel this foolishly) that even though the present system is stacked against them (for secure wage, advancement, recognition), that the rewards of instruction will pay off. Cynically I would say that there are many longing after a lost cause. But, then I am here, pursuing the debate with no intention of rejoining the team.

Piss Poor Prof, at 6:30 pm EST on December 14, 2006

I just bopped over to the class schedule of a certian university department with which I am intimately familiar. Not English, but in the School of Arts and Letters. The department has 10 full time tenured or tenure track faculty. If they had to quit using their mostly self-produced serfs, the grad students and adjuncts, they would have to hire another 12 full time faculty. Hmm. For everyone locked into the hell of the eternal adjuct, would ending tenure ease your pain? Really? How about ending the system by which the universities never have to buy the cow becuase they’re merrily milking the cow for almost free?

joe, at 4:05 pm EST on December 26, 2006

In denial

After reading the article on “Rethinking Tenure — and Much More” I came away with the same frustration I have had with this subject since becoming an academic 20 years ago.

As one or two of the letters pointed out, trying to figure out a one-size fits all criteria for tenure and promotion that would give parity to all of the departments across a college or university is a major challenge. However, the idea that this report ignores the importance of collegiality as one of the criteria for tenure is maddening and absurd.

We are the only profession that guarantees a job for life when one receives tenure. Why is the criterion of one’s professional behavior with one’s colleagues not an equally important part of that requirement? Everyone has an example (to some degree) of a faculty member who feels slighted and then takes out their rancor on their colleagues with the most petty, childish, and sometimes egregious behavior. It is outlandish that faculty senates and administrations will allow this kind of behavior to exist unabated, but it happens all the time.

In some universities I have worked you must be a convicted felon before you can be relieved of your job. That sounds absurd but it’s true. I suggest when this becomes accepted policy something is tragically wrong with a system that was not set up to protect the mediocre faculty member or the sociopath who refuses to be or cannot be a responsible and functioning member of a faculty.

The fact that someone can attain tenure and then stop working or feel immune to a responsibility to nothing beyond self-interest is appalling.

As ridiculous as things have become with tenure, I would prefer to wipe tenure out and have renewable 5-year contracts. There’s a radical idea to chew on and reject.

All of this chatter and squirming over tenure is due to cowardice on the part of administrations and faculty to be honest about the true quality of scholarship, the quality of teaching, and expectations of mature behavior.

Robert, Professor, at 9:05 am EST on December 29, 2006

PhDs, jobs, tenure

I read “Tenured Professor"’s response to my post and looked up his suggested reading. I found, among other things, this:

“In fact, in some areas of the humanities (notably, English and history), there are about twice as many new Ph.D. degrees conferred annually as there are advertisements in the Chronicle of Higher Education for faculty positions in these fields.”

Science PhDs and humanities PhD are simply not in the same economic boat.

I guess my reaction to this discussion is to say I don’t care about tenure —sure, keep it, whatever — it’s not my main concern. Maybe it really does preserve freedom of speech; that’s an untested proposition, but ok. It seems right that it gives profs power versus their administrations.

My disappointment arises from the choice those profs have failed to make to use the power tenure has given them to make sure their profession exists in the future. If they don’t even bother to use tenure’s power to challenge their administrations’ inexorable destruction of their professions, then tenured profs make themselves irrelevant and soon to be extinct. Eventually We’ll have one PROF orbited by hundreds of adjuncts, and that’ll be a department. Tenure is not the point.

Daniel Mozes, Adj. Assist. Prof. at Lehman College, at 9:25 pm EDT on April 25, 2007

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