From Rachel Toor
I asked someone who had been president of two fancy-pants colleges and gone on to lead a major cultural institution, “Can we talk about bravery?”
He said, “Let me answer that in a different way.”
He explained that when people said to him that he must love his job, he told them to ask him when he was no longer in it.
He said, “I never want to love a job so much I’m afraid to lose it.”
You know who has little to fear when it comes to losing a job? Tenured faculty. I submit: The most conservative—that is, resistant to change—and entitled group of people in the country are tenured faculty. We won the job lottery.
To be fair, the vast majority of those teaching are hardworking, student-centered, smart, and caring people who just want to do the jobs they were trained for. These folks (as well as zillions of unheralded staff members) do the real work of our marketing tag lines: transforming lives.
Think back on your own college experience. Who had the biggest impact on you? For many first-gen students, it was a dining hall worker or custodian. For me, it wasn't the head of the faculty organization or the dean. It was Harriet Chessman (who didn’t get tenure), and Judith Butler and George Chauncey (when they were graduate student TAs for less accomplished professors).
Faculty are mission driven. But it's the dead wood Angry 8, or the Furious 15, who do 90 percent of the damage not only to presidents, but to their own freaking institutions.
One president said, “There is a culture of bullying in the academy, and my Angry 8 are as guilty as the worst offenders anywhere. Some of the most unfair, untrue, and downright cruel things that have been said to and about me have come from this group.”
Another, when I asked if she had such a cabal, said, “Yes. They are mostly senior men and senior women, every one of them a feminist.”
A former chancellor said, “The reason this group is hard to beat is that administrators come and go, but the tenured faculty are together for much longer. I found that I could overcome this if I could show the remaining faculty that I was doing as much as I could to win over the naysayers.”
Some of the animus is due, of course, to tribalism. Someone has to “hold them accountable.” Really, who doesn’t love to throw tomatoes at The Man?
There’s the academic tradition of hazing. We ask people to put their ideas into the world and then we attack them make them defend their turf. No wonder scholars are always in fighting stance.
Faculty pledge allegiance to their disciplines and their departments, not to the institution that pays them. Since we were all trained at R-1s, we think that’s where we should have ended up. Delusions of grandeur much? Dunning-Kruger effect?
In my snooping of the CVs of some of the most outspoken faculty bullies who go after their presidents, the recovering acquisitions editor in me knows many of these people were darned lucky to get tenure one million years ago. Who, if they’re engaging in scholarship and paying attention to their students, has the time to prepare the tomes they send to the media—book-length lists of grievances—except tenured faculty never again seeking promotion?
We only need the protection of academic freedom if we’re actually doing scholarly work, not just spouting off on social media. Otherwise, we’re covered by the First Amendment.
The least courageous among us are those with luxurious job security. Full professors (like me) have nothing to lose and no real incentive to remain active researchers. We are the truly privileged.
And yet, the majority of faculty sit silent, let the Angry 8 rant and rave, keep their heads down, and never say, “Have you no decency?” to their intemperate colleagues. Perhaps they are really the ones to blame for the sad state of higher ed, like the white moderates called out by Dr. King.
If you missed it, this week IHE ran a piece from a former chancellor who has always fearlessly spoken out. He lost his job in higher ed and went on to something way cooler.
