You should have read up on him before posting this, because it's going to get flame-tastic.
Praise and Criticism of Finkelstein's scholarship
Not here, w/d. We are a civilized tenure review collective.
His book on the Israeli occupation is good work.
But if there was ever an argument to be made for biding one's time until after getting tenure, this is it: he had everything going for him, including popularity with students, a good teaching reputation, passable scholarly work, and now, as a result of getting into a very public fight over the last few years, has a dramatically reduced forum in which to speak. Waiting an extra year or two to get into a pissing match with Dershowitz wouldn't have been too high a price to pay for some minimal career security, a little institutional legitimacy, and the protection of academic freedom.
But that just means Finkelstein's not very shrewd or prudent. All the blame sits at the feet of the administration, and of Dershowitz, who needs no comment.
Ralph Luker over at Cliopatria linked to this article about Finkelstein.
As I recall, his department recommended him for tenure but was overruled at a higher level.
Dershowitz is scum, enough so to make me rethink the issues I agree with him about.
Oh man, according to that Wikipedia article, Finkelstein in print accused Dershowitz of plagiarism, and Harvard president Derek Bok (yes, the father of that Bok) looked into it and declared that Finkelstein's accusations were without substantive merit. That's the sort of thing that can make for a "eh, not worth it" reputation in academia.
Dershowitz accused Finkelstein's mom of being a Kapo in Auschwitz. That is an insult you don't see that often.
The New York Times Magazine piece last week on Larry Summers mentioned that Dershowitz and Steven Pinker teach a class together and are both more vocal defenders of Summers' delve into gender noodling than Summers himself, which strikes me as sadly apt. Dershowitz is a shitty, torture-loving man.
Harvard president Derek Bok (yes, the father of that Bok)
I thought Derek Bok was "that Bok", and even he is hardly a household name. Who is this other one?
There's a mysterious semi-secret blogger lady named Bok.
I liked this, from Dershowitz's list of the 10 Stupidest Things Said by Finkelstein: "[Some people [who support the thesis of a new anti-Semitism think the musical] Cats is a codeword for K-A-T-Z, Katz."
As a lefty M.O.T., I always appreciated Finkelstein's willingness to come out and say that accusations of anti-Semitism are mostly a fundraising tool and the Holocaust is useful propaganda for the state of Israel's less winsome policy decisions. Apparently being Jewish himself has not been enough to protect him from the pushback.
The Chronicle article linked in 5 suggests that tenure was denied because he wasn't very "collegial" and didn't follow academic standards in his public intellectual life. He's certainly a bomb-thrower, but has anyone ever been denied tenure for being a jerk who wasn't also politically controversial?
Man, it makes me so sad that Pinker is the default spokesperson for cognitive science. Is it too much to ask that an ostensible neuroscientist be able to acknowledge how much we don't know about the brain?
I don't think Dershowitz is torture-loving so much as that he saw the torture issue as an opportunity to make a half-clever argument as a means of self-promotion.
Yes, Hilzoy is Anne Elk (A. Elk) who has a theory which is hers.
Considering that Finkelstein's parents have been accused by Dershowitz of being Nazi collaborators, and that Finkelstein himself has been accused by the Times of rewriting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, firing him for making ad hominem attacks is sort of wry.
Also, re: good scholarship coupled with saying insane things: Benny Morris. Righteous Victims is a super-awesome book, but then in 2002 Morris gave this interview in Ha'aretz. I had a lot of respect for him before, and still do, as a historian, but reading that freaked me out but good.
When I met Hilzoy at UnfoggeDCon it was like meeting academic nobility. In her own right she is a one sharp thinker. Her parents aren't too shabby either. And her grandparents! Ye Gods.
As Giblets said: BOW!
I don't see why Derek Bok should be cited as a good reason for denying Finkelstein tenure; Dershowitz himself admits that Finkelstein openly acknowledged Bok's refutation of the plagiarism argument, which in any case was basically a minor footnote to the charges in Beyond Chutzpah of grave inaccuracies and deceptions in Dershowitz' The Case for Israel. Bok has had nothing to say directly about the latter, and Dershowitz appears to be unable to offer any real refutation of it; his responses consist mostly of misquotations, ad hominem attacks, dark allegations of "conspiracy" and assorted other smoke-blowing. I don't know that any of the Dersh's defenders have done any better.
On The Holocaust Industry, DePaul appear to have cited an NYT review by a Holocaust scholar who's long on wild, inflammatory descriptions of what Finkelstein is supposed to have written, none of which the reader can verify since he doesn't actually quote any of the supposedly offensive material from the book. Not having read the book itself, I can't tell whether the reviewer is right or not, but that pattern of behaviour is by now familiar and more than a little suspect. It's also interesting that all of Finkelstein's outrageous hate speech and intellectual hucksterism apparently snuck past Raul Hilberg when he endorsed the book.
DePaul's decision looks suspect.
Holy shit, Dershowitz wrote that Mearsheimer and Walt's Israel lobby paper had "every paragraph virtually is copied from a neo-Nazi Web site, from a radical Islamic Web site, from David Duke's Web site"?
That Benny Morris interview reminds me of an interview with Levinas, who in the midst of his shtick (anti-semite!) about the Other and the face-to-face and the Neighbor is asked about the Palestinians and says something like, "Oh, some people aren't neighbors, they're enemies." Unfuckingbelievable. I'll try to find the quote.
Shit, I can't find it, and I'm not sure about the "enemy" thing. But it was bad!
Wow, Dershowitz is really... something.
New DePaul mascot: The Fighting Coughlins
Ah, here it is:
Q: Emmanuel Levinas, you are the philosopher of the 'other'. Isn't history, isn't politics the very site of the encounter with the 'other', and for the Israeli, isn't the 'other' above all the Palestinian?
Levinas: My definition of the other is completely different. The other is the neighbour, who is not necessarily kin, but who can be. And in that sense, if you're for the other, you're for the neighbor. But if your neighbour attacks another neighbour or treats him unjustly, what can you do? The alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy, or at least then we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong.
That's from page 294 of the Levinas Reader.
28: Asked about the Palestinian as the Israelis' other, Levinas is supposed to have said: "If your neighbour attacks another neighbour or treats him unjustly . . . Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy. . . " (That's from an exchange between Zizek and Levinas recounted in Organs Without Bodies, as cited here, by Mark Kaplan, though without a page reference. If it's accurate, it would basically render Levinas' musings about alterity meaningless.)
In my memory of long ago, Dershowitz was an outspoken 1st Amendment hero and rule-of-law advocate. Was he always nuts, or did he sustain brain damage in the last decade or two?
it would basically render Levinas' musings about alterity meaningless
That was my initial reaction, although I'm willing to entertain the idea that he just couldn't live up to his own ideals.
Eh. Morris seems fine. Gloomy, and not comfortable, but honest, it appears. People who use language like "the Holocaust industry" worry me, but Dershowitz is pretty good enemy to have.
25.---I haven't really followed the argument, but a junior guy's having to admit a refutation by a very respected scholar is generally not going to do him any favors in a tenure review.
Admitting the refutation of a minor point while successfully defending the major one? Doesn't seem like that should be sufficient to sink him, either.
Hil/ary Bok is Al/va Myr/dal's granddaughter?
On Finkelstein, I think he's the victim of a witch hunt *and* about as well-balanced a scholar of these issues as Danny Goldhagen.
Dershowitz is scum, enough so to make me rethink the issues I agree with him about.
Seconded.
Hilzoy enjoys her semi-anonymity, with respect to her students; maybe some retroactive Goog/lepro/ofing of Hil/lary from someone with the power to do that would be in order?
Oh, really? I thought it was an open secret. Sorry. I'll googleproof it.
I both misspelled the first name in question and failed to see that there's only one actual use of it here. Might be OK.
42: yeah, thought so too. Hasn't she been on, like panels with the two names linked?
Bok Toy would have been a cuter pseud.
Well, I think of it as an open secret too -- I'm pretty sure I've seen her use the term "weak anonymity" for it. But in fact the actual info is rarely seen. I only know about it because about 3 years ago blogger hilzoy said "I'm guest-posting at Kevin Drum's next week", and the postings had her real name. So everyone seems to honor it.
42: It's an open secret; what she want, AIUI, is that people who google for her real name not get a ton of hits for her pseudonym. So 39 isn't problematic, but the mentions of her pseudonym in the rest of the thread might be.
She is a freaking bright woman. I really enjoy reading what she writes.
34: Dershowitz both has done and continues to do good work in U.S. criminal law (he also had the good sense to hire one of my best friends as his research assistant). However, his positions with regard to any Israeli action tend to be either evil, mad, or both.
The torture warrant stuff was also very bad, though I get the impression strangely well-intentioned.
By that, I mean that I've been made to understand that he thought the U.S. torturing people during the so-called GWOT was inevitable, and that announcing a policy of doing so only via judicial warrants issued in advance would both have the effects of requiring a "neutral" decisionmaker agree that torture was necessary in this case and, by bringing instances of torture into the light, lessen the amount of it. It seems more likely that the weakening of the torture norm would increase the amount of it, and that any torture which the relevant actors thought wouldn't happen if it came to light just wouldn't come to light. Also that official approval of torture is so disgustingly wrong that any positive effects shouldn't be considered.
I don't really know much about Finkelstein, my impression is strongly negative but I could easily have read the wrong things in this case.
Based on his other positions, I'm convinced that he thinks Arabs are OK to torture.
Googling Hi/lary Bo/k, an early hit is a link from Brad DeLong's blog to one of her Washington Monthly items. She signed that Hilzoy, but Brad lunk to it under her real name....
I Googled the two names together and got about 120 hits. Many of them were posted by herself under both names simultaneously. In other cases both names were on the same page but not connected. There were no hostile references or outings.
I agree with DeLong: On Finkelstein, I think he's the victim of a witch hunt *and* about as well-balanced a scholar of these issues as Danny Goldhagen.
The point being that there are no witch hunts against Danny G. even though he's equivalently unbalanced. In US academia and the media, one sort of unbalance is allowed a lot more freedom than the other.
Hil/ary Bo/k is Al/va Myr/dal's granddaughter?
Yeah. And of course her maternal grandfather is Gun/nar. Freaking great family in terms of accomplishements. (Separate Nobels to each of her mother's parents!) I can also see that it might be difficult growing up in the shade of that family tree.
For shits and giggles, maybe we can try to stop discussing her.
HB is the new Paris Hilton!
Didn't one of Hilzoy's relatives invent the personal pronoun, or fire, or something?
re: 58
Pedantically, we can probably all say that. If we go back far enough ...
Though I'm shocked by Levinas' comment about the Palestinians, it might be he thinks that because he's from an older generation, whose folks were killed by the Nazis.
His point about the other and enemies is interesting: what kind of an Other would be a Nazi? Neighbor or enemy?
Going back to this case, basically I would say that if I were sitting on Finklestein's committee, the question of collegiality-in-tone would have some resonance with me (I'm sure this surprises no one). I really do think that quality scholarship really shouldn't read like Finklestein's more recent work reads.
But by that standard, there are quite a few people who shouldn't be in academia. Topping the list would be Dershowitz, who seems the absolute antithesis of everything a scholar ought to be at this point. I'm all for people being generalists and public intellectuals, but not for being stupid, unfair and scorched-earth as a consequence.
In a world where Dershowitz has tenure, Finklestein should have tenure. In a *truly* just world, they'd have to share an office.
Benny Morris (shameless self-link, but it's still a worthwhile piece)
We don't know the contents of the tenure file. Which is to say, while we might know something about his writing and even, by inference, his teaching and collegiality, in many tenure cases, letters from academics outside the scholar's institution but in his field carry great weight. We've no idea what those letters said. On that basis alone, I'd hesitate to charge foul play.
The department's recommendation is not, by itself, evidence for foul play. Unfortunately, departments -- which are small societies in which people cannot avoid one another -- have been known to skirt their responsibility to make a difficult decision by simply recommending everyone for tenure, with the idea that the administration, or higher-level committees, will sort things out.
I am not making an affirmative defense of the institution but rather, urging caution in attacking it.
Um, hi.
Thanks for google-proofing. I have no problem with anyone figuring out who I am from what I write on blogs; the feeble gestures I make at anonymity are more to make it harder for my students to turn up my blog posts by searching my actual name. Though ever since Kevin Drum's RSS feed sent all my guest posts out under my actual name, that has been sort of a losing battle. Still, I figure it's worth a shot.
Fwiw, none of the stuff about my various forbears had actually happened when I was a kid, so unlike my little brother, who thought (at 4, very briefly) that he would someday inherit Harvard Square, it didn't have much of an impact on me.
(Actually, my great-grandfather is thought to have invented white space in advertising, which is not nearly as useful as fire.)
57: Paris Hilton has apparently found Gawd. Tell me HB hasn't!
Alan Dersh is a complete embarrassment to his ethnicity. Pity he can't be excommunicated. Or is that possible?
Ever run into Jan Myrdal? Interesting guy. In his books he seems terribly crusty and disagreeable, which is good.
I'd assume that one of Hilzoy's ancestors already found God, so that she grew up knowing where to look for Her. :)
Jan apparently renounced his parents, so probably not. He would be H*lz*y's uncle.
Jon: In view of the fact that he's my uncle, it's probably surprising that I've only met him twice. Last I heard, he still supported Pol Pot.
And put down the fact that I left the 'h' out of 'John' to the subject matter.
So explain this "tenure" thing to me again? We'll give you incredible job security and freedom to do whatever you damn please, but only after you've demonstrated that you can play nice and be a good little junior faculty member and not make trouble?
So explain this "tenure" thing to me again?
Generally, you need to have demonstrated (a) that you can and will publish research that other scholars in your field consider valuable; (b) that you're a good teacher; (c) that you're a good citizen -- i.e., serve constructively on committees etc.
Normally, it's (a) that's the hang-up. It's hard to predict what people will do. How long did it take you to publish your first research? How good is it? But based on the department's judgment and, as I indicated above, the judgment of scholars in your field, we make a prediction.
As to job security, tenure generally means that you can be fired only with cause. There are causes, of course.
Thanks, but I was actually trying to be snarky. I lean toward thinking that tenure isn't a very good way of protecting what it's supposed to protect, and stories like this one tend to reinforce that view. Which is not to say that the guy was (or wasn't) God's gift to academia, but only that it seems pretty obvious that when a tenure decision is heavily politicized, lobbied, etc., it won't be (can't be) based purely on the candidate's merits as a scholar and teacher.
I think that in lower-ranking schools, and I think that DePaul is one such, not too many faculty have published scholarship of any importance. In these cases I think that it's just a bare minimum of publications plus collegiality.
At my alma mater (Portland State) there was a guy "X" in the econ department who had published an article introducing an idea which eventually, in hyphenated partnership with a major guy, came to be established small part of economic theory -- something like the Samuelson-X Principle. He was set for life. Everyone else's publications were small-time.
I think that in lower-ranking schools, and I think that DePaul is one such, not too many faculty have published scholarship of any importance. In these cases I think that it's just a bare minimum of publications plus collegiality.
Uh, plus teaching.
I knew that there was an obscure third factor.
John, I think that used to be true, but isn't so much anymore, owing to the poor job market for professors, which has lasted some decades now. B, C, and D schools can hire academics with PhD's from A schools, and can then demand that they publish, because there are plenty more A academics where they came from.
DaveL, I thought you might be snarking, but I chose to respond seriously mainly because I think tenure decisions -- unlike, e.g., publishing decisions -- generally get taken seriously and that the tenure process isn't nearly as broken as your 77 suggests.
We'll have to wait until slol gets tenure to know what he really thinks.
81: I'm not arguing that universities routinely make bad tenure decisions, but only that I'm pretty skeptical that it's the most sensible way to protect academic freedom and associated values. Tenure, and decent academic jobs in general, look from the outside to be a lot like elite college admissions: the people who get the brass ring are mostly pretty good, and some are really outstanding, but so are a host of others who are less lucky, less connected, etc.
On the case at issue, Dershowitz has tenure and Finkelstein doesn't. One way of looking at that is that tenuring people with Dershowitzian levels of combativeness is a bad idea and not one that DePaul should emulate. But that's certainly not the only way of looking at it.
I'm not sure what you thought I was suggesting is broken about the tenure process, but when I said that the decision in a politicized case can't be based purely on the merits, I meant only that it's not possible to purge all "extraneous" material from your brain when making a decision. That's an objection to tenure only insofar as it's an objection to any system that tries to make one perfect decision and then never question it again.
On the case at issue, Dershowitz has tenure and Finkelstein doesn't.
I don't see this is an excellent comparison. Dershowitz is a law professor who owes his tenure at Harvard to his ability to reason within the law. His opinions about Judaica and politics, while they may constitute his claim to your and my attention, don't have anything to do with his academic respectability, or otherwise.
the decision in a politicized case can't be based purely on the merits, I meant only that it's not possible to purge all "extraneous" material from your brain
In this sense, the decision in any case can't be based purely on the merits, though. Some people, one likes. This is hard to forget. You act professionally, though. Some people, one doesn't like their politics. This is hard to forget. You act professionally, though.
I'm pretty skeptical that it's the most sensible way to protect academic freedom
I'm open to contrary suggestions. But I have to say that even with tenure, you have a lot of professors awfully worried about what they say. Maybe you think that's as it should be, though.
I'm not sure it needs to be life tenure to obtain the relevant benefits, though.
Like I said, I'm open to contrary suggestions. Whaddya got?
Also, for the record, "tenure" doesn't mean "life tenure." It means you need some kind of cause to be fired, i.e., it's not at-will employment. But it falls well short of, say, the life tenure granted a Supreme Court Justice and the proceeding for removing a tenured academic isn't nearly so difficult as an impeachment. Note that the AAUP's statement even allows for "[t]ermination of a continuous appointment because of financial exigency." I'm not so sure "tenure" isn't more like assumed renewal of contract; tenured academics can be pressured, short of removal, to change their behavior and they can be removed.
87: Did you ever see Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome? Do you remember The Wheel?
I'm not sure, and my interjection may be confusing, because I'm not responding to bad decisions about offering tenure. But I have a hard time believing that a guaranteed, say, 20 years, yields different positive behavioral results than a lifetime guarantee. And it would make getting rid of deadwood easier.
88: Fucker. Had to jam me up like that, didn't you?
Some universities have programs serving that purpose. I.e., you get your big tenure review at 6 or 7 years, if you fail it, you're gone. But every subsequent 6 or 7 years later, you can have another similarly encompassing review; maybe you don't get fired if you fail one, but they start to pressure you -- taking away a portion of your salary, increasing your teaching obligations, etc.
taking away a portion of your salary, increasing your teaching obligations, etc.
In police procedurals--at least the one's I read-- it's "freeway therapy."
But I have to say that even with tenure, you have a lot of professors awfully worried about what they say. Maybe you think that's as it should be, though.
No, it's that I think that the sort of social factors you're referring to have a whole lot more to do with how people behave than extreme job security does. It's not that I think more professors need to be fired, it's that the costs of shaping the profession around a high-stakes, up-or-out decision early in a career look pretty high, and I'm skeptical that incurring those costs results in a significant increase in good and interesting work that can only be done with the security of tenure. Even in the employment at will world, people don't get fired for performance reasons very often, and not getting fired is a long way down the list of stuff that motivates people to do good work.
not getting fired is a long way down the list of stuff that motivates people
... or people of a certain kind, anyway. Yeah, and that's one of the things that actually makes the early up-or-out decision clear. Because you want someone who's going to produce once they've got "extreme job security." And if they don't produce even under up-or-out pressure, then you can reasonably assume they won't do much without it.
96: Not buying that at all, but lacking anything but argument ex rectum and anecdotes from the only slightly analogous world of law firms, I'll leave it.
Productivity of law firm partners is much more easily measured than productivity of professors. And there are serious costs to making decisions based on metrics that poorly capture what you are trying to measure, because people will change their behavior to reflect your metric (number of support requests handled is one obvious example, number of papers published is another one).
I'm not convinced that tenure is the best possible system, but it's not like our colleges and universities are the laughingstock of the rest of the world or anything like that. Which leads to "if it ain't broke..."
Actually, I take that back. Why wouldn't the same sort of periodic performance reviews plus the small but non-zero risk of getting fired if you stop doing your job work as well for academics as it does for the rest of us? (Which is to say, not great but functional.)
And do you really believe that failing to produce while under extreme pressure is always and only a sign of laziness? Or that the quantity and quality of someone's work at 30 is always a reliable indicator of the quantity and quality of the same person's work at 40 or 50 or 60?
I'm in favor of tenure, even if slol has it. Especially given the political climate, but even more generally, the bar for firing professors should be very high. Sure, you get some crappy hangers-on, but that's the price you pay for letting other people do interesting work and say interesting things.
96: Hrm, problematic. For some people, that kind of pressure is inimical to productivity; god knows I've gotten a lot more stuff out there this year than I did in the three years previous. I should think that if you want people who will produce when there's not a lot of pressure on them, then you want people who will produce when there's not a lot of pressure on them.
That said, I think tenure is basically a good thing. It has its flaws, but the alternative seems worse.
It has its flaws, but the alternative seems worse.
What is it about the alternative that you think is worse?
That without tenure, it would be very easy to can people who dare to think unpopular things, and or whose intellectual interests go in unpredicted directions. Good teaching, too, often means taking risks and or being unpopular. I've had some profs who got consistently poor evaluations, including from me, who now years later are the ones I think I learned the most from.
Why wouldn't the same sort of periodic performance reviews plus the small but non-zero risk of getting fired if you stop doing your job work as well for academics
As I indicated above, something much like this does indeed obtain in many universities. How many, I can't say.
do you really believe that failing to produce while under extreme pressure is always and only a sign of laziness?
I get the idea you're a little ticked, DaveL, and I didn't mean to annoy you. I apologize. "Laziness" is a judgmental word I wouldn't use. What I would say (what I tried to say) is if you haven't produced in six years, it's not a good indicator of a high level of productivity in the future. It might be because of laziness, though I would never assume that; it might be for other reasons; it doesn't matter -- it bodes poorly. (I, myself, have never seen a case where I would say laziness was the problem.)
Consider the case of a junior academic. S/he writes a PhD dissertation. S/he gets a tenure-track job. S/he now has six years to turn that dissertation, effectively a rough draft, into published material. Supposing it took six years to write the dissertation, that's twelve years to produce published work. That seems, if not generous, then hardly cramped, either.
Someone's going to warn us before slol gets tenure and is able to come in here strapped to fuck our shit up, right?
maybe you don't get fired if you fail one, but they start to pressure you -- taking away a portion of your salary, increasing your teaching obligations, etc.
This epitomizes the worst of the academic world. "Increasing your teaching obligations" is a pressure tactic? Talk about a clear illustration of where the priorities lie. How extremely unpleasant.
(This is not a personal criticism of slol.)
"Increasing your teaching obligations" is a pressure tactic?
Well, it's much as if you had to produce n widgets in x hours. Now you have to produce 1.5n widgets in x hours. It increases your work load. Even if you like your job producing widgets, you might not want that.
The biggest current problem with tenure is that salary commitments to senior tenured folks + budget cuts = overreliance on adjuncts and contract faculty = fewer t-t jobs than there oughta be.
But that's not actually a problem with tenure; it's a problem with budget cutting bullshit.
I am on record as loving teaching, btw.
I also wouldn't mind seeing some middle-ground type of not-quite-tenure available to the very high percentage of Americans in at-will employment.
Scratch that, it will create more problems than it solves. Let's just go for single-payer healthcare, which would do more than any other step I can think of to reduce the terror of losing a job.
109 gets it exactly right, and it's a threat to academic freedom. If you care about that sort of thing.
"Increasing your teaching obligations" is a pressure tactic? Talk about a clear illustration of where the priorities lie.
What Slol already said, plus--although it's common to gripe that the university underprioritizes teaching--the reality is that the lower your teaching obligation, the more time you have to devote to new curricular ideas and personal attention to individual students. Both of which are good things. So even those of us who love teaching start to love it a lot less when you're doing so much of it that you know you're doing it less well than you can/should.
What we really want is for certain persons to get tenure so we can have some deredaction.
Witt: You love your job, right? So if your employer decides that you should work 16 hours a day for the same pay, you'd be A-OK with that, right?
the lower your teaching obligation, the more time you have to devote to new curricular ideas and personal attention to individual students.
I'm not arguing with your overall points, but isn't this part in direct conflict with slol's original statement? I mean, if universities are increasing teaching responsibilities as a pressure tactic, the pressure is to publish more research or go to fancy conferences or get known or something, right? I mean, the university doesn't give a hoot (under this presumption) whether you're devoting personal attention to students or whatever.
I would settle for some dedictodaction.
111 and 112 yes. Although I don't see why we shouldn't get rid of this "freedom to work" and "at will employment" nonsense, really, at least to the extent that one has to have a reason for canning someone. American hangups about omg people will become lazy and not work as hard as they should! are insane; that puritan nonsense has to go.
Mmmm, 117 doesn't really get it right, though. IME, it's less that increased teaching is deliberately intended to pressure people to teach; it's that the people who are already producing research have that as grounds for arguing that they need time to pursue their research, and as a result, everyone else gets loaded up with more teaching.
I'm not really defending this; I've been on the shitty end of that stick and it sucks. And I think junior faculty should definitely be protected from teaching more than 4 courses a year, and should get pre-tenure sabbaticals as a matter of course. I'm more just explaining how it works. I really think that the biggest fucking problem is that the fucking Republicans have succeeded in bleeding education funding and convincing everyone that teachers and professors are a bunch of spoiled whiners who get paid six figures to mow their laws at 10 am on a Wednesday.
the pressure is to publish more research
I don't think so. I think, per Tim's "freeway therapy" analogy, the pressure is to quit. The expectations for publication don't diminish, you're just being asked to do more in less time.
103: That without tenure, it would be very easy to can people who dare to think unpopular things, and or whose intellectual interests go in unpredicted directions.
This is the part that I don't really believe, because it's basically an argument that bosses, given the opportunity, will routinely fire people for dumb reasons. That doesn't happen much outside of academia. Why should we assume that tenure is necessary to keep it from happening in academia?
104: No, I'm not ticked, and I'm sorry that the formulation of my questions came across that way. I just decided on re-reading that the conversation wasn't at such a dead end as I first thought. This isn't an area that I've thought through carefully or have strong opinions about. But tenure seems from the outside to create some really sweet jobs at the expense of a lot of pain among those trying to qualify for those jobs, and that seems like something that requires justification. (I feel kind of the same way about medical education, from a comparable level of ignorance, and with the caveat that practicing medicine apparently isn't nearly as sweet a job as it once was).
I get your point about productivity, but if the source of the productivity concern is needing to be sure about someone before you give up the power to fire them, removing tenure from the picture would lower the stakes a bunch. Not that high stakes are inherently a bad thing, but an academic profession that wasn't built around a high-stakes endurance contest in your formative years might also generate interesting work.
119: The ability to painlessly fire me if I slacked was critical to my getting hired at my previous two jobs. Both of these companies were fairly uniquely American, and I'd be pretty disappointed if that part of our economy went away.
Witt: You love your job, right? So if your employer decides that you should work 16 hours a day for the same pay, you'd be A-OK with that, right?
Actually, you might be amused by the truthful answer to that question. But, okay, let's think about the larger point. Let's say that role of a professor is to a) generate new knowledge, and b) share it with others.
The disagreement comes when one person interprets that role to mean "teaching lots of classes" and another to mean "publishing lots of articles." I fully accept that there are X number of hours in the day and there are diminishing returns to working 60 or 70 or however many hours.
I also hear that universities use the cudgel of "fine, then, we'll just dump more work on you" as a way to browbeat people who aren't performing their roles (i.e., "producing") in the university-preferred way.
What I am objecting to is the taken-for-grantedness of the assumption that the university's interpretation carries the day. Why should it? This is a power struggle. Defining job roles is an ongoing argument in every field I've ever worked in -- either defining up, when the secretarial staff decide they don't want to be treated like receptionists, or defining down, when the doctor decides to take responsibility for calling the insurance company on behalf of the patient.
I'm being stubborn about this because I think this is a too-often unquestioned assumption and it ought to be prodded a bit more.
it's basically an argument that bosses, given the opportunity, will routinely fire people for dumb reasons. That doesn't happen much outside of academia.
But it does, or did, happen in academia. Which is why we have the concept of academic freedom and ultimately, the institution of tenure. Back around 1900, Jane Stanford canned the economist E. A. Ross for saying we should restrict immigration and that certain kinds of natural monopolies should be publicly owned.
I don't think it's implausible that someone saying stuff like that today, or that we should have single-payer, or that we evolved from apes over millions of years, could get fired, if there weren't safeguards like tenure.
Anyway bunch of aggrieved academics said, hang on, there's something to Ross's research, and he should be allowed to say stuff like that. Presto, tenure.
"Presto" is a wild exaggeration, btw.
121: Oh, boy, I completely misunderstood slol's 91! He didn't mean that universities were increasing teaching load as an incentive to saying "Hurry up and do more research so we can lessen your teaching load again", he meant they were doing it as a way to pressure you to quit.
Sorry. Total misreading on my part.
But I've been producing all this research!
This is the part that I don't really believe, because it's basically an argument that bosses, given the opportunity, will routinely fire people for dumb reasons. That doesn't happen much outside of academia. Why should we assume that tenure is necessary to keep it from happening in academia?
Because in academia, unlike a lot of other jobs, the *real* goal is (1) long-term; (2) not market-driven; (3) specifically to challenge convention.
The disagreement comes when one person interprets that role to mean "teaching lots of classes" and another to mean "publishing lots of articles."
Well, again I'm arguing against my own personal interests here, but as a prof once said to me (rightly), publishing is teaching to a much wider audience. Teaching a good class is basically about giving students *existing* knowledge that they lack. Publishing is ostensibly about producing *new* knowledge. Both certainly have their place, and in fact at teaching-oriented institutions, teaching *is* very important for tenure. But at universities, which have graduate programs, what you want is something more than just summary.
increasing your teaching obligations, etc.
A surefire way to increase publications!
Also: bosses, given the opportunity, will routinely fire people for dumb reasons. That doesn't happen much outside of academia.
I beg to differ.
(I must be in a really contrary mood today. I blame the lawyers.)
You haven't read the thread, have you ben?
But it does, or did, happen in academia. Which is why we have the concept of academic freedom and ultimately, the institution of tenure. Back around 1900, Jane Stanford canned the economist E. A. Ross for saying we should restrict immigration and that certain kinds of natural monopolies should be publicly owned.
I don't think it's implausible that someone saying stuff like that today, or that we should have single-payer, or that we evolved from apes over millions of years, could get fired, if there weren't safeguards like tenure.
But a lot has changed since 1900 for employees outside of academia, too. And I don't think the goal is to prevent any professor (or any person) from ever losing their job for bad reasons. There are enough rotten people in this world that some of them will end up in positions of power that they will then abuse. And that's just as true even if the abuse doesn't extend to firing; there are lots of ways to make someone's life unpleasant enough that they start wondering about opportunities elsewhere, especially if they're good at what they do. But firing people for reasons unrelated to the quality of their work has a cost. A school that isn't careful about protecting free inquiry isn't likely to be a successful school. I think that's a stronger protection than tenure is.
And again, I'm kind of thinking out loud here, not taking a strong position. I'm not necessarily opposed to tenure, just skeptical about arguments I've heard in its favor and about whether the benefits outweigh the costs.
And boy are my arms tired.
I still think that the whole concept of productivity in this context is easily misapplicable and probably often misapplied.
A school that isn't careful about protecting free inquiry isn't likely to be a successful school.
You might think that, but then why is the White House full of people from Patrick Henry college? You're talking some Econ 101 talk, there. I mean, in the long run, maybe you're right. But in the long run, we're all dead.
I still think that the whole concept of productivity in this context is easily misapplicable and probably often misapplied.
'splain, svp.
Because in academia, unlike a lot of other jobs, the *real* goal is (1) long-term; (2) not market-driven; (3) specifically to challenge convention.
And the Martians who are parachuted in to run the operation have no understanding of the real goals and will therefore run around firing people who are doing what they're supposed to be?
Re: A school that isn't careful about protecting free inquiry isn't likely to be a successful school.
and
You might think that, but then why is the White House full of people from Patrick Henry college? You're talking some Econ 101 talk, there. I mean, in the long run, maybe you're right. But in the long run, we're all dead.
Also, what about the University of Phoenix et al.? A "successful" institution of higher learning can be defined quite narrowly, as in happy shareholders.
the Martians who are parachuted in to run the operation
... are state legislators, or trustees, who are often out of sympathy with the "real goals."
Given the jittery nature of universities, I suspect that a university system without tenure would lead to a lot of pressure to let someone go at their annual (or whatever) review if what they were researching caused embarassment. This seems like a bad idea.
You might think that, but then why is the White House full of people from Patrick Henry college?
The Justice Department is apparently full of Regent University grads. But when the White House's own legal interests are at stake, the standards are different." Also, success in placing graduates in the Bush Administration does not, IMHO, make a successful school.
A school that isn't careful about protecting free inquiry isn't likely to be a successful school. I think that's a stronger protection than tenure is.
This, I doubt. I think that the damage from not protecting free inquiry would only become apparent after it was too late to do anything about it, creating strong incentives to loot the reputation of the school. You can see some of this in the U.S. manufacturing sector, where companies are only now figuring out that getting rid of job security saved them money at the time but now means that they have to eat the cost of training new employees and dealing with them jumping ship to competitors.
state legislators, or trustees, who are often out of sympathy with the "real goals."
Witness the hearings held last year by my state's illustrious legislature, which used valuable time to ascertain that, in fact, there were no credible accusations of discrimination against conservative students nor was there a need to establish alternative dispute-resolution systems.
success in placing graduates in the Bush Administration does not, IMHO, make a successful school.
Maybe not -- but those are the "Martians" who don't like what you apparently do think is the hallmark of a successful school, and who probably would go around firing people for bad reasons if they could.
142: I was thinking of the administrators, most of whom are/were faculty members themselves. And whose essential skills include managing legislators, trustees, etc. to keep them from screwing up the operation any more than absolutely necessary.
go around firing people for bad reasons
I'm Googling around and can't find the link to the article on NIH-funded researchers getting threatened because the abstracts for their grants included trigger words that were popping up when right-wing activists searched them, causing protests about their work and headaches for their university employers. I believe it was mostly AIDS researchers.
Point being: Administrators can get a lot of heat over unpopular scholarship.
140, 141, 144: You people are on crack. I'm not going to get into the argument about whether it would be perfectly okay if we let the free market take over education.
Imagine a country where states are seriously considering the Academic Bill of Rights, where they've defunded federal stem-cell research for reasons of conscience/ideology and not science, where they've rather often and sometimes by policy dispreferred good science if it doesn't help tobacco or oil companies (e.g.) -- I have no trouble believing that in that country, you'd find academics would be at risk of firing without the safeguard of tenure.
Except for this.
148: Look, it's damn easy to rationalize making x sacrifice "for the greater good of the institution." A means by which the greater good of the institution gets slowly whittled away. Arguing that individual administrators will, of course, heroically stand up to the folks that hold the purse strings to defend individual faculty members is just a wee bit naive.
Point being: Administrators can get a lot of heat over unpopular scholarship.
Absolutely. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that free inquiry is a universally-held value or that there would be no unjustified firings in academia if tenure were eliminated. But I tend to put a lot of that in the category "people suck", not the category "must prevent at all costs". And I do tend to think that the costs of tenure are pretty high and that academics tend to overestimate the importance of tenure to their ability to do their jobs.
Perhaps more to DaveL's point, one potentially quite effective means of handling trustees/legislators could be to tie your hands with regard to firing professors. Everyone knows "I'd love to help you, but our policy says I can't" goes over much better than "screw you."
academics tend to overestimate the importance of tenure to their ability to do their jobs
This is almost certainly true 90 times out of a hundred, at least. But that's why it's there: to protect those 10 cases.
150, 152: Oh, bullshit. Who's talking about "letting the free market take over education," and how would that differ from the status quo anyway? And I'm not talking about making 'x sacrifice', I'm talking about whether the institution of tenure is, on balance, helpful or harmful to the sort of colleges and universities we both want to protect.
Re the various Bush Administration comments: yeah, they're horrible. But is the institution of tenure materially reducing their ability to do damage? NIH researchers aren't getting fired wholesale. And tenured academics whose work depends on NIH funding can be effectively shut down without getting them fired.
is the institution of tenure materially reducing their ability to do damage?
Given my 151, I'd say yes. And note in 151, it's not the Bush Administration per se, it's many dozens of smaller outfits that influence state legislatures, which is where the action is.
I do tend to think that the costs of tenure are pretty high
Okay, what are they? What would be the benefits of getting rid of tenure? What safeguards for academic freedom would you put in their place?
Who's talking about "letting the free market take over education,"
When you say "A school that isn't careful about protecting free inquiry isn't likely to be a successful school. I think that's a stronger protection than tenure is," it sure sounds like you are.
Right, there have been, as I recall, studies about work hours post-tenure, and the overall results suggest that there are a lot of them. Everyone remarks on the deadwood cases while forgetting about the people who keep up their teaching and research while adding heavier committee work.
157.1: I disagree, mostly. Academics aren't powerless, and getting people fired is the sort of obvious bullying that pisses people off. Legislators don't like doing that sort of thing. Much more effective and less costly to stick to the sort of below-the-radar harrassment that they do already.
157.2: I'm thinking mostly of what tenure and the early up-or-out decision does to the structure of the profession. It serves the economic interests of tenured professors very well, but it's rough on people who are trying to get tenure, especially the ones who don't succeed. And I'm unconvinced that the current balance between scholarship and teaching is either optimal or sustainable (how long can tuition increases run at 3x inflation?), although I'm even less sure of that than the rest of this.
But I probably shouldn't have made as strong a claim as I did about costs. Mostly I think the benefits of tenure are overstated. I haven't thought much on the cost side beyond "hey, it's not just about firing deadwood."
158: Eh, that's a pretty weak sort of market takeover. The reason that Harvard isn't Regent University is that it works a lot better for Harvard to be Harvard. I suppose you can call that "protecting their brand" if you want to, but I don't think it adds much to the discussion.
Fwiw, it's worth, I once spent a bit of time researching the history of academic freedom pre-tenure. It was decades ago, so I don't have handy references, but there were a bunch of cases in which professors were removed for things like: supporting unions, teaching Marx, and iirc being German (during WWI.) Also, lots of cases of donors pressuring for the removal of various people, in some cases successfully. So there is a history of this sort of thing.
We could also get into McCarthy era loyalty oaths, if anyone wants.
, there have been, as I recall, studies about work hours post-tenure, and the overall results suggest that there are a lot of them.
I'm not sure that tapping much student ass now that the school can't fire you should count as work. But I'm willing to be persuaded.
Next week maybe I'll go to the NRA convention and argue that the Second Amendment isn't such a big deal.
I get that there were abuses of academic freedom in the past (and the present, for that matter). I'm just resisting the idea that the only (or the best) way to solve the problem is for academics to have the job security of federal judges and a level of control over their work that would make most self-employed people jealous. That's great stuff if you can get it, but it doesn't seem outrageous to ask if it's really doing as much good as its defenders assert when pretty much every other field of endeavor in the United States is able to function without it.
I should also note that my general view of the world is that (a substantial number of) people suck; that unpleasantness and injustice are therefore inevitable; that laws and policies and dispute-resolution procedures are as much about distributing power as about reaching the right result in any given situation; and that enforcement activities are almost as likely to simply redistribute injustice as to reduce it. That doesn't mean that I'm totally cynical and just throw up my hands, but it does mean that I tend to resist arguments of the form "some people would abuse x, and therefore nobody should be allowed to do x." It's not that "ban x" is always wrong, but that it requires more justification than just "x is sometimes abused."
it's rough on people who are trying to get tenure, especially the ones who don't succeed.
You know, that raises some interesting empirical questions. What happens to the people who don't get tenure? Economically: what are their earnings? Sociologically/anthropologically: what do they do instead? Psychologically: how does it affect their view of themselves and their work?
Somebody must have studied this in a systematic way. What does the data say?
Unfogged:Academia::The NRA:Gun Nuts.
I mean, Unfogged:Academia::An NRA Convention:Gun Nuts.
Anyone know why tenure specifically, rather than some other institutional arrangement, was developed in response to the various firings in the early 20th century? Were other options discussed?
Anyone know why tenure specifically, rather than some other institutional arrangement, was developed in response to the various firings in the early 20th century?
Did German universities have tenure? If so that was probably why.
I was worried that would be the answer. But you're probably right. Why did German universities have tenure, if they so had?
People who don't get tenure slink away and are never referred to again.
If you're bounced from Harvard, you can step down and try again. In fact, they say that Harvard bounces everyone on their first try.
I read about someone being refused tenure at Delaware, and the idea was that this was the end of the road for him. Academically speaking, it was time for him to limp to the elephant graveyard and lay down his weary bones.
Not quite. At Harvard, and at most of the Ivies, tenure-track is tenure track in name only. It's a five-year renewable contract with the possibility of tenure, but 'coming up for tenure' means 'competing on the open market for a senior position in your field.'
Most smart, talented junior faculty don't stick around to go through the tenure process; they jump somewhere else before their clock comes up.
Anyone know why tenure specifically, rather than some other institutional arrangement, was developed in response to the various firings in the early 20th century?
It appears to be the case that, in the long view anyway, tenure was restored, rather than developed -- that scholars had special protections for employment going back to the medieval period and extending through the colonization of the Americas; that only in the early c18 did Harvard College try to limit that employment (and immediately used the new limits to get rid of someone who was, in matters of internal politics, annoying to the college president); that through the next hundred and fifty years or so, there was much to-ing and fro-ing over what you should have to do to fire an academic.
Come the period 1860-1914, tenure was maybe at a long-view low ebb, with lots of powerful new college presidents and new state universities, and people generally getting fired without even hearings. The Ross imbroglio allowed a re-discovery of older protections for tenure.
I've known a fair number of people who didn't get tenure and just went on and got another academic job. Sometimes at a "lesser" university, sometimes not.
academics to have the job security of federal judges and a level of control over their work that would make most self-employed people jealous. That's great stuff if you can get it, but it doesn't seem outrageous to ask if it's really doing as much good as its defenders assert when pretty much every other field of endeavor in the United States is able to function without it.
With all due respect, DaveL, this sounds like your argument basically boils down to sour grapes.
The thing is, education isn't *like* most other fields of endeavor. It's pretty much its own unique thing. The things that in some ways it's most like actually operate more or less the same way: the priesthood, civil service in some areas, maybe the nonprofit world. Artistic creation.
And hell, arguably some of the profit-driven industries might do better if they were freed from needing to constantly report to shareholders. It would be fabulous if, say, energy companies could actually devote a big chunk of their profits to pure research and developing new technologies that might not show a profit for decades.
Happiness/SWB studies show that in the long term, people who have been denied tenure are just as happy as those who are granted tenure.
A lot depends on where you're denied tenure and why, but even getting canned by a moderately attractive place is compatible with continued employment at another institution.
Hey FL, where are those studies -- and the ones about work hours after tenure?
Slol, I don't have all my stuff with me, but I think they're cited in ch 8 of Barry Schwartz's book, and I seem to remember that Layard talks about them in his happiness book. In Schwartz, the point is that academics, like everyone else, make faulty predictions about future happiness: we think we'll be happier, but we aren't. (Methodological problems abound.)
The tenure/hours study I can't recall. It was discussed in the Chronicle a while back, but I'm hazy on details.
This was in Paradox of Choice? Why do I even read if I can't remember anything...
As to the characterization of DaveL's argument as "sour grapes" -- this seems unfair. Maybe lots of jobs would work well if you couldn't fire non-performers for anything short of committing a crime. I am inclined to doubt this myself. And if those who do doubt it represent a majority of the electorate, it does seem at least controversial to employ people on those terms at public expense.
And if those who do doubt it represent a majority of the electorate, it does seem at least controversial to employ people on those terms at public expense.
To the best of my knowledge, no one's asserted a right to a tenure system. If the majority of the electorate doesn't like the tenure system at schools funded by the public, it's in a position to change or at least influence the system. It hasn't. I'm not sure where the controversy is.
With all due respect, DaveL, this sounds like your argument basically boils down to sour grapes.
And with all due respect to you, academics aren't the only people who can find lots of reasons why something that serves their personal interests is also in the general interest. Self-interest is perfectly capable of distorting the reasoning of even the most decent and honorable people. And if you're accustomed to the way things are, it's easy to exaggerate the consequences of something like a relatively minor change in the rules for hiring and firing, particularly if you haven't spent much time living under other sorts of rules.
Sour grapes suggests that I'm jealous of academics' job security. I'm not. That's precisely the point I'm trying to make. As a practical matter, I'd really have to work at it to get fired. I think that's true of most people, certainly most professionals. That's why I don't buy the whole "omigod, without tenure there'd be blood in the streets" thing.
The thing is, education isn't *like* most other fields of endeavor. It's pretty much its own unique thing. The things that in some ways it's most like actually operate more or less the same way: the priesthood, civil service in some areas, maybe the nonprofit world. Artistic creation.
No field is just like any other. But what slol's 173 suggests to me is that current tenure rules are basically a little holdover from the medieval guild system that university professors had the power to reimpose and continue to have the power to enforce. Those sorts of rules used to apply broadly. Now they don't. And yet there's not a big problem with capable people getting fired for bad reasons (other than in mass layoffs, which is a different sort of problem).
What I'm suggesting is just that changing tenure rules wouldn't take universities back to the Gilded Age because the rules and social expectations are different now, especially for professionals, even when employment is nominally at-will. Your analogy to civil service and nonprofits reinforces my point, not yours. Civil service employees are more protected than most private employees but considerably less protected than tenured faculty, and nonprofit employees don't generally even have that. But they're seldom fired. Firing people is a pain in the ass. Most folks don't like to do it.
And again, I think you're mostly arguing with a claim that I'm not making. I'm not saying that tenure rules should be changed so that bad professors can be fired more easily. I'm saying that I doubt that tenure is necessary to protect the interests that it's supposed to protect and that I think academia might work better without it.
Just for the sake of clarity/comity--I was saying that the *argument*, or at least what you were saying in the quoted part--sounded like sour grapes; my point was kinda that there have to be better rationales than "well no one else has that kind of job security."
Anyway, yeah, of course academics are self-interested. Part of why I've been in this thread is because most of what I'm saying is actually kind of against my own self-interest, one would think, since I've left the tenure system at least for now partly because I couldn't hack it. In any case, I think that the pro-tenure folks in the thread have made the better, evidence-based argument.
Maybe lots of jobs would work well if you couldn't fire non-performers for anything short of committing a crime. . . it does seem at least controversial to employ people on those terms at public expense.
I don't see why not; I'm awfully bothered by the idea that the best way to make people do good work is to threaten them. I honestly think that most people in jobs worth doing will do them better if they feel secure in their positions.
And *obviously* it's controversial. That doesn't mean anything. So's evolution. Which come to think of it is a really damn good reason for making sure that professorial jobs are secure.
Firing people *is* a pain in the ass. But the thing about academia is that if researchers are doing their jobs, they're shaking things up, and that's the sort of behavior that can generate enough controversy that the pain-in-the-assness of firing someone gets outweighed by the pain-in-the-assness of dealing with the bullshit.
Controversy is too strong, although I do think (most) defenses of tenure are overwrought. DaveL says most of what needs to be said here.
Dave, I'm not an academic (although rfts is), but it seems to me that there are obvious reasons why professors might be more vulnerable to outside political pressure than someone in the private sector at a normal job. Higher education is, with very few exceptions, either state funded or a charitable entity, and so the source of funding is going to be someone outside the institution itself, and an academic's legitimate work is quite often going to involve her asking questions or drawing conclusions that someone with clout finds objectionable.
I hesitate to keep returning to the well of Walt and Mearsheimer's paper, but it provides a useful example. It provoked a huge outcry, with people like Marty Peretz and Alan Dershowitz accusing W+M of being borderline racist hacks and incompetent, shoddy scholars to boot. I haven't read the paper, but people whose opinions I tend to find valuable seem to think that it's not very good; that said, Walt and Mearsheimer are serious scholars, and it seems to have been undertaken in the spirit of real scholarly inquiry. The fact that it wasn't a very good paper makes it all the more plausible that there would have been real pressure raised to fire faculty members who published such a thing if the school in question was less prestigious than Harvard -- Arizona State, let's say -- and the faculty members in question less distinguished.
That's for engaging in their jobs of doing research, as opposed to examples of people being threatened over private political affiliations, which could very well happen to a bus driver or a lawyer or a Wal-Mart manager. Me engaging in my job is unlikely to result in opinions much more controversial than "Rails is too slow to be used in production-level applications" or "I really think we should use Kerberos for all our authentication needs", and I think that's the fundamental distinction that makes tenure in the academy more important than for other jobs -- it's very similar, in fact, to the reason you want to make it difficult for elected officials to be able to fire civil servants.
my point was kinda that there have to be better rationales than "well no one else has that kind of job security."
Which wasn't the argument, of course. The argument was that if the horrible things that academics fear would happen absent tenure aren't happening to people who don't have tenure now, perhaps the fears are overstated.
I'm awfully bothered by the idea that the best way to make people do good work is to threaten them.
With this I absolutely agree. OTOH taking away the risk of bad consequences for screwing up sometimes empowers people to do stupid things and say "neener neener, you can't get me". In a better world, there'd be no need for tenure and no one would ever get fired for stupid reasons. In the world we actually live in, it's fair to wonder what balance of power between employer and employee best limits their power and incentives to screw each other.
But the thing about academia is that if researchers are doing their jobs, they're shaking things up, and that's the sort of behavior that can generate enough controversy that the pain-in-the-assness of firing someone gets outweighed by the pain-in-the-assness of dealing with the bullshit.
This is the sort of thing that makes people who have worked outside academia roll their eyes.
I'm awfully bothered by the idea that the best way to make people do good work is to threaten them.
Maybe not, but it's a fairly effective way prevent people from doing bad work or no work.
154
This is a very good point.
178
"... And if those who do doubt it represent a majority of the electorate, it does seem at least controversial to employ people on those terms at public expense. "
Maybe, but it is generally very difficult to fire any public employee not just teachers.
185: re. eyeball rolling: I already said upthread that this probably isn't the issue in most cases. The point is that where it matters, it matters.
186: Eh. Let me propose that if a substantial number of people are doing bad or no work, there's something wrong with the workplace other than "we can't threaten to fire them."
How long till B gets to From each/To each?
I see nothing at all wrong with that philosophy.
190: What I was rolling my eyeballs about was the idea that academia is unique in generating the sort of controversy that might make people want a coworker gone. And, for that matter, not all academic-generated controversy appears to be attributable to the clear-eyed, pure-hearted search for truth, either.
184: Higher education is, with very few exceptions, either state funded or a charitable entity, and so the source of funding is going to be someone outside the institution itself, and an academic's legitimate work is quite often going to involve her asking questions or drawing conclusions that someone with clout finds objectionable.
This is a valid point. My response is that people with clout generally try to exercise it in somewhat more subtle ways than getting people fired, e.g. by doing things like messing with funding. That's a problem now, and one that tenure doesn't help.
192: I'm not that surprised, but it means that many people are coming to these sorts of issues with very different underlying assumptions about the way the world does and/or should work. It's hard to see how agreement could be reached.
We see, therefore, how the modern faculty is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of education and of hiring.
The faculty has at last, since the establishment of Modern Inquiry and of the global community, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive educational sway. The administration of the modern university is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole faculty.
----
The faculty have stripped of its halo every area of investigation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the historian, the philosopher, the theologian, the man of letters, the man of science, into mere academic professionals.
The faculty have torn away from the college its sentimental veil, and have reduced the mentoring relation to a mere grading relation.
The faculty cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of inquiry, and thereby the results of inquiry, and with them whole interpretations of society. All fixed, fast-frozen interpretations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is lectured is met with blank stares, all that is theory is profaned, and students in class are no longer compelled to face with sharpened senses the full editions of their texts and their relations with their minds.
----
The needs of a constantly contracting market for tenured jobs chases the faculty over the entire surface of the globe. It must network everywhere, interview everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
The faculty have through the expansion of the global community given a cosmopolitan character to research and education in every university. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency we have interdisciplinary work in every direction, even inter-dependence of departments. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous area studies and local histories, there arises a transnational history.
----
The faculty, by the distribution of all certificates of education, by the nearly monopolised system of accreditation, draws all, even the most anti-intellectual, persons into education. The higher salaries of graduates are the appealing drapery with which it ornaments all ivied halls, with which it coerces the anti-intellectuals, though intensely disdainful of professors, to matriculate. It compels all persons, on pain of indistinction, to accept the college mode of education; it compels them to introduce what it calls critical thinking into their midst, i.e., to become college students themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own self-image.
----
The faculty, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, have created more massive and more colossal published works than have all the preceding generations together. Investigation of Nature's forces by science, application of theory to literature and history, word-processing, journals, electronic communications, the creation of entire disciplines for institutionalization, multiplication of fields, whole interpretations conjured out of the ground - what earlier century had even a presentiment that such publications lumbered in the minds of academic labourers?
193.1: Agreed, which is one of the reasons why I think that being able to fire experienced employees at will is a shitty idea.
I can think of one state legislature that has considered the prospect of doing away with tenure, and have rejected it. This suggests that, at a minimum, it's not a high priority for the electorate.
You know, I was going to say, there are lots of things I say publicly that I wouldn't say if not for certain protections. But then I stopped and thought, that's not true, because I said those sorts of things publicly before.
Maybe I was stupid and callow then, or maybe I'm cowardly now.
Actually, I think tenure does at least as much to keep disciplinary/guild boundaries blurry as it does to enforce them; once you've got tenure, you can publish a little outside your own field, and nobody can punish you for not staying between the lines, as long as you're publishing good work of some respectable stripe.
196: Are you paying any attention at all to what I'm actually writing? The point is that people mostly don't get fired, even when employment is at will. And I mostly agree with you that being able to fire people for no reason is a bad thing, although I'm extremely skeptical about the ability of the legal system to determine whether or not a termination is for good cause.
197: Not a priority for me, either, just something that's interesting to think and talk about.
I know that people mostly don't get fired. What I'm saying is that they *can*, and that being able to do so, especially, for political reasons is a Bad Idea. Whether or not it happens constantly, occasionally, or once in a blue moon.
197: Admit that watching the results in SC would have been sort of fun if they'd rid themselves of a tenure system. Maybe bad for the Academy, maybe bad for the SC education system, maybe bad for SC; but fun.
200: Eh, it ain't so bad. Mostly. And the cure may be worse than the disease.
Nobody should be allowed to be fired except on the second Tuesday of every month, excepting for months for which the first of the month falls on a Tuesday, in which case, the third Tuesday. In February it shall be the first Tuesday, excepting for leap years, in which case, the fourth Tuesday.
This should keep me employed a bit longer.
Nah, let's argue about employment litigation now. Truth-finding power: low!
The point of litigation isn't to find truth. That's *our* job.
You're just determined to find comity, aren't you?
The tenure system is bad for contingent faculty. In fact, it may be the primary reason the contingent underclass exists and has such remarkably shoddy working conditions, especially for a highly educated group.
Every department I have worked in relied on contingent faculty for the majority of its teaching, and every department justified this the exact same way: "tenured faculty cost too much." The cost is not just in terms of salary, and not even just commitment by the university to keeping the person employed. The cost also is in the incredible amount tenured faculty demand. At my soon to be former institution, the tenured faculty have been up in arms about (1) not getting free food at faculty meetings (2) not having their personal computers fixed for free by the university (3) salary compression (the salaries of the senior faculty being too close to the salaries of the junior faculty).
The simple fact is that when universities say "we'd love to reduce our reliance on adjuncts, but it is just too expensive" they are telling the truth. In the University of California and SUNY systems 80% of the courses are taught by contingent faculty. There is simply no way all of those courses could be taught by people who are almost impossible to fire or police in any way.
The result of the near perfect job security of the tenured professor is the demand that the rest of the workforce be very "flexible", as they say in management circles, where "flexible" means "required to change jobs every two or three years and move around constantly." I would have no difficulty begrudging the tenured faculty their lifestyle if it didn't come directly at the expense of other people supposedly in the same industry.
At this point, I am sure I will be accused of being sour grapes, as Brock was above, and Invisible Adjunct was when she blogged. So I will just concede my own case (which I think was also IA's tactic): yes, I am sour grapes. Yes it took me 8 years to find a tenure track job because I am a poor scholar. But how is it possible that 80% of the faculty in the SUNY system are such poor scholars that they don't deserve a tenth of the privileges of the tenured faculty.
Also that I could get in trouble for writing this. Supposedly tenure is about freedom of speech. But most faculty have no freedom of speech at all. They are not only employed "at will" in name, they really are fired at the slightest provocation. I've seen it happen a lot. The idea that tenure promotes free speech is self serving nonsense.
Even though this thread is dead, I feel compelled to respond to rob h-c's closing comment in case anyone else stumbles in:
209: In the University of California and SUNY systems 80% of the courses are taught by contingent faculty.
"Contingent faculty" has an unpleasant ring to it.
I wouldn't mind being necessary faculty, though.
Most are part-time or non-research faculty by choice
I'm always a little uncertain about claims like this.
Higher pay and job security is for pussies.
Yes! Leave the higher pay and job security for the women! Finally, gswift gets it.
Seriously though, IME these arguments tend to go something like "they're more interested in teaching than research, therefore they "choose" non tenured positions." When an institution like Berkeley has well over 20k undergraduates, it's ridiculous that there's not tenured positions for people whose primary interest is educating students.
216: Lecturer positions at UC have two flavors of tenure. We have Lecturers with Security of Employment (SOE Lecturers), which are teaching-and-service-only positions, with a status that is indistinguishable from tenure, voting rights in departments, and paid release time for service. These are (only) full time. Other lecturers have a six year probationary period before they have "continuing" status at whatever percent time they are appointed, with continuing status having weaker protections than tenure, especially for budget-related layoffs, but especially after the probationary period they are very far from "at will" employees.
213: By choice for several reasons. Some have no interest in full-time work, or have other full time titles (such as researcher) and only teach occasionally. Some have no interest in research, and in some cases don't have PhDs. It might be noted that universities typically have large numbers of untenured researchers as well as untenured lecturers, but nobody seems to worry about the former, even though their positions are much more financially precarious and can have comparable political pressures. But somehow it appears easier to believe someone takes an untenured research position by choice than an untenured teaching position.
211: My point is that we don't have a huge number of courses at UC being taught by faculty who are "contingent" in the way that term is used by rob h-c. Yes, we have a number of courses taught by people called lecturers. But many people in those titles are well paid (the new full-time lecturer I hired this year started at about the median salary of the new tenure-track faculty), and have jobs that are more stable than most in the private sector, eventually earning all or many of the protections of tenure following a performance review (after the probationary period) that is similar to a tenure review. Yes, we have some transient lecturers and part-timers who aren't part-time by choice, or who wanted tenure track faculty positions here or elsewhere. But the suggestion that anything like 80% of our courses are taught by people in such situations wildly mis-states both the student and faculty experiences. Maybe the situation is different at the urban campuses, but I don't think it is very different.
I wouldn't mind being necessary faculty, though.
im in ur mode5 of extension makin u teach.
"Contingent faculty" has become a term of art, unfortunately, akin perhaps to "ethnic cleansing" in its euphemizing. But I believe Thomas Jefferson is correct, and rob h-c incorrect: there's no way 80% of UC classes are taught by contingent faculty unless there's something fishy about the accounting.
Shorter DaveL:
There are no necessary protections of matters of faculty.
Ah, but I see where rob might have got the figure from. The AAUP last year reported on use of contingent faculty. If you look at the far-right column, you will see that grad and contingent faculty make up something like 70-80% of UC faculty.
But it looks to me as though that's counting all TA's and research assistants equally as faculty, and it doesn't mean that's how courses are taught.
Look for example under instructional faculty, and see the percent who are non-tenure-track. There you see that non-tenure-track instructional faculty make up 10.1% at Santa Cruz, ranging up to 18.1% at Riverside.
If you want to think about how different kinds of institutions use or abuse such labor, compare the UC's to Stanford. A UC would look the same as Stanford on the far-right column -- Stanford, at 75.9% of grad/contingent "employees" would place in the middle of the UC's. But look at instructional faculty. Only 2.8% of Stanford's instructional faculty are non-tenure-track, as against 15.5% of Berkeley's.
As long as we're on the subject, note that the Cal State on this page, San Diego State, has a larger percentage of non-tenure-track instructional faculty -- 18.6% -- than any UC.
