Academic freedom for all
/The cover story in the latest issue of C&EN is about threats to academic tenure. As someone who spent six years on the tenure track and saw the possibility of tenure snatched away from my colleagues, I have thoughts.
When discussing tenure, non-academics tend to think that tenure means you've got a job forever. Critics of tenure often point to a hypothetical "lazy" tenured professor taking up university resources without putting in "enough" effort, or (all too real) examples of universities finding it difficult to fire abusive tenured professors. These arguments against tenure are specious, though. Tenure does not prevent a university from firing someone for cause – so when they retain an abuser or let them quietly find another place seek prey, know that they are being cowardly, not fulfilling some legal obligation. Besides that, I have a spouse working in the corporate world, and trust me that he has encountered incompetent and abusive people who have kept their jobs for years despite a lack of tenure. Offering tenure does not mean keeping incompetence, and getting rid of tenure does not mean only competent people will persist.
Proponents of tenure point to the importance of academic freedom: the freedom to pursue lines of study (in research and also in teaching) that may be controversial without threat of losing your job. Those areas of study could be anything. As Andrew Dressler says in the C&EN piece, “You don’t know what’s going to be politicized until it does get politicized."
What boards and administrators want (but may not admit to) is the ability to fire people when they feel like it. Worried about decreasing enrollment? Fire faculty from your least favorite programs and tell them it's for the good of the institution. Feel threatened by the existence of transgender people? Fire anyone who puts pronouns in their email signature. Think a Black professor is "difficult" and just doesn't "fit"? Get rid of that professor. These things already happen, but they're easier to do to the untenured.
I am glad tenure exists, but I don't think it is a very good tool for the problems it tries to solve. I agree with tenure supporters that academic freedom is important. I think it's so important, that its protection shouldn't be reserved for those who make it through a six-year obstacle course. A first-year, part-time instructor should be just as protected when teaching controversial topics as a distinguished professor with decades of full-time experience. But right now, they're not.
Tenure is an individual solution to collective problems. I suppose it's very American in that way. The individual professor jumps through hoops attempting to please all and sundry, incentivized to overextend themselves, compete with colleagues, and exploit their trainees. If you think I exaggerate, know that I was advised by my very first dean not to meet expectations for tenure but exceed them, meaning of course that the implicit expectations were somewhere higher than the explicit ones, and how much higher was impossible to know. A couple years later a faculty member on the committee that made tenure recommendations warned junior faculty that since we were part of a hiring boom, the board may not want to grant tenure to everyone. The implied advice was to be even more excellent than the other tenure candidates to have a shot at one of a limited number of seats. (Seats that, when the time came, the board yanked anyway.) And after years of doing more more more, isn't it understandable that some people would want to slow down or stop? How dare they be "lazy."
Once a professor achieves tenure they have its protection, but on the track to tenure they will have been advised not to ruffle too many feathers among the established lest they lose out on necessary recommendations. For those who spend years playing it safe, how many suddenly feel empowered to take the risks academic freedom protects?
If I dream of an alternative, it looks like this: faculty supporting each other instead of competing for scarce seats in the tenure club; faculty of all levels of experience equally empowered to take risks and protected from termination or political interference when they pursue controversial areas of study; and equitable expectations for faculty labor.
A model for this alternative exists, and it's called a union.
Unions aren't perfect. They're still made of people, and people are complicated. Unions are difficult to form at private universities thanks to case law like the Yeshiva decision. Membership among faculty groups (part-time, full-time non-tenure track, tenure-track, tenured, librarians, and other folks with teaching duties and other titles and/or responsibilities) varies widely. But when a union works well it comes with solidarity, job protections backed by federal law, and contracts that set firm boundaries so the work cannot just grow grow grow.
When I came to Utica I took a non-tenure track position. Giving up pursuit of tenure took some getting used to, but as I said that summer and have said many times since: I'd rather have a union than tenure. I'd rather have solidarity, job protections, and a clear contract from day one than spend more years exhausting myself chasing the possibility of security.
If that sounds good to you, maybe you can have that too.
Happy Labor Day
