AKMA’s Random Thoughts

On Faculties

With a growing community of dissent over at Invisible Adjunct’s column, with an increasingly sympathetic correspondence with Dean Kriss, and with some turbulence on the academic home front, it’s probably time that I stake out some of my own thinking about the academic vocation, about graduate study, about tenure, and about specifically Christian academic work (as that’s one of the bases of Dean Kriss’s critique of tenure).

As far as “academic life” in general, I’m willing to grant that the privilege of enjoying one’s daily work might, just might, warrant accepting less-than-ideal circumstances for undertaking that work. That slender possibility narrows considerably, however, when one reflects on the likelihood that any particular academic job will actually offer the features of “academic life” that attract many of us in the first place: the atmosphere, the opportunity, and indeed the responsibility to read broadly, deliberate deeply, and to engage students and colleagues in a searching consideration of the subtleties that reward our patient attention to history, literature, human social interactions, philosophy, art, and, of course, theology. Once one adds in administrative responsibilities, the impedimenta of classroom instruction (constructing and evaluating assignments, record-keeping, class management), the ways that our personal responsibility to students occupies time, extra teaching to balance out the generally low pay for educators, and the thousand natural shocks that academic life is heir to, the time remaining for the life of the mind dwindles dramatically. Most of those who point to the benefits of academic life aren’t themselves enjoying the full experience.

Academics are almost universally overworked, underpaid, condescended to, offered fustian flattery in the place of velvet respect, and flat-out ignored by a culture that depends on their work for sustaining the wisdom, balance, perspective, and critical insight that build and enrich our shared culture.

Now, while it’s true that graduate programs often admit more students than can realistically expect to attain tenured academic positions, please let’s take a step back and assess what to make of that fact. After all, some people really do pursue academic studies for the sake of the knowledge and discussion itself, and they can end up in non-teaching academic jobs, or in related-but-not-academic positions (perhaps in publishing, with foundations or other NFP organizations). That doesn’ mean, “Hey, disappointed grad student — just buck up and take a job at a benevolent NGO” (as though it were that easy anyway); it does mean that we can’t look on advanced studies simply as a conduit toward tenured faculty positions, a conduit that’ faulty if it doesn’t convey one hundred per-cent of its graduates to those positions. Yes, most grad students want faculty jobs, and yes, most advisors think only in those terms, but we simply can’t take some step as drastic as [hypothetically] limiting grad-school admissions to balance out retirements. If someone wants to get a theology degree, then go be a screenwriter, that should be an open possibility.

But there’s the rub — for if we admit people without regard to the likelihood of their obtaining a tenured position (after all, they might be florists at heart), we comply with the circumstances that have constructed the gruesome labor scene that presently prevails in academia. If we treat graduate school strictly as a pre-faculty training process, we turn away bright, interested students who don’t particularly want to deal with academia’s frustrations.

It’s worse than that, though, because there’s no way reliably to tell which entering students will be the ones who will, at the end of their programs, be most employable, and which will be bright, insightful, and not at all faculty material. The difference between an application from a college senior and the embodied learning and pedagogical outlook of an ABD or a new Ph.D. plays a tremendous part in the tangle of finding places for scholars and would-be scholars to work. No one can make that determination from a masters-degree admissions folder, so the notion of restricting admissions in order to head off an oversupply of PhD’s just won’t fly.There need to be more masters students admitted to programs than there will be tenured positions at the end of those programs because not everyone admitted should be a professor. So although a top-flight program could afford to make the pledge that I proposed, to carry a graduate until he or she got a steady gig, that would only clarify which institutions were willing to put their money where their mouths are — it wouldn’t be possible for less prestigious institutions to make that commitment, and they’d still be producing more graduates than could attain tenured positions.

I don’t think tenure is the problem, though it plays a role in the dreadful situation we now have. To put it another way, if tenure suddenly disappeared, I expect most faculty would work hard to re-establish it, for the same sorts of good reason that engendered the practice of granting tenure in the first place.

Not to let academia off the hook, but I see the outstanding culprit as a culture that can find no use for extremely capable, insightful, academically-sophisticated workers. It speaks volumes about the way of life in the U.S., and about our long-term economic future, that Ph.D. holders with strong academic careers would not be a massively attractive pool of job candidates. Of course, if the culture showed more interest in scholarship and learning, there would also be more jobs available in academia.

Are academics at fault? Not for being too egg-headed, no matter what populist appeals to common sense and plain language cry out. Some jargoneers are frauds, and some plain-spoken observers speak plainly because they can’understand complicated ideas. Some jargoneers are trying arduously to extend language to express insights that don’ already fit squarely into conventional patterns of expression, and some plain speakers have a gift for communicating disorienting insights in deceptively lucid prose.

More culpable, I reckon, are those teachers who sustain the romantic possibility that everyone could be an academic star. Teachers ought to be more honest about the prospects of getting the academic jobs that most PhD students will hunger for, both at the college applying-for-masters level, through the progress toward a masters degree, and especially as students draw closer to the sacrifices that a doctoral program requires. Sentimental urges to boost students’ self-esteem, to boost the teacher’s self-esteem by giving birth to intellectual progeny, to conceal the relative weakness of one’ home institution by pretending that it can justifiably send off a high proportion of its students for doctoral study, all these buy some comfort at the expense of the students themselves. It’ hard to tell students, especially friendly, ambitious students, that they’e looking for self-esteem in all the wrong places, but someone has to do it.

Tenure? It’ certainly a problem, and less of a problem (in some ways) than I’d reflexively have assumed, but I still mistrust administrators’ sense of what’s best for an institution, and what they owe to faculty who have worked hard to support that institution. Perhaps this is just a classic instance of labor versus management, but I still sense a peculiar vulnerability of teachers, which vulnerability tenure exists to counteract.

The bigger villain, oddly enough, is the nature of the academy as an institution — such that one must own buildings, a vast library, and a broad array of infrastructural devices in order to count as offering “education,” whereas a conspiracy of bright allies could probably cobble together an earth-shaking faculty of academic outcasts and margin-dwellers if only they could just set up shop and teach people.

Should an ostensibly Christian institution offer tenure to its employees? Dean Kriss suggests that there is a principled reason for eschewing tenure, in that it presupposes a degree of mutual mistrust that’s antithetical to shared discipleship. I suppose that’s true, and I just admitted that I don’ trust administrators (as a category — I know one or two whom I trust — one, anyway — most days). How would one begin to cultivate the trust that Dean Kriss stipulates as requisite for institutional discipleship? I think that putting faculty at constant risk of being fired would not encourage the sort of atmosphere for which my estimable correspondent hopes (as do I!). Especially in an situation where any of several issues might constitute a vocational third rail, teachers without tenure would not be free to promote the fullness of intellectual engagement with sensitive issues, but would be obliged either to parrot the administration’s party line or risk unemployment.

What would it take, to make possible a seminary without tenure? I could imagine a seminary in which the faculty was relatively free to govern itself, such that a dean (if there be one) would emerge as an effective leader from within the faculty (this is beginning to sound like the Gospel of Matthew’s ideal of community life); the trustees would serve not so much to manage as to protect the institution’s well-being; the seminary’s mission explicitly named its accountability to high standards of mutual obligation; and the remuneration and benefits were such that it drew faculty who were making a reasoned judgment of risk, so as to avoid simply taking advantage of the surplus of nominally-qualified jobseekers. For such an institution, though, I would not by any means ask the faculty to make the first move.

To sum up these miscellaneous ruminations, I resist blaming academia for not dealing effectively with its cultural degradation. Yes, the academic world certainly ought to do better, must do better by its prospective participants — but the battered spouse of commercial culture isn’t to blame for the embarrassing bruises and black eyes it endures, and is not even fully guilty when it unthinkingly passes on abusive assumptions to the next generation of academics. A bigger cultural change, with more expansive ideals, will have to come before academics have access to the resources that would make possible a truly humane academy.

Posted by AKMA at June 29, 2003 12:26 PM | TrackBack