Just a placeholder here for a blog that picks up Joseph’s and Naomi’s thoughts about tenure in the context of International Labor Day (and the commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre).
Margaret suggests that my disenchantment derives from my present job situation, and I would be grossly self-deceived to suggest that that’s not a factor. At the same time, I don’t want to underestimate the consciousness-raising that Invisible Adjunct and her community effected (nor overestimate the influence of my out-of-place-ness at Seabury). On May Day, I’m particularly attentive to a labor system that offers precious protection and privilege to a [diminishing] few, while increasingly exploiting the least powerful workers. I used to see this as a struggle to extend tenured privilege to all academics, but I’m inclined now to see tenure as part of the problem, a basis for paying depressed salaries in academia. To tenured and tenure-track faculty, the administration can point to tenure as a tremendous perk to offset low pay, then they can turn around and tell adjuncts and other casual employees that they obviously can't be paid as much as the tenured. Teachers who attained tenure under one set of expectations now withhold tenure from candidates to whom they’re applying very different standards. And Alpha College awards tenure for warm fuzzy characteristics, whereas Beta University adheres to strict publish-or-perish criteria, and Gamma Institute veers from one standard to another depending on the department, and so on. In this sense, “tenure” isn’t a single job characteristic, but a variable characteristic whose expectations demand so unpredictable an array of possible qualities that a tenure-seeker can be driven mad by the earnest commitment to try to fulfill a tenure committee’s criteria.
If tenure doesn’t in some strong, clear way benefit adjuncts, then in the long run it hurts all academics. Time for an alternative.
Posted by AKMA at May 1, 2004 02:09 PM | TrackBackAll very forcefully argued & I agree with much of what you say. Now, can you imagine an academic world in which the last protections of freedom of thought have been taken away? In the current political atmosphere. Tenure, for all its faults in the current system, can be seen as a last bastion against the completely corporatized university, subservient to the myths of market populism & overt control by government.
Posted by: joseph duemer at May 1, 2004 08:54 PMJoseph's observation is an eye opener. I'd forgotten that free speech needs to be protected and that tenure is one good way to protect it in institutions of higher education. Projecting here like crazy, I wonder how difficult it must be to be bound up in institutional obligations in a Christian hierarchy AND an academic hierarchy. I'm sure I couldn't walk that path, or is it a tightrope?
Posted by: fp at May 1, 2004 09:43 PMFrank first: I don’t have any particular problems with the latter part of the dilemma you sketch because I really do hold with the stuff that (presumably, if anyone cared) might get me in trouble. In the Episcopal Church, dissenting from the church’s teaching doesn’t cause much trouble with most dioceses; I’m probably among the people who think it ought to matter more.
As for protecting academic freedom, I see what you see, Joseph, and I don’t like it either. I guess I’m willing to wager on the extent to which the academy — a pretty diverse institution which, even narrowly construed, ranges from some tepidly left-wing places to some vigorously right-wing places — to find places to harbor insightful voices apart from tenure as much as it has with tenure.
And again, buying the freedom of the few at the cost of the freedom of the many sounds too much like a Faustian bargain.
Posted by: AKMA at May 1, 2004 10:12 PM