Dispatch from the Tenure Wars
Writing in the Wall Street Journal (June 18), Timothy Knowles, “a former teacher, principal and district leader” laments the difficulty of eliminating “low-performing teachers.” Granted, there are abundant reasons for tenure reform at the K-12 level. College, however, is a different matter.
Marketing his new book, Cary Nelson, spear point of the AAUP, says
I’m a dyed-in-the-wool, devout believer that you only have academic freedom and free speech if you have job security. If you don’t have job security, you can’t speak out forcefully, and I think that means academic freedom will be diminished.
I rarely agree with Dr. Nelson, a fellow I find usually animated by left-wing, social constructivist, and Sixties sentiments, but in this case he is right.
Mr. Knowles paints administrators as ex-teachers called to a higher mission. However, in college, many administrators have little or no classroom experience, and Mr. Knowles seems oblivious to just how political, punitive, and self-serving careerist administrators can be (just look at how many of the cases at FIRE originate from administrative excesses). Without tenure, my campus would have no discernible conservative voice at all. I would have been fired by at least three different college presidents for a variety of transgressions: organizing the faculty union, suing the college, publically criticizing multiculturalism, openly opposing “student learning outcomes.”
Students can survive a poor teacher (how many great teachers are there?), but they can’t survive a university monoculture that is an ideological echo chamber. Tenure may sometimes protect incompetent knaves but, where it still exists, tenure also protects vital intellectual pluralism.
I have to agree. If we must choose among imperfect alternatives, then tenure is still my choice as well. Without it, I’d have been an ex-faculty member 20 years ago.
Tenure is the same sort of job security that janitors, secretaries, and such have, namely, they can be fired only for cause. Unfortunately, it has been so regarded as so elevated for college professors that it is very difficult to get, and tenure reviews are firing devices. What any staff – janitors, secretaries, et al. can get after nine months of service- college faculty can get only after six years, if they get it at all. If they have been good enough to be kept for six years, then they should have tenure – at least after two years.
Job security is always important. How do administrators keep their jobs?
“Granted, there are abundant reasons for tenure reform at the K-12 level. College, however, is a different matter.”
Tenure reform for thee, but not for me. Try telling that to the state legislature. It’s going to be a tough sell when the time comes.
It sounds kind of like those articles that seem to be popping up all over the place — Yalies and such writing about how college is a waste of time and money — excepting people like themselves, it goes without saying — while the lower ranks would all be better off in trade school.
Then there’s the breed of public university graduates — blogging about how corrupt are public universities, what a waste is university research — while they pursue graduate degrees at public universities!
Very strange the effects of living in glass houses. Material for quite a few dissertations, I imagine!