Campuses’ ‘Chokepoint Charlies’
Tom Blumer observes that our leftist universities and their ilk possess and abuse their power to destroy careers and control people’s lives. The communists, he says, constructed checkpoints, whereas our leftist leaders use “chokepoints”:
Those who occupy positions in university systems, government bureaucracies, as well as certain union and professional organizations, often with the active assistance of the courts, serve as the system’s “Chokepoint Charlies.” You can’t get through or move on unless you jump through their hoops, comply with their demands, or behave according to their established norms.
Here is Blumer’s take on campus chokepoints:
In university systems, the most obvious chokepoint is tenure. If you achieve it, you have a position for life; if you don’t, your career is essentially over. Not surprisingly, leftist-dominated universities have used denial of tenure as a principal means of culling promising conservative professors, or even usually reliable liberals who utter occasional center-right thoughts, from their faculties’ ranks.
Other university chokepoints are in the classroom. For the most part, it’s still true that if you’re bright enough, apply yourself, keep your head down, and avoid making too many waves, you’ll get through. But if you happen to incur the wrath of an intolerant radical prof by expressing a dissenting view, no matter how well-supported, you may find yourself with a failing grade, a lengthy redress or appeals process with less than assured results, and perhaps the inability, at least at that university, to go on to the next step in your desired major.
Perhaps the most dangerous chokepoint at universities is in research. If your line of inquiry leads to conclusions that are contrary to established beliefs — say, just for the heck of it, if you find evidence that the earth really hasn’t been warming, or even if it is warming that it’s not significantly influenced by human activity — there’s more than a slight chance that your “peer reviewers” won’t be impressed and that your next funding request may not be granted. Just like that, you’re on the outside looking in.
Bravo to Tom Blumer for the excellent discussion of Campus Chokepoints and Chokepoint Charlies.
I am a nontraditional history scholar who entered the academy in 1989 after a decade-long career in a high-profile public institution. The Washington bureaucracy is a model of democracy compared to the academy. In my public institution, we had annual reviews, clear-cut objectives for the next year’s performance, and an appeals process. Young staff members were encouraged to follow their instincts and develop new research strategies. Granted, there were problems with the rambling bureaucracy, but there was a good deal of flexibility and tolerance.
By contrast, I have found that most, but not all, universities are filled with Chokepoint Charlies. I was lucky to find a graduate school mentor who encouraged me to write on a nontraditional topic, but the majority of faculty members could not see beyond the dominating OAH/AHA mantra of Race, Class, and Gender or some other “dominant paradigm.” A brief stint on the tenure-track at a large northeastern university exposed me to the narrowness of academic research, and more egregiously, to administrators who publicly claimed to support a diversity of opinion but who would not stand up to the social historians. To name names, the Jon Silber administration turned out not to be user friendly to this scholar with centrist values.
Since leaving my full-time academic position in 2002, I have established a very successful consulting business and published up a storm, but recently encountered the Chokepoint Charlies again in a job search at a local public university. The troops rallied, closed ranks, and used tenure as a mechanism for discounting highly qualified nontraditional applicants for a public history position. The end result was that yet another faculty member espousing the same-old same-old was added to the department, while those of us with stronger publication records, more experience as fundraisers, and a broader interdisciplinary focus were excluded. “Dear Worm, You don’t currently hold tenure, so we won’t even consider your application. We hope you will be happy to continue working as our adjunct slave.”
Most universities have become mono-versities, and the tenure system has contributed to the problem. The exclusion of non-tenured faculty from a job search is particularly problematic given the current employment situation. As the U.S. Department of Education has just told us, 57% of faculty are now off the tenure track. Nearly 60% of people who received history Ph.D.’s from 1990 to 2004 do not work as faculty in academic history departments. When the Checkpoint Charlies exclude non-academics or adjunct faculty from the pool of candidates for full time slots, they exclude the bulk of available talent.
But, then, why would the Checkpoint Charlies want to include people who see the world through a different set of lenses?