Disagree on Tenure

...each must show excellence in teaching, research, and university service...

...Does Wiener really doubt this...

...Some individuals, including the chair of the Columbia University astronomy department, have refused tenure on principle while continuing to teach on short-term contracts...

...This contributes to the expansion of the academic reserve army of the semi-employed and to the passivity of its members about their low pay and poor work conditions...

...Voluntary retirement at seventy was, however, not anticipated and its persistence cannot be counted on to keep budgets down...

...In addition, the academic versions of the "culture wars" have identified arts faculties, especially at elite universities, with a trendy liberal-leftism centered on "identity politics" and "political correctness" perceived as institutionalizing the outlook and slogans of the student radicalism of the sixties...

...A New York Times article by William H. Honan, "The Ivory Tower Under Siege" (December 28, 1997), fully documents a campaign across the country by trustees and politicians to impose heavier teaching loads and stricter standards for tenuring and granting paid sabbaticals on university faculties...

...Not a few professors have come to doubt whether tenure should be maintained in its present form...

...Actually, some of the rules for review and penalties that Wiener says are in force at UC are not very different from suggestions for reforming tenure advanced by many of its critics, the major difference, presumably, being that Wiener would not countenance dismissal even for persistently negative evaluations of performance...

...Former Stanford University president Donald Kennedy, a biologist, has written that "in many places, especially the large research universities, tenure may slowly be dying of natural causes...

...DENNIS WRONG'S The Modern Condition: Essays at Century's End has just been published by Stanford University Press...

...In addition to my own review in the Times Literary Supplement (January 23), I have seen only one review of this book, by Ivar Berg, a former dean at both Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, in Contemporary Sociology...

...Denial of tenure has also become fraught with risks of litigation...

...The evidence for the few years since compulsory retirement was abolished is that a majority of faculty are still retiring (as I myself did) at seventy, the age limit set by previous legislation, although sixty-five and sixty-eight were not uncommon before the 1960s...

...Trustees and elected state legislators with control over the budgets of public institutions are often conservative Republicans anxious to reduce government spending...

...Nor are professors penalized with salary reductions for indifferent academic performance, unlike professional athletes...

...In both the cases he cites, clearly so for Thomas Reeves confronting the "intolerant liberals [who] dominate academia," objections were likely to be raised by the professors' own departments, supporting Lewis's complaint that ultimate authority now resides at the departmental level where conformism and mutual backscratching are often the rule...

...The most obvious one is the abolition of mandatory retirement...

...It is also worth noting that for some time now universities have preferred to hire junior faculty directly out of graduate school because hiring people who already have teaching experience at other institutions means that they have to be considered for tenure within a shorter period under the regulations of the American Association of University Professors, violation of which leads to censure by the organization...

...Small wonder that colleges and universities find ways to avoid the whole tenure issue by increasing non-tenure-track appointments...

...The current tight academic job market also means that a person denied tenure at one institution has difficulty finding a tenured or tenure-track position at another...

...His failure to mention the Yeshiva decision is as grave an omission as his neglect of the abolition of mandatory retirement...

...There is evidence that the increases have leveled off in the past few years, but this has yet to influence the attitudes of trustees, administrators, consumers, or Republican congressional representatives, who have created a commission to investigate the rising costs of higher education and to suggest remedies, which will surely include modification of tenure...

...For young couples who are modestly well-off but not rich, the prospective cost of college education, even for children as yet unborn, has become their major concern in planning for the future...

...I feared that a conventional union would simply cast a protective mantle over the featherbedding, boondoggling, and "protection of the inept" (in William J. Goode's choice phrase) that have recently fueled the protests of critics of tenure like Michael Lewis...

...I served on NYU's promotion and tenure committee for the arts and sciences faculty in the 1980s...

...Perhaps I should disclose at this point that I voted in three National Labor Relations Board elections at NYU in the 1970s...

...An institution's commitment to tenure may now cover as much as fifty years rather than roughly thirty years as in the past...

...The unionization issue at NYU and most other private institutions became moot in the late 1970s as a result of the Supreme Court's Yeshiva decision, ruling that no meaningful line could be drawn between "management" and "labor" in most universities...

...moreover, the added years are when salaries for senior faculty are at their highest...

...I am pleased to learn that these rules exist at UC, but am doubtful about "most other universities...

...Is a guarantee of lifetime employment really the only way to protect unbounded free speech or legal off-campus political activity...

...If "the bottom-line is budgetary," as Wiener contends, this is also true for the consumers of higher education: the students and their families...

...Wiener is certainly right that the cost-benefit concerns of university administrations and boards of trustees have led them to trim faculty salaries by reducing the proportions of tenured and even so-called tenure-track faculty, who can be replaced by adjunct, parttime, and nontenured full-time teachers at considerably less expense...

...Arthur Levine, president of Columbia Teachers College, thinks that "higher education will be forced to create a variety of appointment alternatives to allow older faculty to move from full-time to part-time status, rather than directly into retirement...

...His examples of the risks to which right-wingers are exposed are not very convincing...

...Such "penalties" as frozen salaries and "terminal" associate professorships are common enough, but I have never heard of anyone being demoted in rank...

...Wiener closes by advocating unions and collective bargaining for "college teachers...

...Criminal offenses or acts evincing a more vaguely defined "moral turpitude" have always been grounds for dismissing tenured faculty—one wonders why Wiener even bothers to mention such cases...

...Both of us complain of Lewis's exaggerations (Berg cuts his 30 percent in half) and purple rhetoric, but agree that he documents real abuses and their "structural" causes, making the academy vulnerable to the ruthless cost-benefit reforms of outsiders...

...Increased competition of colleges and universities for smaller birth cohorts of students has already led some institutions to demand that their tenured faculty engage in advertising and public relations activities, such as speaking at high schools and fraternal associations...

...Although currently retired, I still teach as an adjunct...

...Costs, especially for the latter, had increased by even larger percentages in the seventies and early eighties...

...Poisoning the Ivy by Michael Lewis, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, recounts the "seven deadly sins and other vices of higher education in America" (his subtitle) and estimates that about 30 percent of tenured faculty are guilty of the "misfeasance and malfeasance" he reports...

...That cost increased by half over the past decade for public four-year institutions and by a third for private colleges (I take these figures from Honan...

...Presumably, the oversupply of Ph.Ds will correct itself in time as the scarcity of jobs and limited chances for tenure become more evident...

...A result is that many people prefer underpaid and even part-time non-tenuretrack positions to tenure-track positions DISSENT / Summer 1998 85 where eventual tenure is doubtful—while they do scholarly or scientific work that they hope will ultimately increase their chances for tenure somewhere...

...those who don't are subject to demotion or other penalties...

...Perhaps Wiener has in mind a union that would represent only nontenured faculty, as some have advocated, but he doesn't say so, and his article is mainly about tenure...

...There is even a law firm that advertises in Lingua Franca its availability to plaintiffs in such cases...

...I voted for the American Association of University Professors as the bargaining agent in a first election, but after its elimination I voted with majorities for "no union" in two subsequent elections...

...Wiener's sarcasm regarding a tenured professor opposed to tenure is unjustified...

...Wiener mentions that "tenured professors at the University of California, and most other universities, face reviews of their performance every two or three years...

...Donald Kennedy reports that rules for dismissal for inactivity and incompetence exist at Stanford but "do not really provide secure grounds for firing a professor...

...Accordingly, more and more people denied tenure embark on alternative careers, which enhances the value of tenure and willingness to sue when it is denied...

...If there are good reasons and powerful "social forces" restricting tenure and limiting the number who receive it, it seems to me not beyond the bounds of invention to find alternative ways of protecting faculty against being fired for expressing opinions offensive to 86 DISSENT / Summer 1998 some organized group...

...Wiener alludes to this possibility, but dismisses it much too lightly...

...In light of the inveterate anti-elitism of the American public, it is hardly surprising that a growing segment of it wonders whether the beneficiaries of a lifetime job security unavailable to anyone else truly deserve it...

...The reduction in federal funding has also added to the fiscal problems facing universities...

...With respect to unpopular speech, Lewis writes: "No board of trustees is likely to risk the ignominious accusation of McCarthyism by reversing a personnel recommendation of the faculty and administration unless it is virtually forced to do so...

...Philip Altbach, an authority on higher education everywhere, thinks the "golden age" of academia is over throughout the industrialized world and that fewer people will receive tenure...

...Following Wiener's precedent, let me disclose that I was a tenured faculty member for over thirty years at three private universities—Brown, the New School for Social Research, and New York University...

...But critics of the professoriate for sloth, arrogance, hypocrisy, bad teaching, exploitation of students (including sexual harassment), and ideological special pleading have not all been from outside the university nor rancorously right-wing in their politics...

...These men are simply acknowledging social and economic conditions restricting tenure that are unlikely to go away...

...rWALLY, we come to academic freedom, the first and usually the last justification for tenure...

...He goes on to observe that "the public perception that tenure protects `deadwood' is, alas, correct...

...Yet other considerations that Wiener never mentions influence the challenge to tenure as it has evolved over the past several decades...