Thursday, August 5, 2010

Tenure and Academic Solidarity

Every academic lucky enough to get an exceedingly rare tenure-track position arrives at their first "real" job with one hope: to get tenure. For a scholar, getting tenure is that happy moment when you can finally start saying what you really want, teaching what you really love, and writing what you really think. At least, that's how the mythology goes. Tenure requirements are usually extremely convoluted, complex and designed to make your life as miserable as possible. The amount of paperwork you have to fill out all the time is daunting. The necessity to please every senior faculty member and ever administrator is painful.

Obviously, the institution of tenure serves important goals of preserving academic freedom and protecting established scholars from the anti-intellectual practices of the university administrators. The 6 years a young academic suffers through on her way to tenure also have a purpose. I believe that this purpose is to alienate tenure-track academics from the rest of the teaching community, defeat any inclination towards independence they might have, and ingrain in them a habit of subservience towards the administrators and senior faculty. On the tenure-track, you spend 6 years in the position of a deer in the headlights, constantly searching for opportunities to please everybody and show just how compliant you are. Tenure becomes this Holy Grail that we struggle to deserve with a single-mindedness that borders on the obsessive.

Tenure-track faculty are often groomed to despise the part-time teaching faculty. At the same time, senior faculty often take out the frustrations of their own endless years on the tenure-track on the junior faculty members who are beginning the same journey. As a result, tenure-track academics bolster the sense of their own importance by bossing around the part-timers, adjuncts and graduate students.  This creates a sense of resentment between all groups of academics and it would be naive to expect this resentment to disappear suddenly the second tenure is awarded.

Another aspect of the tenure-track process is fear. We are terrifed that we might antagonize anybody who will later on turn out to be crucial for the process of tenure review. So we learn to self-censor, shut up, not question and comply with everything. We turn ourselves into willing tools used by the coroporate-minded administrators to destroy academia. Often, we even anticipate the quantification and standardization measures that will end up of robbing our profession of any meaning.

Don't get me wrong, I don't advocate giving up tenure. It's one thing that protects us from being tossed out of academia because of our political convictions, our ideological stances, or our inclination to practice freedom of thought. What I suggest is that we lose the single-minded obsession with improving our chances for tenure to the exclusion of everything else. Getting tenure in a university gutted of true intellect, freedom of thought and creativity will not be worth much anyways.

While recognizing the importance of tenure, I believe we need to learn to value our academic solidarity with our colleagues. Instead of marginalizing the part-timers by letting them know how much more important we are, we need to realize that the only difference between us is sheer luck. Instead of exploiting grad students, we need to remember how difficult grad school was for us and lend them a helping hand. Instead of complying with every ridiculous demand of the administration, we need to analyze its ramifications and present a united front in our resistance to these practices of casualization and corporatization.

For now, we, the academics, are losing this battle everywhere. Gradually, universities are turning into the worst kinds of corporations. While we are sitting there locked in our offices frantically trying to bolster our tenure dossier, the academia is being overtaken by managers eager to bring their corporate practices into our world. We need to wake up and realize that by the time we feel ready for our tenure review, there might be nothing but ruins all around us. We might even lose the very institution of tenure.

6 comments:

Richard said...

Social critic and free floating intellectual Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd, Random House 1960) wrote s rather long essay titled “The Community of Scholars” in 1962. In this essay he noted that the original concept of the university was of a group of scholars learned in some subject (originally theology or cannon law) who could attract a group of students willing to pay to learn from them. Goodman maintained that as universities developed a scholar might be elevated to the position of Rector and a few staff might be hired (bookkeepers, janitors), but the essence of the university remained the community of teachers and students who were pretty much self governing. He claims with the exponential growth of universities after WWII this simplicity which had already been eroded was completely lost. Universities came to be run by professional administrators who broke up the community of scholars and ran the universities like money making corporations.
The fight you refer to began over fifty years ago and the scholars have been losing ever since.

Clarissa said...

Thank you, Richard. I have heard about Paul Goodman but never got a chance to read him. So now I have ordered The Paul Goodman Reader that will come out soon.

Anonymous said...

So, why is this better than working on the Wall Street you hate so much? I don't see much difference.

Human nature is the same everywhere, and while Wall Street guys are happy to be humiliated and pushed around to get a bonus at the end of the year, young professors go through a strikingly similar experience to get tenure in 6 years.


I guess this kind of thing happens in "all or nothing" situations when there's a juicy carrot that may or may not be awarded. Based on your own post, I can only say that the academia is not any "nobler" than the rest of the world.

Clarissa said...

It's my second year on the tenure-track and until now nobody has humiliated me or pushed me around. If they did, believe me, I'd have risen a stink to the skies on this very blog had that happened.

Anonymous said...

Another aspect of the tenure-track process is fear. We are terrifed that we might antagonize anybody who will later on turn out to be crucial for the process of tenure review. So we learn to self-censor, shut up, not question and comply with everything.

On the tenure-track, you spend 6 years in the position of a deer in the headlights...


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Although you didn't mention "humiliation" explicitly, to have to comply with something you dislike is the same as "to be pushed around" to me. Having to please the people you disrespect is humiliating.

Also, you mentioned once that, unlike, a corporate employee, a professor can't be fired without warning. Technically, it's true, but the question is why.

The apparent answer is that firing a professor in a middle of the year will create more headache for the university than for the professor. In the corporate world, on the other hand, there are no one-year-ahead plans.

Clarissa said...

"to have to comply with something you dislike is the same as "to be pushed around" to me."

-Erm. . . really? I don't like brushing my teeth but I comply with this social norm anyways. Am I being pushed around? If so, by whom?

And as somebody you happen to know well, I am surprised that you still think I'm trying to please somebody I don't respect. Are any examples forthcoming?