Monday, October 4, 2010

Assault on Tenure: What Can We Do to Stop It?

A full-scale assault on the institution of tenure in the United States started this summer when several leading newspapers published a series of articles arguing that tenure should be abolished. Immediately after that, several universities announced that they are planning to fire several of their tenured faculty members. For now, I know of two such schools: Southern Mississippi and SUNY Albany. If you know of any other schools where tenured faculty are being let go, please leave their names in the comment section. We need to create as much bad press as possible for the universities that engage in such shameful, anti-intellectual practices.

So what can we, the academics, do to prevent the institution of tenure from being destroyed completely in this country? I believe that unless we make a concerted effort to oppose these practices, we can say good-bye both to tenure and to the integrity of the higher education system. The university as a bastion of knowledge, learning and cultivation of intellect will disappear. Instead, we will have glorified trade schools that will produce nothing but brainwashed, illiterate robots.

This is why I am convinced that we need to act and we need to do it now. I propose that every academic in this country and abroad should engage in a boycott of those schools that participate in the assault on tenure. We should refuse to collaborate with anybody who has the misfortune of working for Southern Mississippi or SUNY Albany. We should refuse to listen to their conference papers, we should refuse to admit them into the conference sessions we organize, we should avoid submitting our own papers to conferences they organize. We should refuse to collaborate with them in any way. We should refuse to review their articles for publication. We should speak out against these universities whenever we get a chance.

People will say that this will only serve to punish innocent scholars who happen to work at these institutions and who are not responsible for the actions of their administrators. Such objections are doubly wrong. First, a sustained and active boycott of Southern Mississippi and SUNY Albany will result in an immediate loss of prestige by these schools. The administrators who thought they were working for a respectable university will find themselves managing a backwater school that is ridiculed and despised by everybody in the academic community. Let's see how much they like hearing people scoff in their faces every time they mention their place of employment. Let's see how much they like seeing prospective students avoid applying to their schools unless every other option is exhausted.

As for the so-called innocent faculty members of these schools who will suffer as a result of a wide-spread boycott of their institutions, how innocent can they be if they have heard these horrible news about their own colleagues being deprived of employment and they still have come to work today? If they are in the classroom right now, instead of staging a protest in front of the administrators' offices? If they are tacitly collaborating with the administrators who are throwing their colleagues out on their asses? If they haven't even made a collective statement of protest against this atrocity? The kind of boycott I propose will serve their interests in the long term because - as much as they want to believe otherwise - this process will not stop at the professors of the "useless" foreign languages. We will all live to see a complete destruction of the institution of tenure.

I want to remind my colleagues everywhere of the following quote from pastor Martin Niemöller they must have heard a thousand times but don't seem to have taken to heart:
When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I remained silent; I wasn't a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
If we don't speak out today, it will be too late tomorrow.

13 comments:

Anita said...

I like the quote at the end. It makes me ask myself if I've not spoken out when necessary.

I have a friend who is about to get tenure. I'll have to tell her about your post and ask her what her thoughts are; maybe I'll learn even more on the subject.

Clarissa said...

Your friend must have invested an incredible amount of work into getting tenure. Imagine how it must feel to find out that now your tenure is not even worth anything.

Pagan Topologist said...

It does not help much, but there is a bit of ironic justice which is likely here. We are often willing to work for less than we could get elsewhere precisely because of the academic freedom guaranteed by the economic security of tenure. If tenure is eliminated, prefessors will be demanding much higher salaries. This will be possible since far fewer people will be willing to take the jobs if there is both low pay and no guarantee of academic freedom.

Anonymous said...

Have you seen the documentary movie called "Waiting for Superman" currently in the theaters? The basic premise is that the villians in the American educational crisis are teacher's unions and tenure.

Clarissa said...

I don't think that this is what's going to happen at all, though. i think we are all moving in the direction where we will work on the same conditions that our adjuncts and instructors now work: insane workload, low pay, zero benefits, and contracts that have to be renewed every semester.

As a college administrator once said to a colleague: "We are giving you a chance to come here every day and practice your hobby. And you complain that you don't like the conditions?"

Clarissa said...

"Have you seen the documentary movie called "Waiting for Superman" currently in the theaters? The basic premise is that the villians in the American educational crisis are teacher's unions and tenure."

-Are you kidding me??? Thanks for telling me about it! Now I have to watch it and write a review. I wonder who is paying for it.

I hope that NOW people will stop telling me that I'm being paranoid in my belief that there is a concerted assault on tenure in this country.

Lindsay said...

I don't think you're paranoid at all. Since maybe the 1980s or '90s, when people who were student radicals during the '60s and '70s started becoming tenured professors, there's been a wave of right-wing fear that later generation of students would be indoctrinated with socialist, Communist, feminist, anti-American ideas. They see tenure as protecting these radical professors (who mostly exist in their imagination, although most academics are *liberal*, and a few are or were radicals -- the campus is hardly a hotbed of rebellion, though!) whom they would like to fire. And it does protect professors -- if you have tenure, you're free to think, write and say whatever you want, without worry about what John Q. Public will think of it. But yes, there *is* an assault on tenure, and it's part of the Culture War that's been more or less ongoing since the '60s. Don't you love this country?

(Also, I gave you a blog award).

Anonymous said...

Your idea to put an end to this assault on tenure is brilliant, my friend. Anything that is not a petition at this point (!)...

Ol.

V said...

Pagan Topologist, I would not be so optimistic. Currently there are tens of candidates (hundreds in the case of top schools), significant percentage of them actually decent and employable, per one faculty position. One can not only abolish tenure, but also lower the salaries on top of that.

I am starting to see some use in Quebec's strong unions (generally I used to hate them)...

Pagan Topologist said...

I certainly agree about collective bargaining. We have been unionized at the University of Delaware since about 1972. Even though our union, AAUP, is not very strong as unions go, it has helped us quite a bit over the years, in terms of working conditions, salaries, and benefits. We have a significant number of CNTT positions, but they seem to enjoy a de facto tenure even if not in name.

Clarissa said...

PT: tenured and TT faculty are unionized at your university?? I wonder why I never applied for a job at that wonderful place.

Pagan Topologist said...

I don't know. There is still time.

Anita said...

My friend and I see each other at horseback riding lessons. Unfortunately, she was leaving when I remembered to ask about tenure and we could only have a two minute conversation. She wasn't aware of what's going on at the universities you mentioned, but she was definitely annoyed about people wanting to elimiate it tenure.
Like one of your other commenters, she mentioned freedom of speech. She also talked about salaries, the number of part time professors at her university, and a conservatist movement against it.
Because of your post, my ears are now programmed to pick up on the subject when the word tenure is heard. :)