No doubt this particular phrase signals for most of us the
conflict in attitudes between Trustees, and politicians, hypocrites
as most of them surely are in such matters, between the norms of
'productivity' and those of intellectual excellence. Excellence
takes a lot of time, the luxury of leisure, and is produced in
very small quantities (hence its value from scarcity). Working
harder, longer, more industriously, will not in general produce
one single more insight into a complex or ideology-entangled
issue -- whereas a day at the beach just might. The university
culture descends from the Age of Leisure; we are an aristocratic
institution with a democratic function in an Age of Fear. The
privileged and powerful (Trustees, politicians, et al.) greatly
and rightly fear that declining productivity, gross mismanagement,
and international competition, are going to sink the US economy
and that they will go down with the ship, if they're not tossed
overboard first. So they and their kind are on a holy crusade
to make everybody else work harder and faster, from their sheer
desperation and need to be seen as the advocates of productivity.
They are not, of course. Managers and 'leaders' in the US today
by and large contribute next to nothing to productivity, indeed
seem if anything to generate negative value-added. Compared to
their peers in European and Asian economies and governments,
particularly, they are overpaid, over-rated, under-accountable,
and generally clueless. Masters of image, smoke, and mirror, and
little else. The latest and hottest fads in progressive management
theory (see _Organization_ v.3 n.3, August 96, article by Gee and
commentary by me) try desperately to find a role for the boss in
changing organizational patterns that make bosses unnecessary (if
they ever were).
University faculty will never convince the public at large that
by letting us waste as much time as we need to, we will once in
a great while give them back something of incredible value. Neither
will we convince Trustees and politicians that we should be allowed
to be just as unproductive as they are. I think it is more or less
politically and economically inevitable that the size of tenured
university faculties will shrink substantially in the next few
decades, whatever happens to the population or the percentage
seeking higher education. Far cheaper and less labor intensive
alternatives are in the offing. Liberal arts degrees also seem to
be an idea whose time is long passed. Technical education, part-time
faculty, on-line learning and mentoring are among the favored trends.
And all this may well be for the good in terms of both social
justice and general standards of living, though this is harder to
predict.
What does tenure defend? unpopular inquiries and theories, which
are, pretty clearly, necessary ... and isn't amazing there are
institutions in our society designed to make this possible --
a holdover of aristocratic privilege, I think, a wonderful anachronism,
not likely to last indefinitely. In the cyberfuture of scholarship
and intellectual debate, ease of self-publication and distribution/
access to ideas from every quarter will guard the unpopular ...
actually subsidizing the unpopular seems to much to hope for, but
in the cyberworld of niche-livelihoods, almost anything might be
able to command a paying audience.
Tenure also defends long-term projects and bringing to bear career-
long expertise on unfashionable problems (what good, very senior
academics tend to turn to). Early retirement incentives are already
eroding this feature of the traditional system, and it's not clear
that people hired this year will reach retirement in a world where
universities will be very significant full-time employers any more.
Tenure mostly defends people who don't need it and don't earn it.
Their ideas are fashionable to pedestrian, where not hopelessly out-of-
date. They fill slots that could go to younger or newer people with
more interesting approaches. They are boring teachers and indifferent
researchers.
What we worry about with the loss of tenure is political interference
in the life of the university, with firings of people because a few
votes are to be gained by a news story about how wicked their ideas
were, justified by hypocritical technicalities about 'program changes'
or 'lack of industry and cooperativeness'. Traditionally we have been
willing to put up with the enormous wastefulness of the tenure system
in order to protect these few, in hopes that one or two of them might
have viewpoints useful in helping make a better world. I think that
lately this policy has been justified. A lot of feminist scholars,
and those working in such new fields as African-American studies,
Gay and Lesbian studies, radical postmodernism, media studies, and
many others have been sheltered by tenure (when a few of them could
get it in the first place) while they built initially unpopular
approaches into the most creative, dynamic, and progressive fields
in the academy today. Without tenure few of them would have lasted
more than 5-6 years, or had the institutional support needed to
develop whole new disciplines.
In the future, however, I believe there will be other means to do
all this, and that universities will not have the resources to
be nurseries for new fields.
So that leaves really only the balance of power issues. At U of Minn,
the administration seems to support the faculty against the Trustees,
but that is not a normal pattern of alliances. A great danger of
the proposed 'reforms' there is to increase the power of the adminstration
over the faculty, when in most institutions that power imbalance is
already dangerously great. Faculty votes of no-confidence in adminstrative
officers from Dean to President should be binding on Trustees, as
a matter of a university's by-laws and charter. Salary reductions are
penalizations and should not be legal except by general contract
agreement, applying to broad categories, not to individuals. Firings
for cause should be for very strictly defined causes, with stringent
explicit criteria, and avenues of appeal to neutral mediators.
And post-tenure review? Who is qualified to review the work of
senior scholars? generally NOT members of their own departments,
or administators in their own universities. Qualified outside panels,
with all the cost that entails? It seems worth undertaking only
in special cases. If 10 years after the last promotion there is
no evidence of an active research program, or prima facie evidence
of poor quality in teaching, it would not be unreasonable to convene
an evaluation panel (after perhaps a notice a year or two in advance).
And if its findings are negative? a 2-3 year terminal contract?
So, should I/we write the Minnesota Trustees? (Anyone like to find
out who they are, individually?) And what should be said? JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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