What We Talk about When We Talk about Tenure
Mary Burgan
 
I spent two recent weekends defending tenure at higher education conferences, one actually set in Disney World! Do faculty members realize how many higher education conferences come to the aid of the hotel industry in the off-season? Do they understand that administrators get together to trade strategies at such gatherings? When faculty members hear deans talk about "asynchronous pedagogy," "learning communities," and "stakeholder rights," does it dawn on them that the disclosure comes from education chautauquas that spin lingo nearly as exotic as the jargon at meetings of the Modern Language Association? The fact is that while faculty debates the nature of knowledge in their own conclaves, their administrative colleagues talk elsewhere about managing the university. These conversations proceed in relative isolation from one another, though in a mood of increasing mutual suspicion. Indeed, it is this suspicion that has come to color the current debates on tenure.

On the one side, faculty members see administrators as undermining the authority of the faculty by hiring more and more part-time and adjunct instructors, by threatening increased surveillance over every aspect of faculty work, and by eliminating departmental home bases. They hear their leaders preach about teaching and service in public forums, while behind closed doors these same leaders intensify mandates for publication, grantsmanship, and national research recognition. And faculty are exasperated by the euphoric pedagogy now being peddled by consultants who fly onto the campus to accuse the typical faculty member by yearning to be a "sage on the stage rather than a guide at the side" of students. At one long, Saturday morning scolding from such a guru recently, a satirical colleague was heard to murmur over and over, "We're sorry. We're sorry." The tenor of many of the current mandates for change from the world of higher education management seems anti-faculty, if not anti-intellectual.

On the other side, educational managers say that it is very hard to engage tenured faculty in making plans for such critical eventualities as shifts in enrollments, the demands for consumer satisfaction in education, and the deflation of the market for new Ph.D.'s. When administrators talk about faculty governance, they complain that it is expensive, inflexible, and impervious to the bottom line. The subplot of their talk is that tenure could be abolished, and governance made less intrusive, if only one research university would make the first move.

Fed up with the difficulties of reform, some of our educational managers don't understand that the culture of academic freedom carries a mandate for faculty to be fearless in the expression of knowledge not only in their research but also in the classroom. I worry that our administrative colleagues forget that in a world now so bound by competition, there is a social value in the cultivation of autonomous professionals who claim the right to criticize what is presented as progress of efficiency, as well as public relations schemes and management fads. That is why tenure cannot be limited to a few research faculties in seats of educational privilege. Indeed, it is students in less privileged locations who most require the fresh air of a contrarian opinion blithely spoken or a controversial book bravely taught. Of course, under the stress change, faculty cannot afford to be rude or automatically oppositional. But neither can administrators dismiss academic freedom as the faculty's self-indulgence. Academic freedom is not a rule to guide the settlement of one or another pedagogical incident; it is an environment in which the exploration of solutions can breathe rather than gasp from one put-down to the next. We could use more of this kind of environment when we talk about tenure.

From ACADEME March-April 1998, p.2.

It is not the student in the fight, it is the fight in the student that counts.
 
Larry Crumbley

 Little Rock Chapter (Grade Inflation)

Society for a Return To Academic Standards 
  


Last Updated: 14 May 1998