Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Paul Campos uses his tenure wisely, and a rant about tenure
I am not a big fan of the tenure system for professors. The most widely-cited justification for tenure is that professors need to be able to write and speak freely without being afraid that they will lose their jobs. The problem, though, is that in order to get tenure one has to conform to the political and social norms of the modern university for so long -- that is, one has to suck up to, and not piss off, powerful people like deans and department chairmen -- that very few people who actually get tenure use it to say things that are unpopular with their colleagues.
With this column, Paul Campos has established himself as an exception:
Indeed.
Since I've been old enough to think about it, I have not understood the "academic freedom" argument to support the lifetime employment guarantee that is tenure. Why should we protect accomplished professors from the consequences of their speech, and not everybody else? Surely it isn't because we want academics to be free from political pressure. If we cared so much about insulating academia from politics, we never would have thought up the idea of universities owned and managed by the government. And then, having done that, we never would have decided to fund even private universities with buckets of taxpayer bling-bling. And finally, having done all of that, academia never would have declared that the "personal is political," blurring all lines between dispassionate analysis and political self-interest.
No, there is no "free speech" argument that can justify tenure.
The only argument that I can understand for tenure is that it is necessary to induce people to specialize in narrow academic subjects that have no intrinsic economic value and that may go in and out of favor during the course of a career. We need a few people to specialize in ancient South Pacific culture or weird Chinese dialects or obscure poets from Iowa. Every generation needs a couple of true experts in St. Augustine, Martin Luthor or Charlemagne. Who would shoulder that burden without the prospect of lifetime employment? Only amateurs or the independantly wealthy. We need the possibility of tenure to induce people to specialize in subjects that may or may not be valuable for the entire duration of a lifetime, but for which we need to preserve expertise.
Unfortunately for Paul Campos, Professor Bainbridge, Glenn Reynolds or Eugene Volokh, there is no such justification for tenure for law professors (or medical school professors or business school professors). If any one of them or all of them were fired for whatever reason, they could easily duplicate their income and then some in private practice, none the worse for wear (other than suffering the indignity of having clients). Sure, we (or at least I) appreciate that they use their academic freedom to blog like banshees, but that is hardly a good reason for lifetime employment.
With this column, Paul Campos has established himself as an exception:
Over the past few days I've been bombarded with e-mails regarding the Ward Churchill scandal. Many have expressed astonishment at how someone like Churchill could have been hired in the first place, let alone tenured and made chair of a department.
It's a good question, but it's not one that any of the academics who've written me have asked. We already know the answer.
One of the many ironies of this scandal that threatens to undermine academic freedom is that it couldn't have happened if those who decided to hire, tenure and promote Churchill had taken advantage of academic freedom themselves.
The privileges created by tenure are supposed to insulate faculty from political pressures in general and censorship in particular. Yet those of us in the academy, if we were candid, would have to admit that few places are more riddled with the distorting effects of politics and censorship than university faculties.
Academics claim to despise censorship, but the truth is we do a remarkably good job of censoring ourselves. This is especially true in regard to affirmative action. Who among us can claim to have spoken up every time a job candidate almost as preposterous as Churchill was submitted for our consideration? Things like the Churchill fiasco are made possible by a web of lies kept intact by a conspiracy of silence.
Indeed.
Since I've been old enough to think about it, I have not understood the "academic freedom" argument to support the lifetime employment guarantee that is tenure. Why should we protect accomplished professors from the consequences of their speech, and not everybody else? Surely it isn't because we want academics to be free from political pressure. If we cared so much about insulating academia from politics, we never would have thought up the idea of universities owned and managed by the government. And then, having done that, we never would have decided to fund even private universities with buckets of taxpayer bling-bling. And finally, having done all of that, academia never would have declared that the "personal is political," blurring all lines between dispassionate analysis and political self-interest.
No, there is no "free speech" argument that can justify tenure.
The only argument that I can understand for tenure is that it is necessary to induce people to specialize in narrow academic subjects that have no intrinsic economic value and that may go in and out of favor during the course of a career. We need a few people to specialize in ancient South Pacific culture or weird Chinese dialects or obscure poets from Iowa. Every generation needs a couple of true experts in St. Augustine, Martin Luthor or Charlemagne. Who would shoulder that burden without the prospect of lifetime employment? Only amateurs or the independantly wealthy. We need the possibility of tenure to induce people to specialize in subjects that may or may not be valuable for the entire duration of a lifetime, but for which we need to preserve expertise.
Unfortunately for Paul Campos, Professor Bainbridge, Glenn Reynolds or Eugene Volokh, there is no such justification for tenure for law professors (or medical school professors or business school professors). If any one of them or all of them were fired for whatever reason, they could easily duplicate their income and then some in private practice, none the worse for wear (other than suffering the indignity of having clients). Sure, we (or at least I) appreciate that they use their academic freedom to blog like banshees, but that is hardly a good reason for lifetime employment.
1 Comments:
By 
Fausta, at
Wed Feb 16, 10:39:00 AM:
Tenure's been a controversial subject in my family, which has several (tenured) academics, and several members of the traditional professions. I totally agree with you that there is no "free speech" argument that can justify tenure, and very little argument for it at all. Talented amateurs, such as http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displayStory.cfm?subjectid=348996&story_id=3623112 Miriam Rothschild, can do excellent work in arcane subjects.
As for the tenured professors with leading blogs, as much as I enjoy reading their blogs, I find them too self-referential -- a trait from academia, perhaps?
Fausta
