{"id":12119,"date":"2009-05-18T21:44:21","date_gmt":"2009-05-19T01:44:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2009\/05\/18\/12119.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:52:03","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:52:03","slug":"why-and-for-what-reason-and-wh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2009\/05\/18\/why-and-for-what-reason-and-wh\/","title":{"rendered":"Why? And for what reason? And wherefore?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I had meant to respond, ages ago, to a question<\/a> Matt H. asked in the comments to a note almost a month ago. Since I never did respond, rather than just ignoring it, I’ll put it up here in a new note, particularly as I don’t have any real inspiration for writing just now, and don’t feel like doing another damned Book Report.\n

What is it that makes you in favor (apparently) of abolishing tenure, where I’m leery of it; and I want term limits for Senators, which concept you (V) previously have expressed the leer thereof?<\/i><\/blockquote>\n

First of all, I’m going to do the web thing where I dismiss the question: The current situation with Senators, which can roughly be described as renewable six-year contracts with the understanding that almost all the incumbents will be renewed in their positions, is what I would imagine replacing the current tenure system, if the tenure system were to be replaced. I would be against limiting the professor to a particular number of renewals at a particular institution; I would be against granting Senators life appointments. So there’s that. And besides that, I wouldn’t describe myself as in favor of abolishing tenure so much as strongly ambivalent about tenure; if I could snap my fingers and make that policy change, I don’t know that I would do it. And I am less leery about term limits than I was; if I could snap my fingers and institute a, say, four-term limit for the Senate, I don’t know that I wouldn’t. Although I would prefer to use that finger-snapping business as leverage for other changes that I think are more valuable, but that’s where the leer comes in, right?\n

But I don’t think Matt was getting at the specific differences in circumstances and policies. I think he’s looking at our instincts when it comes to job protection, democracy, conservativism (in the sense of preserving What Is), and the levels of leeriness in suggesting changes. Essentially, we both look at the tenure situation and see positives and negatives, and he is leery of change where I am willing to chance it; we both look at the Senate and see positives and negatives, and I am leery of change where he is willing to chance it. It’s not risk-aversion, it’s not the conservative temperament, and I’d be willing to suggest that it isn’t really the policy differences in the matter (much as I would be willing to argue that I am correct in both of my positions). So what is it?\n

Partially, of course, it’s that my Best Reader is at the moment Junior Faculty. Y’all know the joke about the scholar that has a heart attack and dies at the very moment the hood is placed over his head conferring the Ph.D.? At the gate of the Afterlife, he is told that while of course had he continued in his academic career, he would have been dispatched to the Bad Place, but since he expired just at the moment, they weren’t sure what to do with him. Eventually, he is told that he will have to choose his ultimate destination. Choose?<\/i> he asks. I mean, isn’t it obvious?<\/I> No, he is told, he should visit both and see which he prefers. So up he goes on a visitor’s pass, and it’s very nice. Harps, hosannahs, haloes. You know, nice. Not real exciting, but nice. And then he goes to the other place, again on a visitor’s pass, and you know what? It’s wonderful<\/i>. It’s like the ultimate college, and the library? It has everything, everything ever written and a lot of stuff that was never published, and even more, there are all the great scholars and academicians, from his own advisor’s advisor’s advisor all the way back to Plato, and all the stuff they’ve been working on since passing to the other side. And they all sit around and talk about the work. And they are interested in his work, too, and have suggestions for collaboration and for resources he could use, and all of these conversations are over the most fantastic meal he’s ever had, eating and drinking and the life of the mind and when he is back at the gate turning in his visitor’s pass, he says I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’d like to go to Hell, please<\/i>. Well, there’s this, like, ultimate thunderclap, and blam-blam-blam there’s our deceased young friend in Hell, with torment, unspeakable torment, and flames, and ice, and demons jeering at him, and the howls of damned souls, and all of that, and he cries out in agony, he cries out Where is the library? Where is the meat and drink? Where are my colleagues? This is not what I was shown!<\/i> and the voice that answers him says that was the interview, fool. Now you are junior faculty.<\/strong>\n

Which, you know, funny. But.\n

I’m saying that the problems with faculty tenure are connected to problems in my own daily life. I’m actually experiencing them. So, naturally, when I’m totting up costs and benefits, and weighting factors and risks and whatnot, I’m naturally going to weight those factors that I’ve seen with my eyes more heavily. Too heavily? Probably. Hard to tell, of course. How could I tell how heavily to weight the misery and waste of publish-or-perish? I see the people (not by Best Reader, so far) who have gone into the decision and come out busted, the university losing a good teacher (in at least four of the cases I personally know about, although to be fair, I don’t know that they are good teachers by any sort of objective metric, if such a thing exists) and the neighborhood losing a neighbor as the tenure-denied family packs up to go elsewhere, and all that. And did I mention selling the house? And in many of those cases, it seems to me that the problem is tenure<\/I>, that the departments would, on the whole, be happy for the junior faculty member to keep teaching and going to committee meetings and all, but for tenure<\/I>, well, they just don’t have the stuff for that.\n

Whereas, you know, the stuff about the Senate and term limits, while I do see the problems in theory, in practice there are very few bills that I am aware of as passing or not passing because of term limits, or cases where the bill that passes is significantly worse because of the lack of term limits. Is that because I’m just not paying attention? Or because I’m not working on the Hill, or married to somebody who is working on the Hill, with a bunch of other college buddies and siblings and other friends and acquaintances on the Hill as well. Or because the problem is trickier and more insidious, because the real problem is the committee chairs and their seniority-driven power to set the agendas, so that it rarely comes down to a vote and an old retrograde Senator who has rested on incumbency for a decade to publicly screw his constituents in that vote. Sure, all of that.\n

So I can make all the logical arguments in the world, and furthermore I can believe all of those arguments, and ever further all of those arguments can be right<\/i> but that’s not why Matt and I have different instincts on these cases. Why<\/i> is that other thing.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger tells a joke. Not the funniest joke I’ve ever told in this Tohu Bohu, which would be Joke Number Thirty-Nine, but a good joke anyway. Although my Perfect Non-Reader likes the one about what baby potatoes wear to bed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12119"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18773,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12119\/revisions\/18773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}