{"id":2253,"date":"2004-09-13T10:54:07","date_gmt":"2004-09-13T14:54:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/09\/13\/2253.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:46:41","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:46:41","slug":"shhh-hes-talking-about-tenure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/09\/13\/shhh-hes-talking-about-tenure\/","title":{"rendered":"Shhh, he’s talking about tenure…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There was an odd Op-Ed piece<\/a> in this morning’s New York Times by John M. McCardell, Jr., former President of Middlebury College, where he claims to say what most serving college presidents dare not say. And, of course, the first thing is—three guesses? And the first two don’t count unless they begin with ‘ten’ and end in ‘ure’. Yes, it seems that tenure is an outdated policy, which served its purpose in the 40s and 50s, but is not now necessary. Yes, the most undiscussed secret of higher education is tenure. You will never, ever, ever hear a college president with the temerity to knock tenure. Nope.\n

Oh, come on.\n

Look, Your Humble Blogger takes a back seat to no-one in his bewildered contempt for the economics of higher education. Further, I admit that tenure is probably every bit as justified in factories as it is in universities; I’ll go along with that, too. But the tenure debate is raging free and easy across the land, and for President Emeritus McCardell to suggest that this is some new, daring thing is preposterous. I will say that he does present some newish arguments, if that’s what they are. He claims that academic freedom is no longer at risk (good to know, Mr. President), and therefore the tenure protections are unimportant (although it’s entertaining that he does that in the context of claiming there were things about higher education that college president’s don’t dare say, but now that he’s retired, he can say them). He hints that, in fact, it might be better for young professors if tenure was not the norm, as it would relieve the publish-or-perish pressure. He even, I think, attempts to imply that abolition of tenure would help even up the gender imbalance, but I may be reading too much into that. He doesn’t say anything at all about money.\n

What tenure does is prevent the employer from firing the employee. That’s what it is. If you want to lift that, presumably it’s because you want to fire some employees. It seems pretty simple. Every serious argument for getting rid of tenure that I’ve ever heard comes down to ‘we want to fire a bunch of expensive useless profs’. Well, and use the threat of layoffs to hold down salaries. Either there are a lot of profs who have tenure but who aren’t very good at their jobs, which is possible but I have not seen any evidence of it, or this is about money.\n

I know that the tenure system has given rise to a system of adjuncts and part-timers that screws everybody. I suspect the answer to that would be to have collective bargaining, and have the employer insist that the bargaining unit include part-timers and adjuncts. There are other suggestions, some of which are probably implementable. But the answer could be removing tenure only if the problem, at its heart, is in the old, useless, well-paid profs. And I don’t think it is. I’ll need to see that argument, and I’ll need to see some data. President Emeritus McCardell just murmurs some nice phrases about secondary and tertiary aspects of the issue, ignoring the primary one. Oh, and his next point is that student\/faculty ratio is overrated. Which it is, of course, but ... hm ... how would that ratio be affected by getting rid of tenure again? Oh, yes, you are thinking about (but not talking about) firing people.\n

No real point, just that if you are going to talk to YHB about abolishing tenure, you’d better start talking about layoffs and pay cuts, because that’s the real issue. I agree with him about the drinking age, though.\n

                           ,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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