Tenure Good?

An article in today's Inside Higher Ed reports on a situation at Northeastern University in Boston in which faculty members without "proper" accreditation were released so that the university could higher more tenure and tenure-track faculty members. The article notes that many of these lecturers and adjuncts have had decades of experience teaching at Northeastern and that Northeastern has often focused on "experiential learning" programs such as coops and gaining hands-on experience.

This situation is troubling to me on several levels, but there are two that stand out predominantly for me. The first concerns the role of a university. If the role of the university is to teach students, then I think that the practice of teaching is often overlooked as an important facet of the educational experience. I don't care how much expertise a person has, if they are unable to get up in front of a group of students and explain it in such a way that it makes students think in ways that they have not thought before, gives them skills that they can use in their chosen profession or give them the background kinds of knowledge that they need to go investigate the world themselves, then an educational institution has failed its mission. I don't believe that there is any reason why someone with an advanced degree can do this particular task any better than someone without an advanced degree. And, certainly for many professional programs, it is vitally important that there are teachers who have experience in the profession that students are being trained for. I have talked to people who are getting degrees/have gotten degrees in social work, public policy and public health who have never taken a class or gained an intimate knowledge of the practical problems that will be faced in a profession. While nothing can prepare someone comparably to gaining experience on the job, it is important that students know what kinds of issues they are likely to face in any given chosen profession and practical strategies for dealing with the situations that do arise.

This is not to say that advanced degrees don't offer something. I will not spend the better part of six years of my life attempting to obtain something that I don't think is worthwhile. But, obtaining Ph.D.s are a good way to become an expert in a certain area, which is vitally important. Maybe if our president had listened to the historians, military strategists, cultural anthropologists with highly specialized knowledge about specific aspects of war, we might not be in the quagmire that we are in. On the other hand, most professional jobs and more and more non-professional careers require that someone have broad-based knowledge about different aspects and how to deal with the practical uncertainties, divisions, memo-writing, agenda-making that make up the day-to-day tasks of jobs.

The second part that concerns me is the effort to make tenure the gold-standard for all higher-ed employment. While the AAUP has been defending tenure and the AFT has been pushing FACE legislation, there are other considerations to having a full-time academy than tenure. Protecting the kind of people who have been working at Northeastern for decades and the professionals who take a side job teaching college students because they want to have an impact on their profession need to be protected as well. To receive a notice that after decades of service, you are no longer welcome, is a disgrace and huge slap in the face. And while the representative from the AAUP quoted in the article claims that this is not the best way to handle these situations, on paper, the "long-term" outcome (more tenured and tenure-track professors as a proportion to the total of academics hired) is exactly what the AAUP and FACE legislation would end up creating.

While the goals and aims of both the AAUP and the AFT are solid, the devil is, as always, in the details. Without specific mention of situations such as these in policies and programs advocated by strong organizations, I am afraid that will be more examples such as this; or, even worse, universities will intentionally fire these lecturers to make a show and say "our hands are tied by the policies of the AAUP/AFT/[insert organization here] put in place — go blame them for losing your job." I don't think that will be good for anyone, but as long as the conversation remains solely and explicitly about tenure, I fear that this going to be the result of these policies.

In my dual role as a graduate student and employee

I was catching up on the internets today since I finally have service at my apartment [which, is also serving as my "office"] and was reading an interesting series of posts from Female Science Professor. FSP is a fascinating blog by a woman employed at as a full professor at a Research I university in the physical sciences and often has interesting tidbits about the life of academics and the particular life that women face in science departments in the country.

In this series of posts, FSP is reacting to the NYT article on Harvard's task-force report that teaching should be institutionally emphasized (available here). The task-force's summary of Guiding Principle (p.5) is:

To renew its commitment to excellence, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences must motivate and empower committed teachers as well as distinguished researchers, and actively encourage intelligent pedagogy as well as pathbreaking research. Devoted teachers abound at Harvard, yet their individual efforts are often not perceived as central to institutional priorities.

and, among the major principles that should be addressed:

Tenured faculty should lead by example, requiring of themselves the same commitment to teaching that they ask of junior colleagues and graduate students who are at earlier stages of developing their capacities as scholars and teachers.

That this is garnering attention because it is Harvard disturbs me a little bit; but, on the other hand, the fact that it is garnering attention is a distinct positive. The Harvard interim president acknowledges, “If we don’t do it ourselves,” President Bok said of the government pressure, “they’re going to make us do it their way.” And to see "their" way, look at the crumbling school infrastructure and massive privatization under No Child Left Behind.

Following the initial commentary, FSP took on two issues that were brought up in the comments of the initial post: first, she commented on the teaching/research/service requirements while teaching at a research university; then she discussed the issue of "buying-out teaching requirements. The first post is an interesting read for those interested in tenure and a discussion of promotions in academia [although, as an interesting side note, I find it interesting that neither FSP nor her commenters found that teaching and research were related activities], but it is actually the second that I found more interesting.

The question revolves around the practice of "buying out" teaching requirements. This is a practice where one would write into a grant proposal a certain amount of money that would be used to pay the professor's department a set fee in order that the professor does not have to teach the class that semester. Often, the department will then hire an adjunct or, if it is a required graduate course, strong-arm a less-prominent researcher to teach the course [or, simply not teach the course].

As I posted there, I have two major concers about this practice.

1. In my role as a student, I have found the course offerings in graduate level courses to be strinkingly sparse. While graduate education is certainly not built on a foundation of taking classes in the same way that an undergraduate course of study is, graduate-level elective classes are often the time where students are exposed to the background literature in their field or sub-field or where new literatures can be discovered. By curtailing these offerings, my department has made it more difficult for me to obtain my degree in a timely manner (another, apparent pet-peeve of most universities).


2. Second is the prospect of my future employment in the field of academia. As Dr. K points out in the comments, the adjuncts that are hired to teach these "bought-out" semesters are paid far less than the tenured or tenure-track professors who bought out their commitment. Adjuncts have no job security, and what security they have depends on their evaluations from their students which, logically, leads to grade inflation. They have severe curtailments on their academic freedom as they are at best short-term contract employees and, at worst, at-will employees.

I find it interesting in the debates surrounding academic freedom and adjunct parity often overlook at the entire context of institutions of higher education. When I have brought up the issue of graduate education in debates about adjunct parity, I am often met by either a) open hostility telling me that adjuncts could never instruct me the way that tenured or tenure-track professors could or b) outright confusion. I seem to get the response, "What the hell does this have to do with anything?" The same could be said about debates I have had regarding academic freedom - we (rightly) concentrate on Horowitz's big legislative agenda, but often forget the day-to-day, quotidian (thanks wobblie) experiences that threaten academic freedom on campus.

I know that there must be dozens of other banal rules, regulations and policies that threaten the very ideals of a free and fair academy such as this one. While we target the large-scale n'er-do-gooders such as Horowitz and ACTA and fight with (or as) the adjuncts and contingent employees that deserve fair treatment with legislation and national campaigns, short term goals should include targeting policies such as these to make them more fair, equitable and just. I believe that research should provide an instrument to help teach and that teaching should provide the energy and ideas to supply creative research. At times, one needs more resources to commit to research; I just hope that Harvard and other instutions take seriously the recommendations of the task-force to value teaching the same way they value research.

The Dismal State of Higher Ed

This week in the Huffington Post, Barbara Ehrenreich writes about the lack of value of a college degree. Yes, I know, this is the same Barabara Ehrenreich of Nickel and Dimed and who helped found (with SEIU) United Professionals, a quasi-union in order to help out white collar workers who have been downsized or can't find jobs. Unfortunately, while she talks about college grads in her "manifesto", she apparently believes that Higher Education is "a scam."

Chiding MIT for releasing the Dean of Admissions, Ehrenreich writes:

Can you be fired for doing a great job, year after year, and in fact becoming nationally known for your insight and performance? Yes, as in the case of Marilee Jones, who was the dean of admissions at MIT until her dismissal last week, when it was discovered that she had lied about her academic credentials 28 years ago.

And, the great insight learned from this action is that, "But in the last three decades the percentage of jobs requiring at least some college has doubled, which means that employers are going along with the college racket." She also goes on to say that she believes that most employers want college-educated students for one of two reasons: 1) Because they know how to conform or 2) they are in debt up to their ears and, therefore, become subservient employees unwilling to risk being unemployed.

What is even more depressing is the comments after the article. These are people who read the Huffington Post who are vehemently against colleges and believe them to be a racket as well. One notable post reads:

Nice post. 'Bout time.

My experience with Ivy League is that if you actually used your mind, i.e. challenged the tenured professor and the carefully crafted conclusions (history) then you would receive a grade reduction; regardless of how well argued your case.

Indoctrination.
How NeoCon.

I don't care if we launch Free Exchange on Campus, or FACE, or any number of other initiatives. The true NeoCons have done such a good job destroying the American academy with an "employment focused" and "market based" attitude with the complicity of the current American academics who refuse to enter into "political" discussions because it might "taint" their research. If this is what readers of the Huffington Post believe, then we are doomed.

I would also guess that most of them don't know that more and more of our teaching is being done by contingent labor. Employees who can be hired and fired at will, who keep their office hours in their cars, and can't take the time to remember their students' names because they have a thousand of them. Until we are successful at getting the Ehrenreichs and Huffinton Post readers of the world to understand where the American academy has changed, then we are going to be woefully unsuccessful in front of our own legislators.