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tenure

The Truth about Tenure

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April 12, 2012
AAUP, tenure
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The AAUP today released an important new report on the violation of faculty rights at two Louisiana public universities, Northwestern State University and Southeastern Louisiana University (pdf of full report).

AAUP Associate General Secretary Jordan Kurland called it, “the worst situation the AAUP has encountered of using cutbacks in funding as an opportunity to select unwanted tenured professors for release.” In some cases, the tenured professors were fired and then offered jobs teaching their old courses at less than half the pay.

Cases like these should reveal what a lie it is to call a tenured professorship a “job for life.” In reality, plenty of tenured professors get fired, some of them for good reasons. No one, especially not the AAUP, has ever said that tenure means a job for life. The purpose of tenure is to prevent the arbitrary firing of long-term faculty, which often happens for political reasons. Tenure is simply a requirement for due process. And cases like what happened in Louisiana in the wake of Katrina show what would happen constantly in an academic world without tenure.

What Tenure Means to Me

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April 11, 2012
tenure, working conditions
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By annetteboardman (annetteboardman is a pseudonym of a college professor who teaches at a university in Missouri). This essay originally appeared on DailyKos.

It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to work anymore, that I have permission to never update a class, or get grading done in a timely manner.  Perhaps you thought it meant that I didn’t need to actually make any challenging assignments, or perhaps do just a bubble-sheet midterm and final, and perhaps a three page paper that I wouldn’t give any feedback on except for a letter grade at the top.

The Missouri state senate this week passed a bill (it still has to go to the House) for school teachers.  They wanted to get rid of tenure altogether.  But they compromised by making it ten years in the same school district (you start over again if you change districts).  You know, if you don’t threaten people with losing their livelihoods, why would they work to do a good job?

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David Levy’s Faulty Attack on Professors

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April 2, 2012
academic freedom, collective bargaining, compensation, faculty, tenure
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The following is a guest post by Michael DeCesare, an associate professor and chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Merrimack College.

Yet again, the professoriate finds itself under attack from a misguided and misinformed administrator.

David Levy, in a March 23 op-ed piece in the Washington Post, asked the very tired question of whether college professors work hard enough. At the heart of Levy’s argument is his complaint about the existence of “outmoded employment policies that overcompensate faculty for inefficient teaching schedules.” His question, really, is: “Do college professors teach enough?” Read More

Accuracy in Academia Responds to My Critique

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October 6, 2011
academic freedom, faculty, tenure
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Malcolm Kline, executive director of Accuracy in Academia, has responded to my critique yesterday of his essay listing the professors who provide “100 arguments against tenure.” Kline argues that abolishing tenure “is not tantamount to firing.” That’s absolutely true. But Kline is not making a broad argument against the existence of tenure (and there are legitimate arguments to make, although I disagree with them). Kline is correct that there are some colleges without tenure that have low dismissal rates.

That, however, has nothing to do with his argument citing specific individuals as “proof” that tenure should be abolished. I could refute Kline’s incorrect claim about tenure that “academics are the only ones who enjoy this perk in this day and age” (somehow ignoring the many other professions, such as teaching, which have far more professionals with tenure than academia). I’m concerned about an argument against tenure which condemns 100 specific individuals who have done nothing to deserve being fired.

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The Thought Police at Accuracy in Academia

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October 5, 2011
academic freedom, faculty, tenure
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Back in the 1980s, Reed Irvine’s right-wing group Accuracy in Academia (AIA) caused controversy by recruiting students to spy on left-wing professors. With the growth of the internet, AIA can do the spying online, but its attacks on academic freedom continue to this day.

One of the most disturbing features on the AIA website is a series by executive director Malcolm Kline titled “100 arguments against tenure” (parts one, two, and three) in which he declares, “we offer the following pedagogues as proof that tenure doesn’t work.” Since tenure provides job security against arbitrary firings, we can conclude that any individual described as “proof” of the evils of tenure must be someone Kline thinks should not have tenure, and should be fired. I contacted Kline to ask if that’s what he wants and how he can justify taking away the jobs of these 100 professors, but he didn’t respond. But why would any professor be an argument against tenure unless they deserved to be fired? If Kline believed these professors should keep their jobs, how would that be “proof” that the system of tenure protects professors who are incompetent? The entire premise of Kline’s article only makes sense if he wants these academics to be fired.

So who are the 100 professors Kline wants to purge from academia? It’s a mixture of some of the most prominent scholars in the world (such as Nobel economist Joseph E. Stiglitz), plus any professor with the misfortune to come across AIA’s radar in the past year. Read More

AAUP News

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October 4, 2011
academic freedom, American Association of University Professors, contingent faculty appointments, tenure
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The AAUP announced Friday that an investigating committee will visit Louisiana November 12-15 to look into discontinuance of academic programs within the University of Louisiana system and resulting potential termination of tenured appointments. See the letter announcing the visit. See an earlier statement on reports that the university system had embarked on what appeared to be an unprecedented and unwarranted assault on its faculty.

AAUP president Cary Nelson discusses tenure, faculty rights, and contingency on C-SPAN. Watch the full interview here. Note: the interview was conducted in August but aired for the first time on October 2. (10/3)

The New York Times reports on a letter the AAUP wrote with the ACLU and the PEN Center, advocating for a US visa for Kerim Yildiz, a human rights activist from London. (10/3)

Florida Governor Rick Scott Takes Aim at Tenure

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September 26, 2011
corporate influence, faculty, tenure
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Guest blog by Lisa Roney

I am a tenured associate professor at one of the largest (though, let me emphasize, not one of the highest ranked) public universities in the U.S. How can I explain why it is that this often makes me want to cry?

Don’t get me wrong. I love my work, and, although I am not an academic superstar, I’ve done reasonably well. In economic times when so many are losing jobs, my job is relatively secure. The work that I do has pleasant and meaningful aspects that I value, in spite of sometimes snake-pit politics and bureaucratic burdens that often make it very difficult to focus on the things that are actually my job.

However, the future of public higher education, and especially in my area of the humanities, is truly in question. Even though more than half of all Americans attend at least some college courses, and 30% over age 25 have a bachelor’s or higher degree, what we do in academia and the value of it is still largely misunderstood by the public. When the governor of the state of Texas can blithely call for higher education reforms that include “treating students as ‘customers,’ judging faculty by how many students they teach and how those students rate them, and de-emphasizing research that doesn’t produce an immediate financial return,” it becomes clear that our future is in the hands of people who either don’t know what they are talking about or harbor a truly vile and anti-intellectual agenda. Or both. Read More

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