BY AARON BARLOW
The 1940 AAUP Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure argues that:
Tenure is a means to certain ends; specifically: (1) freedom of teaching and research and of extramural activities, and (2) a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability. Freedom and economic security, hence, tenure, are indispensable to the success of an institution in fulfilling its obligations to its students and to society.
In no way is this a claim of permanent employment for tenured professors in all situations. Nor is it something that should be bragged about having attained in discussions within the public sphere. It is not, after all, dispensation to say anything one pleases in any context (freedom of speech concerns that) and it does not make its bearer special or better than anyone else.
In a time when too many professors lack tenure or its possibility, it is also not something that should be seen as a right or a privilege for a few but as a support allowing those of us lucky enough to be tenured in what should be all of our fight for this important status to be expanded to a much greater percentage of the faculty. Tenure becomes more and more meaningless when fewer and fewer people have it. It cannot be “indispensable to the success of an institution” when it is granted to few in the institution. It helps almost nothing when tenure is seen as a privilege and not a responsibility. Quite the opposite.
I want to separate tenure and even academic freedom out from free speech today because of a recent incident where Randa Jarrar, a tenured professor at Fresno State in California has conflated the two—or, at least, has implied her speech is a little more free than that of most because she has tenure. In response to those outraged by a tweet of hers:
The professor taunted those attacking her, sharing a contact number that was that of Arizona State University’s suicide hotline, and said she was a tenured professor who makes $100,000 a year.
“I will never be fired,” she tweeted.
She shouldn’t be fired, but not because of tenure. She should not be fired because the continued existence of our system of governance requires that almost all speech be tolerated by our governments and their entities (including public colleges and universities). But that has nothing to do with tenure.
Jarrar’s right to speak should not be abridged, and her job should not be threatened, no matter how ridiculous her comments may be (as long as they are not an equivalent to that old ‘shouting fire in a crowded theater’). As Michelle Goldberg writes:
There is… no “grotesque” exception to the First Amendment. “Randa Jarrar’s speech is constitutionally protected, and Fresno State cannot, consistent with the First Amendment, discipline her for it,” Ari Cohn of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education told me. “On top of that, the public announcement of an investigation, with clear statements from the university president indicating that he would like to take some kind of serious action against Jarrar, itself can violate the First Amendment.”
Again, though, that has nothing to do with tenure. At a public institution, a newly hired assistant professor and a part-time instructor rate just as much protection as Jarrar. As Seth Kahn, a professor in Pennsylvania wrote on Facebook in response to a news story on Jarrar’s comment:
If you needed more evidence that tenure doesn’t indicate better faculty, here ya go. I doubt she’s actually an idiot, but flaunting tenure as her protection for being a provocateur is wrong. And it feeds the millions of trolls out there who already think we’re all like this.
If she wants to wave the First Amendment around as protection, good on her. But to hide behind her job as if that protects her from the consequences of saying things publicly? F[***] that.
We, faculty and everyone else, need to loudly protect the First Amendment rights of everyone. Why? Writing for Vox, Anna North notes that:
The controversy over Jarrar’s tweets comes at a time of larger debates around speech on college campuses, though these have typically taken a different form. Conservative New York Times columnists Bret Stephens and David Brooks, among others, have written with disapproval when college students protest comments by professors or appearances by conservative speakers.
In October, Stephens wrote that today, “professors live in fear of accidentally offending their own students and a governor needs to declare a countywide state of emergency so that white supremacist Richard Spencer can speak at the University of Florida.” But, he wrote, “free speech is what makes educational excellence possible.”…
Brooks, meanwhile, wrote in March that “students across the country continue to attack and shut down speakers at a steady pace, from Christina Hoff Sommers to Jordan Peterson.”
No one should be shut down, on public university campuses or elsewhere. And you can’t make distinctions, be they political leanings or tenure status.
What angers Professor Kahn is that what Professor Jarrar has done is add an unwarranted and unneeded element into a debate over Freedom of Speech. And he is right to be concerned. The image of tenure has become one of elite faculty able to do whatever they please without consequence, an image frequently used in attacks on American higher education. To insert tenure as a defense in places where it does not belong is not only irresponsible but actually damaging to the institution of tenure itself and, as a result, to the status and effectiveness of our American colleges and universities.
Although nothing Randa Jarrer tweeted was particularly wise, I don’t think she’s inaccurate in her analysis of tenure. In an ideal world, the free speech of assistant professors and instructors would match that of tenured professors. But the real world is different. Both assistant professors and contingent faculty face serious evaluations to continue in their jobs, and those evaluations can be distorted to punish them for their political speech. Tenured professors are not immune from punishment for their speech, but for dismissal it must meet the high standards of punishment, not the normal evaluations of academic merit. We need tenure as a firewall against distorted evaluations that punish political speech. We also need to work to prevent those distorted evaluations. But tenure does, indeed, mean something.
Aaron, for what it’s worth, I feel like it’s important to say something about what happens in the rest of the thread you cite here. While I’m not on board with everything everyone says, there are three really key points people made in response to me that I hear loud and clear.
1. Randa Jarrar isn’t responsible for the disparity between tenured and non-tenure-eligible faculty (and neither is she the only person who thinks what she thinks about tenure, even among people who support and are committed to protecting it); and
2. Given what’s happening to her right now, especially as a woman of color, piling on to her is about the least supportive thing to do among people who identify as colleagues.
3. As a woman of color, she needs support for saying some things that we happy, safe white guys wouldn’t get.
I don’t want to pretend like I didn’t make the initial post–I need to be on the hook for having said something I now think was out of line, but I do think I wasn’t right the first time.
Seth, I understand what you are saying. But Professor Jarrar needn’t have brought tenure into a free-speech discussion. Doing so clouds the issue and makes it more difficult to defend tenure and expand it–or even argue for the free speech rights of non-tenured faculty. In addition, I refrain from criticizing her for the tweet that raised such a ruckus. That’s irrelevant to the point I am trying to make. I still don’t think you were out of line, though I do find your further comments, here and elsewhere, sensible.
Aaron: This strikes me as a free speech issue rather than an academic freedom issue, but the complication I have wondered about is this. So long as Jarrar kept her Twitter post as a personal opinion, she not only has a right to express her views, she joins millions of others who expressed their views of Barbara Bush, some good, other not so much. But when Jarrar brought in her faculty identity, did she imply that her opinion was somehow connected to her faculty position? We are regularly reminded that we should avoid any slippage between personal opinions and professional, university-sanctioned statements, and my first reaction was that she had crossed that line. She would have crossed it even she had commented that Barbara Bush was a wonderful person, and she could write that with authority because she’s a tenured faculty member, etc… But even in such a case, the worst I’ve heard of is a mild reprimand from some VP for Faculty Affairs, and everyone forgets about it a week later!
I agree, David, which is why I made no mention of the content of her comment.
There is no such thing as a “professional university-sanctioned statement”: professors speak for themselves, and universities sometimes make institutional statements. But revealing one’s job title is a simple statement of fact, and can never be a punishable offense. The AAUP long ago endorsed the idea that professors should not falsely claim to be speaking on behalf of the institution, but I’m not aware of any professor who has ever done that, although faculty are still falsely charged with it (as at Dixie State).
John Wilson: I’ll defer to your more extensive knowledge here. I have taught at several universities, at each of which we have been warned not to use any mention of our university affiliation/position in personal communications which could be interpreted as somehow implying university endorsement. Obviously, as you write, simple statements of fact — revealing one’s job title, for example — are innocuous, but when someone writes on Twitter: ‘attack me all you want: I’m protected because I teach at West Coast University and I have tenure,’ I wonder why they didn’t write “attack me all you want: I am the treasurer of my bowling league and they would never fire me because I’m the only one who knows how to access our bank account.”
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