December 18, 2013--Professing

Having been one at a number of institutions, from up-close observation, professors are not among my favorite professionals. For the most part, I prefer dentists.

Professors--tenured professors--have about the best job in the history of the world.

With what other kind of work can one make a very comfortable living with generous benefits, work two to three days a week, eight or at most nine months a year, and have frequent vacations? Almost as many as members of Congress. And then every few years have sabbaticals, which for a half to a full year offer full or half salary with no classroom or other university responsibilities. And, perhaps best of all, with tenure a professor can work until he or she drops and in no way be let go. Even for demonstrable incompetence or lack of research and publications.

And with all of this, professors are often among the world's most prolific whiners. About their university responsibilities (many would like to be paid, and paid more, for doing even less); about university politics (usually much to do about nothing or at most very little); about their colleagues and administrators; and about much that goes on in the world.

Criticizing and complaining they are very good at, but doing something about it is another matter.

So I was not surprised when a day or two ago, the American Studies Association, with about 5,000 professors as members, voted by a two-to-one margin to boycott Israeli academic institutions to protest Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

This means they will oppose academic exchange programs and Israeli professors will no longer be welcome as ASA members; invited to ASA-sponsored events; or, if the ASA has anything to do about it, be allowed to have sabbaticals in the U.S.

Next month, the much larger and more influential Modern Language Association will vote to ask the State Department to criticize Israel for allegedly barring American professors from going to Gaza or the West Bank when invited by Palestinian institutions.

The boycott is the first the ASA has ever instituted and what the MLA is calling for is equally unprecedented. They have not seen fit to take similar action in regard to Russian or Chinese academic institutions even though those governments curtail basic freedoms for almost all of their citizens. They did not call for the boycott of South African institutions during the Apartheid years. They are apparently OK with Iranian, Egyptian, Cuban, Venezuelan, Saudi Arabian, and Pakistani academic institutions though basic freedoms are severely restricted in these and, sadly, many other countries.

The fundamental case in favor of lifetime employment--tenure--is to protect academic freedom. To make professors impervious to arbitrary or ideological retribution when they express their contrarian views. So it is more than a little ironic that the ASA, for which one of its principals is the protection of freedom of thought and scholarly activity, would so blatantly, for ideological reasons, take such a censorious position.

The good news is that the major higher education organization in the United States, the American Association of University Professors opposes the boycott, saying that it makes little sense to focus on Israeli universities where criticism of government policy often originates.

Even Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas opposes the boycott. He said that it is inappropriate, as the ASA did, to compare Israel to Apartheid in South Africa. Further--

We are neighbors of Israel, we have agreements with israel, we are not asking anyone to boycott products of Israel.

But members of the ASA do not perceive any contradictions in their position. One member said that--

People who truly believe in academic freedom would realize protesting the blatant and systemic denial of academic freedom to Palestinians, which coupled with material deprivation of a staggering scale, far out ways concerns we in the West might have about our own rather privileged academic freedoms.

I am having trouble figuring out why we in the West who have the privilege of academic freedom should be immunized from the consequences of denying it to others.

I may have once been a professor, but I need help from other professors to help me understand and parse this tortured tangle of rationalization.

September 17, 2013--The Walmartization of Higher Education

Tenure as we know it is a relatively new thing.

In the 19th century, professors served at the pleasure of trustees and university presidents. And they could be terminated with little cause. Major donors could and at times did pressure university administrators to fire certain individuals or prohibit the hiring of others, mainly those they felt would interfere with the religious principles of the institution.

Courts rarely intervened in dismissals; but, nonetheless, a de facto tenure system existed and professors, if they did not get far out of doctrinal line, could expect to have their jobs for life.

During the early years of the 20th century, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a quasi faculty union, began to pressure colleges and universities to adopt practices that provided lifetime employment protection for senior professors.

The AAUP contended that this was necessary to shield faculty from being dismissed for their views--political as well as religious. Though there were relatively few cases of these kinds of firings, it proved to be a potent argument; and so by the 1950s virtually all institutions of higher learning implemented a tenure system that assured continuous employment after, typically, a seven-year probationary period.

During the McCarthy era, when there were indeed witch hunts to root out alleged Marxists and communists, many, under the protection of tenure, were able to claim that their private views--and even those they articulated in class--were an expression of "academic freedom." Though there were situations where colleges caved into pressure, for the most part few tenured professors, even during that dark period, were dismissed. Many felt intimidated, but very few were purged.

In more recent years, in some quarters, tenure has come under attack. For a number of reasons--

First, it can be used to protect incompetents. After receiving tenure, professors are for all intents and purposes free not to keep up with their disciplines, teach from yellowing notes, and spend little time outside the classroom with students. At even prestigious institutions many tenured faculty are rarely on campus--teaching two to three days a week--do little meaningful research, and shun committee assignments and other collegial and campus citizenship responsibilities. Tenure makes them effectively untouchable, even unsupervisable.

Tenure also makes it difficult for institutions to flexibly deploy resources into new fields and disciplines and makes it almost impossible to phase out departments where enrollments, because of market forces, have shrunk dramatically.

To invest in more programs in computer science, it may be necessary to phase out courses in classical languages; to build capacity in molecular biology, it may be necessary to scale back offerings in biochemistry. With tenured classicists and traditionally-trained biologists, institutions are locked into rigid academic structures which, if they cannot be reformed, place severe limits on an institution's ability to keep up with the times or break new intellectual ground.

And the AAUP and faculty unions claim that without tenure colleges would dangerously reduce the number of expensive full-timers and replace them with much-lower-cost part-time adjuncts. As a result, it is asserted, teaching quality will decline.

This is half true--

Many places in fact have dramatically shifted teaching responsibilities to adjuncts. It is not unusual for at least half of all freshman and sophomore courses to be taught by graduate assistants and part-timers. Cost savings are indeed considerable. But, and this is significant, there is growing evidence that adjunct faculty are more effective in the classroom than tenured faculty.

For example, the New York Times recently cited a study which showed that part-time faculty are more effective in the classroom than full-timers.

The study was based on data from more than 15,000 students at Northwestern University. The results revealed that there was "strong and consistent evidence that Northwestern faculty outside the tenure system outperform tenure track/tenured professors in introductory undergraduate classrooms."

This appeared to be true in almost all subject areas and was especially evident for "average and less-qualified students." These conclusion were based primarily on how likely students were to take additional courses in the discipline and comparisons about the grades students received in subsequent courses. Again, in most instances, students taught by adjuncts reported that they had richer experiences and performed better than those taught by tenured faculty.

Rather than face the challenges this and similar studies have exposed, the AAUP attempted to change the subject. Anita Levy, a senior program officer at the association, said:

My worry is that a study like this can be used to justify hiring more contingent faculty who won't have due-process protection or job security and might not even have offices. It's part of the just-in-time, Walmartization of higher education.

A few points--

Adjunct faculty do have due-process. If they feel they have been dealt with illegally they in fact have recourse to legal remedies. In addition, why should they or any ineffective faculty member have "job security"? And just having private offices does not guarantee that faculty members will set aside more than two hours a week for office hours or use them appropriately.