Inside American Education (37 page)

The heavy dependence of many colleges and universities on federal research money has yet another major consequence. The need to avoid the political appearance of racial discrimination, in order to retain these grants, makes minority youngsters valuable as bodies and expendable as students. Their large numbers on campus and small numbers on graduation platforms reflect this fact of life. Science professors, with large research grants at stake, have especially strong incentives to vote for the admission of mismatched minority students, knowing that such youngsters are unlikely to become science students. Similar attitudes have been observed among mathematicians at Harvard.
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Tenure

Two concepts dominate discussions of tenure—“academic freedom” and “deadwood.” Often neither term is defined very clearly.

The original impetus toward academic freedom in its current institutional form came from a series of firings of professors for their political or social views in the early twentieth century. The American Association of University Professors was formed in 1915, and from its first meeting came a declaration which called for tenure as a protection of academic freedom. The conception of academic freedom at the time was that of a protection of professors from reprisals for their activities or
beliefs
outside the classroom
. Inside the classroom, the original AAUP report said, the professor must avoid “taking advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions before the student has an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters in question.”
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Over the years, however, the doctrine of academic freedom was turned completely around to protect whatever professors did
inside the classroom
. By 1969, a survey of professors found more than four out of five agreeing that “faculty members should be free to present in class any idea that they consider relevant.”
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Jacques Barzun, drawing upon his experience as dean at Columbia University, said: “I have personally known men who thought it fair to indoctrinate the captive freshman, and yet called it a violation of academic freedom when they were cautioned or restrained.”
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Academic freedom had thus been transformed into
carte blanche
or academic licence, and it has protected not only intellectual independence but also personal failings and misconduct. As a knowledgeable academic has noted, it protects tenured professors “in whom signs of deterioration, incompetence, gross neglect of duty and willful flouting of academic authority are only too evident.”
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Although academic freedom has become, in practice, faculty unaccountability, many fear that the erosion or disappearance of tenure would mean the disappearance of intellectual freedom at colleges and universities. However, institutions with personnel very similar to those in academic institutions have operated very well without tenure. The closest institutions to academic institutions are the various “think tanks” such as the Brookings Institution, the Hoover Institution, the RAND Corporation, and many others scattered around the country. These think tanks typically employ scholars with Ph.D.s who write articles and books very similar to those of their academic counterparts—and in fact, many think tank scholars are former academics, academics on leave, or part-time academics. Though lacking tenure, these think tanks have produced at least their share of controversial individuals and controversial writings.

Tenure is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for intellectual boldness. Other occupations with iron-clad tenure, such as civil servants, have been more notable for people quietly
keeping their noses clean while waiting for retirement on pension. It may even be that tenure attracts into an occupation more than its fair share of people too timid to take their chances in the marketplace. Even a defender of tenure has pointed out that “it is inconceivable to professors how matter-of-factly people outside academia look for new jobs.”
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Tenure and its ramifications make looking for a new job a much more traumatic process for academics. Tenure does not increase over-all job security in colleges and universities. It distributes the insecurity in a peculiar pattern, concentrating it on the younger, less experienced, lower-income, and untenured faculty members—the most vulnerable people. Every guarantee of a job to a tenured professor is an exclusion of an untenured professor who may be equally, or more, qualified. In few other occupations does someone who is doing a good job (or even an outstanding job, as measured by teaching awards) have to fear being thrown out of work at a flourishing institution. Yet leading universities routinely fire the bulk of their untenured faculty members when their contracts run out after a few years. This system of hiring far more junior faculty than are likely to be retained exists because of the impossibility of knowing, in advance, which of the promising new Ph.D.’s emerging from graduate school will prove to be among the top research scholars who will meet the standards for being granted tenure. By hiring a dozen promising assistant professors, a top-level department may be able to find one or two who meet their criteria for promotion and permanence.

This whole Draconian process—the “up-or-out” system—is made necessary by tenure and by the AAUP rule that the tenure decision cannot be postponed indefinitely. Because tenure means a commitment to pay an associate professor’s salary, or more, for decades to come, it is a commitment of more than a million dollars to one individual. To avoid being stuck with “deadwood,” the institution must make a once-and-for-all decision on each individual faculty member within a few years. In turn, this means that the untenured faculty member is under great pressure to “produce”—that is, to produce published research—at the beginning of his career, while putting together courses for the first time, and perhaps while supporting a new family as well. The higher up in the academic institutional pecking order a new faculty member begins, the greater the
likelihood of having to relocate, tearing up the family’s local roots and starting over again hundreds of miles away, or even on the other side of the country, wherever the best new opening appears. Therefore job changes tend to be more disruptive for academics than for secretaries, accountants, or computer programmers. Changing jobs in academia typically involves geographic relocation, because comparable colleges and universities are seldom located in the same community.

Anyone who has been through this experience is likely to find it a horror not to be repeated. Those who must try two or three institutions before finally achieving tenure can spend the better part of a decade in limbo, without as much job security as a factory worker in a viable business. When tenure is finally attained, it is not only likely to be regarded as precious, but also as something whose abolition would mean a return to debilitating insecurity and chaotic disruptions of family life. Yet the gypsy life of an untenured faculty member is itself largely a function of the existence of tenure for others, and the incentives which expensive tenure commitments create for institutions to protect themselves against mistakes—against “deadwood”—at all costs.

The concept of “deadwood” is also worth examining. The classic example is the tenured professor who resolves the conflict between teaching and research by doing very little of either. The costs of “deadwood” are even higher than the salaries of those individuals who are not pulling their own weight. Where the tenured professor ceases to keep up with the ongoing development of his field, someone who is up to date may have to be hired, and parallel courses created, so that the department does not suffer the national (or international) embarrassment of turning out Ph.D.s who are found to be obsolete in some specialties.

Like other concepts, “deadwood” varies with the context. A professor who publishes a good scholarly article once every five or six years may be a very respectable member of a liberal arts college, especially if his teaching is first-rate. Yet he would be considered “deadwood” in a research university where his department is vying to become recognized as one of the top ten in the nation. The existence of tenure, however, inhibits the transfer of individuals from where they are “deadwood” to
where they are not. It also protects those who are “deadwood” everywhere.

Given its high costs, what benefit does tenure confer in return? For the profession as a whole, it does not increase job security but merely concentrates the insecurity on vulnerable new faculty members. This leaves as its principal claim that it protects academic freedom, at least for the tenured faculty. In turn, the image of academic freedom is that it is a protection against ideological conformity, imposed from outside, and stifling the free exercise of the mind which is at the heart of teaching and learning. With the passing years, however, this conception has grown ever more remote from reality.

Since the 1960s, at least, the conformity of the academic world has been an
internally
imposed conformity of the left, culminating in the “political correct” fashions of the 1980s and 1990s. Tenure and academic freedom have not protected individual diversity of thought on campus but instead have protected those who choose to impose the prevailing ideology through classroom brainwashing of students and storm trooper tactics against outside speakers who might challenge this ideology. The related concept and practice of “faculty self-governance” has allowed this ideological intolerance to enter faculty hiring decisions as well, so that conservative “think tanks” like the Hoover Institution have flourished on the services of scholars who are ideologically
persona non grata
in universities to which their published research would otherwise give them ready access.
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As in other cases where results are the opposite of intentions, incentives are the key to understanding what has happened. Tenure not only insulates professors from outside pressures of a political nature, but also from accountability for carrying out their teaching responsibilities in a responsible manner, or for protecting the academic and behavioral standards of the university from internal subversion. Moreover, the tenure and self-governance powers of the faculty likewise restricts the ability of administrators to enforce these standards. When President Nathan Pusey of Harvard was repudiated by his faculty in 1969 for having had students ejected from a building they had forcibly occupied (and from which they were leaking confidential files to the media), this epitomized the
institutional unaccountability of the faculty and the irresponsibility to which it leads.

Less dramatic but more pervasive examples include the structuring of everything from the course curriculum to the scheduling of class hours to suit the convenience of professors—regardless of how this affects students or the mission of the institution. For example, faculty insistence on having classes scheduled at times convenient for themselves means having courses meeting at times clustered together, making it impossible for students to take many courses they would like because so many classes meet at the same time. The ramifications go beyond students’ inconvenience or a missing of particular courses; graduation can be delayed, at great and needless cost.

A recurring complaint in many fields and in many colleges and universities is that the faculty teach courses in esoteric sub-specialties, while foundation courses in the field go untaught. When a college’s philosophy department offers no course in logic but does offer a course on “Philosophical Perspectives on Gender,”
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or when a history department offers no history of Germany or France but has a course on “Images of Minorities in Cinema,”
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then faculty sub-specialties are being indulged at the expense of students’ education in fundamentals. Self-indulgence at the expense of taxpayers, donors, and tuition-paying parents is also common, not only in the numerous individual frills and extravagances in academia but also, and more fundamentally, in the whole approach to academic financing, in which money is spent or committed first and then funding sources are asked to help the institution meet “rising costs.”

There are many kinds of costs besides money costs. Among these have been grade inflation and other deteriorations of academic standards, the mindless proliferation of costly “innovations,” and a growing toleration (and even praise) of mob rule, which has future as well as current implications for academia—and for the country as a whole, as students emerge from college expecting to settle the issues of the day by riots. The fundamental institutional failing of colleges and universities is that many of its decision-makers need not give any serious weight to the many costs they create, because those costs are paid by others.

The institutional incentives created by faculty self-governance
are for mutually indulgent log-rolling, especially when tenure ensures that many professors must regard each other as “facts of life” for years to come. This was understood more than two centuries ago, when Adam Smith wrote: “They are likely to make common cause, to be all very indulgent to one another, and every man to consent that his neighbour may neglect his duty, provided he himself is allowed to neglect his own.”
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Outsiders also pay the non-monetary costs created by academic decision-makers. When rules are bent to pass minority medical students at Harvard, no professor loses anything, even though unsuspecting patients may pay for years, and some may even pay with their lives. Yet there is nothing whatever in the institutional processes to force a re-thinking or to prevent more such “feel good” decisions from being made, with other bad results, in other areas. As the distinguished Columbia University dean Jacques Barzun said, nearly half a century ago: “Most of the heartburnings in the academic world come from somebody’s yielding to the temptation to be nice at the wrong time.”
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