In one of his essays on the behavior of the British underclass
(“Do Sties Make Pigs?”), psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple describes
a bizarre policy of public housing landlords in England. The
practice is to distribute limited housing units according to need,
with bad behavior taken to be a sign of need. The applicant with
the viler rap sheet has the greater chance to secure housing at
public expense; the decent, hardworking indigent goes to the bottom
of the waiting list.
“Thus,” writes Dalrymple, “a public housing tenancy is to
psychopaths what tenure is to academics: no better invitation to
irresponsibility could possibly be imagined.”
Thus too does Dalrymple display in a passing analogy the public
attitude about tenure in academia. Where else is one guaranteed
employment for life? And where else, given such a guarantee, are
the consequences of shabby behavior so muted? Whenever my work as a
college teacher pops idly into polite conversation with a stranger,
I am always asked, in wistful tones, “Do you have tenure?”
As I’ve got older, I seem to have acquired enough sense to be
embarrassed by the question. The system of tenure, evolving over
the past 80 years into its present calcified state, grew out of two
perceived vulnerabilities in the academic life.
The first had to do with academic freedom. Three generations
ago, when there were far fewer college professors (about 49,000 in
1920; more than 800,000 today), issues of academic freedom were
tied much less to eccentric ideas than to personal animosities. In
other words, an honest philosophy professor could be at risk of
losing his job if he ran afoul of a slack student whose father
happened to be one of the college trustees.
The second vulnerability was economic. In 1920, college
professors tended to be sure-enough intellectuals of broadly humane
learning and somewhat abstracted disposition. They became college
teachers because they were drawn to the life of the mind — but
also because, in a narrow field of career opportunities, they
weren’t much good for anything else. If a college professor lost
his job in those days, he was at plausible risk of going
hungry.
So the tenure system came into being originally to give special
security against peculiar risks. Today, however, the tenure system
is entirely severed from its original rationale. Tort reform, for
better or worse (mostly worse, but that’s another topic), has made
lawsuits much easier to file and more likely to succeed, so that
protection is readily pursuable in the court system when a college
is perceived to be violating academic freedom.
This point was brought home to me some years ago when the story
was floating around campus that a candidate for tenure had included
her lawyer’s name and phone number with her application package; in
case of a negative decision, she averred, the tenure committee
should inform her lawyer first. As it happened, there developed no
need to call the lawyer, leaving some of us to wonder what need she
had for the tenure she was granted.
And for those denied tenure, the economic vulnerability of
yesteryear is no longer an issue. An assistant professor of
philosophy in 1920 would have been hard up for gainful employment
if he had found himself out on the street. But in today’s hugely
diversified economy, any number of jobs unheard of 80 years ago can
be filled by an erstwhile college teacher. An acquaintance of mine
in the English department, fed up with academia before his tenure
became an issue, went off to the “real world” and, last I heard
from him, is now supporting a family of eight with a six-figure
income as a technical writer for an electronics firm.
SO WHY IS THERE STILL a tenure system? Although “academic freedom”
continues to be a stated rationale, the real reasons are less
elevated and more convoluted.
Far from protecting eccentricity and dissent, tenure has
devolved over the past generation into a spoils system indifferent
or hostile to ideals of free inquiry and free speech. The main
requirement has come to be something called “collegiality,” a kind
of loyalty — not to truth or to a particular discipline or even to
the institution, but to an ethos which the late University of
Chicago sociologist James Coleman dubbed “conspicuous
benevolence.”
Conspicuous benevolence identifies (at a comfortable distance)
with the oppressed; forces hiring practices that stress gender and
ethnicity over talent; touts diversity (excluding the intellectual
kind); demands vocal support or quiet acquiescence.
Tenure is the plum one receives for one’s conspicuous
benevolence, whether of the vocal or muted variety. Among outsiders
like Dalrymple, the common-sense brief against academic tenure is
that it renders a teacher safe from accountability. The reality is
more sinister.
“It’s an ingenious way to preserve a herd mentality,” a friend
once remarked to me over beer suds. “By the time you’ve done all
you have to do to get tenure — after five or six years in graduate
school and six or seven years on probation doing what you must,
saying what you should, not saying what you shouldn’t — by the
time you finally get through all that and get tenure, you’re
gelded.”
Yet my friend — a tenured academician rather conservative by
contemporary academic standards — supports the system. “We need
more protection now against our colleagues than we ever needed
against trustees or administrators.”
For another analogy — perhaps better suited to the political
junkies who visit this website — imagine Ted Kennedy waddling from
stage-left to a raised lectern at a news conference and denouncing
the Bush administration for their amicus brief against racial
preferences at the University of Michigan.
Ted Kennedy behind a lectern at age 70 — that’s the tenure
system: a bloated, debauched, tired bundle of superannuated ideas
slurred in a peculiar accent.
No analogy is perfect, though. The tenure system is quite a bit
older than 70 and not about to fade away anytime soon.
