Academic Tenure

  Universities have been a frequent subject of this blog [1,2,3,4].  I therefore wasn't surprised when a reader asked for my thoughts on tenure, the sacred cow of academia.  It's a tough topic—one can't help having mixed feelings, because tenure can be not only the fundament of freedom of inquiry and speech, but also a distasteful source of sinecure.

  I was exposed to the academic-freedom aspect of tenure early in my university career. When I arrived at UC Berkeley in 1960, the infamous Loyalty Oath dispute, although by then resolved, was still an active memory.  A decade earlier, during the initial anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War, new state legislation suddenly required faculty members to sign a codicil to an oath already mandated by the California constitution, which had until then required only an affirmation of support for the state and national constitutions.  The codicil said, "I am not a member of the Communist Party, or under any oath, or a party to any agreement, or under any commitment that is in conflict with my obligations under this oath."  Those who did not sign it would be fired, tenured or not.

  The faculty objected to the new oath on many grounds, among which were: it constituted a political test for employment (the Communist Party was and is a legal party in California); it violated the privilege of tenure, i.e., not to be fired without just cause, as adjudicated by a faculty investigation; it contravened the state constitution, which proscribed requiring any additional oath by the faculty beyond that already included in it; and it violated the constitution's requirement that the University be solely under the governance of the Regents, with faculty advice but without legislative interference.

  During the controversy, dozens of faculty members who refused to sign were indeed fired, although court decisions by mid-decade had reinstated them.  By the time I arrived at the University, the situation had been restored to the status quo ante, but wounds still festered.  I believe the open sore was one of the sources of the Free Speech Movement [3] of the early 1960s, when the University's administration, succumbing again to outside political pressure, denied students their long-recognized right to organize on campus for political causes—the immediate target this time being freedom marches to the South.  It was another assault on free speech at the University by the same actors who launched the Oath, and the faculty overwhelmingly supported the students' cause.

  The Loyalty Oath dispute limned the upside of tenure for me: freedoms of speech, association and inquiry are intimately part of it, and any trimming of its prerogatives attacks the core of academic freedom.  That freedom had been hard-gained as tenure grew in the 19^th century from an ill-defined de facto principle in a select group of universities to the virtually universally accepted practice it is today, with more or less uniform standards throughout the country.  Weakening tenure's shield could be disastrous, as the Loyalty Oath conflict showed.

  As my career at UC unfolded, however, I also saw the downside of tenure: the accumulation of deadwood within the faculty—people who no longer seemed to be sharing the full load of research and teaching.  As a chairman of a department and later the dean of a school, I was appalled by the few who I felt were taking advantage of tenure to slide into academic lethargy.  They were a source of faculty and student discontent—even ridicule—and a waste of precious resources.

  At first thought, one might imagine that "just cause" for dismissal could be enlarged from travesties such as academic dishonesty—e.g., falsifying research—to a requirement that those with tenure live up to the same standards of teaching and research that gained them tenure in the first place.  But this could be a slippery slope with a quagmire at its bottom.  It is one thing to require young faculty members to demonstrate during their initial 6-8 years that they deserve tenure—that itself creates undesirable pressure on them in formative years to adhere to the safe and acceptable, to eschew the risky.  It is a huge step to require senior faculty continually to pass judgment on their peers, risking imposition of a lifelong conformity on academic inquiry and teaching that could stultify the entire academic venture.  The Einsteins among us, whose ideas are far out of the mainstream, probably could not maintain tenure under such a regime nor would they want to make the sacrifice of creativity needed to do so. 

  The trick, I think, is to make as sure as humanly possible that new hires have the character and intellect that will assure their attaining tenure and thereafter remaining fully contributing members of the faculty.  I believe that can be done by meticulous, multilevel screening of candidates before their initial appointment as well as at the tenure decision.

  In my ruminations about the differences between UCLA and UC Berkeley [2], I opined that UCLA's initial-appointment system was too lax, depending on only a dean's approval.  That depends too much on the dean's judgment, leaving the brunt of evaluating qualification for tenure to later events; but it is much harder to discharge a colleague after 6-8 years than not to have appointed him or her at all.  Some universities avoid this dilemma by setting up "horse races," appointing several assistant professors for each tenured position that will be available, with the understanding by all that at most one will win.  I think such an approach is cruel, for it can tarnish many excellent academics early in their careers. 

  I believe that the system at UC Berkeley strikes a happy medium.  The initial appointment is first very thoroughly scrutinized at three or four levels before being sent to a disinterested and demanding campus-wide committee of faculty.  That committee has standards constraining it to approve only candidates who will almost certainly achieve tenure and not thereafter become deadwood.  Knowing these standards, lower-level evaluators daren't forward a case that doesn't meet them.  The same campus committee constantly monitors a newbie's progress and has the final word on the tenure decision.  Under this regime, it is the rare assistant professor who doesn't clear the tenure hurdle by some margin, and even rarer that, once awarded tenure, doesn't remain a fully productive member of the faculty.

  My answer to my reader, then, is that I am four-square in favor of academic tenure in universities as it generally exists today, not only as a safeguard of academic freedom, but also as a nurturer of the unorthodox among us.  If the system of appointment to the faculty is sufficiently finely tuned, then the overhead of the few who later become deadwood is not too much a price to pay.

A Half-Century Time Loop

   Last fall I was jarred into what I would call a time loop by the onset of the Occupy movement.  A strong sense of dèjá vu propelled me back almost fifty years to relive the days of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, when I was beginning my professorial career.

  The tenor of American society as it entered the Sixties needs some portrayal for those much younger than I.  If I had to pick a word that best captures it, I'd choose "conformity."  In the previous two decades the nation had emerged from the Great Depression and gone through the traumas of World War II and the Korean War.  Veterans of those wars wanted nothing more than to get on with their careers and their families.  The Eisenhower years (1952-60) had brought an era of "normalcy."

  Conformity was reinforced by an anti-Communist hysteria and the blacklisting it entailed. Many around the country, including UC faculty in the early Fifties, had been required to sign loyalty oaths or be dismissed.  Although Senator McCarthy's crusade had ended in 1955 when his attack on the Army was derailed, the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was still a force.  Fear was palpable; I remember my mother in the Fifties hiding away books by Bolsheviks that she had bought in 1920 as a college student.

  The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a 1950s book and movie, depicted conformity in business.  (The title was more than figurative; when I was interviewed in 1956 for a job at IBM I discovered that my friends there wore only solid blue or gray suits, white shirts and "discreet" ties.)  According to a 1950s sociological study by David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, the American middle class had become "other directed," being guided more by outside influences than from within themselves.

  I arrived at Cal in 1960 after a stint in industry.  The university I entered was shortly to be styled in UC President Clark Kerr's The Uses of the University as a "multiversity."  (Ironic that, having recently blogged about the universe and multiverse, I should now be writing about the university and multiversity!)  Kerr wrote that the university had become like a huge corporation: so departmentalized, so composed of and beholden to a bevy of competing interests, as to be governable only through a corporate model.  The book is a bit rueful, sensing a loss of something valuable: the university's center had shifted from its faculty to its administration.  "Faculty members," Kerr wrote, "are increasingly figures in a 'lonely crowd.' "  Kerr was of course referring to Riesman's book.

  The milieu I have outlined was the background of most students in 1960.  Yet a rebellion was in the offing, partially informed by the rising, nonconformist "beat" ethic that had strong roots in San Francisco.   Months before my arrival at Cal, some students had been participants in a riot in San Francisco when HUAC had held anti-communist hearings.  Sproul Plaza, the main venue on campus for student activity, was a bazaar of tables where causes ranging from left to right were advocated and organized, among them anti-segregation Freedom Marches to the South.

  In September 1964, the "bazaar" was suddenly shut down because of complaints by conservatives outside the University. The result was the birth of the Free Speech Movement, an explosion of rallies and sit-ins by thousands of students. Hundreds were jailed.  It was a unique occasion in which Maoists and Young Republicans joined forces.

  The FSM quickly morphed into a thoroughgoing indictment of the university itself.  In December, Mario Savio gave a speech that encapsulated the students' alienation.  If the university is a firm, he said, and its president a manager reporting to a board of directors (the Regents), then the faculty are simply "a bunch of employees" and students just raw material to be formed into product and sold to the university's clients.  This was intolerable.  "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part.  You can't even passively take part.  And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.  And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."  (A video of the speech is really worth watching.)

  The FSM's message ignited protests among similarly disaffected students around the world.  It defined the rest of the Sixties as it spilled over from universities to society at large.  These youngsters were saying that everything they saw in the conformist society around them was broken, unresponsive to "working within the system," because it was the system itself that had to change.  And change it they did.  The subsequent years of turmoil produced a new ethos for their and later generations that would have been quite unrecognizable a decade earlier.

  On awakening from this time-loop reverie, I was convinced that Occupy is a grandchild of the FSM.  Two generations later, Occupiers are as alienated from a broken, unresponsive system as were students in the FSM.  In the Sixties the FSM had sprung up in a system characterized not only by the multiversity, but also by a conformist culture,  stifling social mores, and racial segregation.  In the Tens, Occupy's frame of reference is a rapacious Wall Street culture, dysfunctional government, and a greatly inequitable distribution of wealth and income. Despite these differences, Savio's diatribe against "the operation of the machine," if spoken today, would no doubt strongly resonate with Occupiers.  Major changes in the system were then and are now called for.

  The Occupy movement is now restarting after a winter lull.  Last year it greatly increased public awareness of the appalling and growing wealth/income gap in the country (see the chart below).  As it reawakens, I hope Occupy will further focus the public on that gap and other inequities. 

  Some complain that Occupy has no agenda, that it is but an inchoate protest against the status quo.  I would remind them that the FSM had no agenda either, only an irrepressible and well-founded urge for change.  As in the Sixties, we might be in for some years of tumult.  If so, as in the Sixties, our now very unbalanced and unresponsive society will be the better for it.

      Source: New York Times, April 17, 2012

  Late Flash:  As I post this blog entry, I find that The Occupy Handbook, a 560-page compendium of articles about Occupy by noted economists, columnists and others, has been published today.  I have downloaded it onto my iPad  and am looking forward to reading it.