tenure

decided to not use the "defend the indefensible" formula here because I suppose it's defensible b/c yeah yeah academic freedom or w/e but there's no way that the tenure system itself isn't a major factor in the adjunctification of undergraduate teaching and the well-documented up-fuckedness of the job market for PhDs. seems like just a way for a bunch of increasingly-ineffectual white dudes to remain in their sinecures while complaining about administrations and telling people not to get PhDs.

dud

first he went for the people who overidentified with fight club, then the english empire, now baby boomer academics on interminable contracts, silby keeps shining the light of ideological truth on these otherwise beloved institutions

there's no reason this couldn't go any of the ivory tower or tenure threads already existing

what is ilx's tenure policy?

treesh you are tenure track

phew

i think, in some ways, the justification of tenure lies in the work that can be done by scholars 20-40 years after they get the tenure. the initial work, meh. the protection from reprisal, good, but all academics should enjoy it. the real virtue is the way it makes possible work done for itself, or at least more so than any other work is, beyond all scheduled career milestones and merit pay checkpoints and rising-talent/mentor-vindicator/profile-raising/student-attracting excitement on which vain orientations toward the academy thrive.

this work is rare, and most of it that even gets done is not of lasting value or general significance, but it's hard to see how it could get done any other way.

The biggest change in the 20th century bearing on the question of tenure is the rapid shift toward making college degrees and graduate degrees a mass phenomenon. I come from a family crammed with both school teachers and college professors and was raised to accept the idea that tenure was a foundation stone of academic freedom, but with millions of PhDs milling around out there, and colleges/universities almost as common as grocery stores, it seems to me that tenure has become a shibboleth.

otoh, given how venal college and university administrators are, I don't see that eliminating tenure would improve matters in any large way. The numbers of positions thrown open would still be dwarfed by the number of applicants, and it would still be ridiculously easy to keep the worst aspects of the current system in place. All that would happen in my view is that salaries for every position would be brought down to a level resembling the current salaries for untenured positions. Progress?

first he went for the people who overidentified with fight club, then the english empire, now baby boomer academics on interminable contracts, silby keeps shining the light of ideological truth on these otherwise beloved institutions

― Nothing less than the Spirit of the Age (nakhchivan), Tuesday, August 26, 2014 9:47 AM (56 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there's no reason this couldn't go any of the ivory tower or tenure threads already existing

― marcos, Tuesday, August 26, 2014 9:52 AM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbh I posted this while exhausted and angry for unrelated reasons and I wouldn't really call this thread a good idea in the harsh light of morning

nah its cool

this is a case though where its worth considering what is valuable about the institution though, in order to recuperate it or in order to show that it is bankrupted beyond all recognition and needs to be discarded whole

there should be a sort of truth and reconcilliation committee between mediocre 60 yr old tenured professors and unemployable recent phds where the former admit to the latter that they only have their security by virtue of birth year and if they were around today they would be unemployed too

to be fair, a lot of phds do say that. i made a brief venture into the world of a literature phd via taking a course as a non-matriculated student and when i talked to the professor one on one he was pretty candid about the shitty job prospects. this was pretty different from my college advisor, who still sometimes will encourage me to apply to phd programs and says that things work themselves out.

the admission of their own fortune is the key more than the caution which is the barest due diligence

do you still have any dreams of academia treesh?

yeah. my plan is to teach high school for a while and then see what i want the next step to be. i'm excited to do this, and think it will be a good experience, but i don't see myself being a high school teacher for my entire career.

i think i've discussed this before on here. i wonder, are there less people applying to phd programs today than there were several years ago? i think there are probably many people who, like me, were spooked by the job market.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/09/12/humanities-doctoral-programs-show-unexpected-boost-new-students

New doctoral enrollments in the arts and humanities have been been going up very modestly -- an average of 1 percent annually -- for a decade. But data being released today by the Council of Graduate Schools show that in the fall of 2012, arts and humanities doctoral programs saw a 7.7 percent increase -- a surprising jump given the difficulty many new Ph.D.s in those fields have in finding jobs.

let me google that for you

Many months ago (before I got tenure) I wrote something about this process, kind of just a note to myself really, so that I could hold onto the indeterminacy of how it felt to be inside the pipeline, and ignorant of one's fate. It's very much a view from the inside and therefore will probably come off as egregiously narcissistic navel-gazing, but I think it might also be germane if we're going to have a tenure thread. I post it only in the hopes of de-dramatizing something that gets mythologized a lot (mostly by academics themselves). It's long, so feel free to "tl, dr" it. Okay, here goes:

I’ve spent my life in school. Pre-school, kindergarten, elementary school, high school, first undergraduate degree, second undergraduate degree, graduate school, academic employment. I’ve been inside academic institutions and thought about them in myriad different ways at different times. (The story of my life is the story of being in schools). But there are things that you only learn when you are on the borders of things. When you are inside a system you’re in a great position to see certain aspects of it, and you’re in a lousy position to notice other things. You have no independent standpoint of comparison. The basic question is one I have never asked myself: what is a school? A workplace that is subject to procedures and legal codes that is essentially economic in nature? A scholarly community in which ideas, methods, and values are protected and preserved, subject to debate, open to change? A family with a kinship structure and attendant obligations and hierarchies based upon status?

I’m thinking about this in a new way because I’m at a point upon the edges of the institution right now: the final stages of a tenure decision. It’s Sunday today. The sun is shining and it’s a lovely late spring day, but I am indoors, printing out the revised papers of my undergraduates and a chapter by a graduate student that needs looking over. I see the stacks of books, slowly creeping and gaining territory in the office of the English Department where I have worked for the past seven years, just as I have been edging my way slowly towards this point in time. It’s Sunday and on Wednesday the Academic Council of my university will vote on whether I get tenure or not. That vote is and is not decisive. They can vote to approve or they can vote to reject, but even their vote is not final, for their decision is subject to the ratification or rejection by higher up levels of the University- the Provost and the President. There are wheels within wheels within wheels, and it’s a process that I am only informed about it in a piecemeal fashion, leaving ample room for paranoid speculation and anxiety. The basic opposition at the core of this decision is stark: up or out. If I receive tenure, I have job security for life (bracketing egregious forms of misbehavior) and can look forward to the option of enjoying decades of a scholarly life with a salary and full healthcare benefits for myself and for Martin, and with a modest pay raise and a sweet sense of accomplishment at having finally achieved something that I have worked towards for over a decade. If I am rejected, I am granted a final year of employment at my university (a period with the chilling designation “terminal year”) after which point I lose my job, lose my salary, my office, and Martin and I lose our healthcare benefits and enter . . . what? The world outside the safe harbor of this institution.

On Wednesday a room full of my senior colleagues will meet in a room and vote on my future. They will decide whether I move up or move out. They will either seal me with the authenticity, status and privilege of academic success, or will cast me out of my community into a ferociously uncertain and competitive academic job market in which my chances of finding new employment will be forever complicated (not necessarily compromised, but certainly changed) by the dark mark of this rejection. The stakes for the University are, of course, high; though the length of time a tenured professor stays at their institution varies widely, a tenured professor who stays for several decades is likely to amount to the equivalent of a million dollar investment in that person’s scholarship. This is why their research needs to be demonstrably valuable, likely to survive and impact the profession as a whole, and contribute to the cultural standing of the university beyond the physical borders of its campus. Or so the rhetoric tends to go surrounding the standards in place. The stakes for me are just as high; over the years I have emotionally internalized the values of this institutional process, longing for tenure, working towards tenure with a relentless drive to publish articles, publish books (I have written two), present at conferences, plan conferences, schmooze with publishers and senior scholars and up and coming new scholars, have quips at the ready, stay fun at the dinner, go out of my way to network, Tweet, befriend, advise, and, through it all, conceal the mounting terror as this day of judgment approaches as best I can.

On Wednesday, I will know something: either the Council will vote for me or against me- in either case, then the onus will be on the President to either uphold that decision or reverse it. But at some point in the future, perhaps Wednesday, perhaps a few weeks later, I will know. Now, as I look outside at the trees swaying in the wind and casting fugitive shadows across the eerily perfect green lawn as undergraduates briskly march to the gym, I don’t know. I am writing this today, on this Sunday in which I need to look over those revised essays and that new chapter, because I want to hold onto how this uncertainty feels. This feeling has a limited lifespan. I am attached to this uncertainty because I feel, already, skeptical about both of the imminent emotional outcomes that are headed my way: relief and joy on the one hand, despair and remorse on the other. I am suspicious of both of these scenarios, equally suspicious of the narratives of inevitability they will surely induce.

If I get tenure, I worry that I might start telling myself that this only makes sense and that it is somehow justified, that it is because I worked so hard, for so many years, and because I made the right decisions at key points in my career about where to go, whom to respond to, which methodological and scholarly habits and attachments to cultivate and which to let go, which relationships to reinforce and which to abandon, where to put my focus and attention. It will make all the sacrifices, the letters not written to friends, the visits to parents not taken, the time with Martin not spent, the songs that were never written and the performances that never happened, somehow look like “the right thing”, the expedient, necessary thing, if one wants to assure one’s self of success. It will reify and harden into a toxic smugness a kind of image of myself as a success, as a winner, as someone who gets what he wants because he deserves it. And that will not be true. There are a million swarming other potential ways in which I might have developed, might have behaved, might have comported myself towards others, which might also have generated the same professional result. And the positive result will not demonstrate the necessity of what I have done- only its sufficiency in this case, with these colleagues, with this Ad Hoc committee, under these circumstances- the million teeming factors and extra-personal contingencies that fell into place a particular way, and which were not of my doing. My getting tenure will not justify my existence, but will constitute a fact about one point in time at which I interfaced with an institution.

And the same goes for a negative outcome. If I do not get tenure, I worry that I will start telling myself that this only makes sense and that it is somehow justified, that it is because I didn’t work hard enough, for so many years, and that I made the wrong decisions at key points in my career about where to go, whom to respond to, which methodological and scholarly habits and attachments and which to let go, which relationships to reinforce and which to abandon, where to put my focus and attention. It will make all the time that I didn’t sacrifice, the time I spent with friends, the time I spent seeing my family, the time I spent with Martin, making music and performing and going on tours, somehow look like “the wrong thing”, the smoking gun of my essential wrongness, a mistake, a demonstration that I was insufficiently serious, insufficiently rigorous, insufficiently focused. It will reify and harden into a toxic despair a kind of image of myself as a failure, as a loser, as someone who didn’t get what he wanted because he didn’t deserve it. And that will not be true. There are a million swarming other potential ways in which I might have developed, might have behaved, might have comported myself towards others, which might also have generated the same professional result. And the negative result will not demonstrate the insufficiency of me as a person or as a scholar- only its insufficiency in this case, with these colleagues, with this Ad Hoc committee, under these circumstances- the million teeming factors and extra-personal contingencies that fell into place a particular way, and which were not of my doing. My not getting tenure will not justify my existence, but will constitute a fact about one point in time at which I interfaced with an institution.

This is deflationary to say. It resists a fairly cherished assumption, the idea that we are agents who control the outcomes of our lives. A lifetime of reading in the construction of narratives has not, really, inoculated me anymore than anyone else against the expectation that there are plot arcs and momentum and a kind of aesthetic well-formedness to the stories we tell about how our lives are going, expectations that violate the messy, halting, uncertain, and tangled forms that most lives actually take. In asserting that there will be nothing inevitable, just or right about getting or not getting tenure, I want to resists the idea that I get to feel pride or shame based on my situation. Those are (both) pleasurable in their own ways. There’s a basic asymmetry, of course; it’s easy to see the pleasure of pride, but I think there might be a lurking, prideful pleasure in shame too. There would be a kind of tragic self-pity spiral that tenure denial would license in me which would ratify and justify all sorts of self-destructive and melancholic acting out that might itself generate some midlife crisis drama and excitement, in opposition to the more-of-the-same stability narrative that getting tenure would induce. The dirty little secret about getting tenure might just be that it’s good but not great, no magic bullet for the fears that dog our sense of self-worth, and only redoubles the guilt of institutional complicity that academics ought to feel about the fundamentally unjust system in which they work.

But perhaps shame and pride aren’t really warranted here, and perhaps they aren’t helpful emotions in looking clearly at a situation. They are suspect because they make the self the center of the story, and people like to think about heroes or villains much more than they like to think about institutions, processes and groups. Aren’t I to blame if I fail? Aren’t I to be praised if I succeed? Only to a point, and a limited point. Only if you are ignoring the rest of the picture, the rest of the story, the institutional surround against which this decision happens, and from which it takes its meaning.

[ran out of rant steam there- the malingering issues / question would be: as we hurtle towards an increasingly apartheid-like situation in which the distinction between TT and non-TT faculty gets more and more blatantly unjust, how can we push strategically for a better basic contract / safety net for everyone so that even those at the bottom of some kind of seniority hierarchy structure (whether it involves tenure or not) are brought up to something better? if the tenure iceberg is melting and admin/decanal authority keeps creeping and extending, how can faculty push back in the most democratic, responsible and ethical way? Schools want enrollment to grow, but they also want to keep student-to-teacher ratios low; they've used grad student labor to massage this, but there's a terrible human cost for talented grad students who dutifully TA for years while being fed empty promises about the hiring light at the end of the tunnel who then file their dissertations and enter a labor market with grim job prospects (it's not that there are NO jobs, it's that the competition for the jobs that there are has become truly brutal, and often this leads to equally brutal workloads as that competitive environment leads employers to push courseloads to exploitive levels- if you won't do something, you can bet someone else will). This has been unacceptable for a decade at least, and, except for a ****VERY lucky****/talented/connected/diligent few, it is only worsening. Something's gotta give, and MOOCs are not the answer.]

gulp, guess I killed the thread. sorry y'all.

i'm excited to do this, and think it will be a good experience, but i don't see myself being a high school teacher for my entire career.

― lars von (Treeship), Tuesday, August 26, 2014 2:31 PM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark

Famous last words

Re the point that tenured faculty have sinecures: it doesn't feel that way! we get so much administrative work that goes unseen except by other faculty/admins.

would kind of like to hear about a movement of righteous faculty who get tenure and then reject it, like sartre or marlon brando or something

the problem with that is that tenure isn't a one time prize; instead it's a daily dose of awesome

also very few academics working tirelessly for tenure track jobs have the level of financial independence of sartre or brando.

well that's why it would be astounding to see

i found teaching high school to be really occupationally fulfilling even if not monetarily rewarding in the least

also not sure why rejecting tenure would be "righteous"

yeah the committee work and mentorship of younger faculty that the tenured ranks must complete at my university makes me pause. It aint "Let me write an article a year and look over the graded work my grad assistant just handed me."

euler, you know, in a bill and ted sense, refusing the injustices of an unfair world

i dunno i know i have an endless reservoir of resentment but when i look at my friends with solid jobs or with tenure, or elder faculty i know, they don't appear to be doing shit about 'the system', even the academic system, just enjoying the security as best they can under the threat of career advancement and direct-depositing their paychecks. and who else is in a position to do anything about it but them?

I dunno I was pretty wrecked in the immediate aftermath of tenure; just wanted to cultivate my garden for a while

plus academic politics soak up a lot of fight energy; like there are forces of selfishness among faculty that require a lot of energy to resist, before even getting to the plight of the un/underemployed

i think seeing how nominally progressive tenured faculty become total assholes to non-tenured teaching staff and grad students is a great education in how the world works

the most hateful behavior i've ever seen up-close is from tenured faculty (even administrators) wielding their own power and privilege.

and i'm still not "against" tenure, b/c it's the only hope i have at this point for any kind of employment security

i'm very pro-unionization, is my answer

of grad student assistants and adjunct faculty, i mean

i'm very pro-unionization, is my answer

Answer to what?

(Not just being a dick/pedant. TAs and sessionals are generally unionized in Canada. I'm wondering whether this has answered something wrt tenure.)

like there are forces of selfishness among faculty that require a lot of energy to resist, before even getting to the plight of the un/underemployed

Would be interested to hear more about this.

a lot of privileged people end up tenured (big shock) and they want to take collective resources for themselves, and "the good" have to work hard to resist it. maybe it's a way that the privileged block change: set fires that have to be put out before change can happen, repeat repeat repeat

it's a way that the privileged block change: set fires that have to be put out before change can happen, repeat repeat repeat

Oh, absolutely! This is not your imagination.

if we are wondering "why don't the people who just suffered and worked for seven years to get tenure who were also lucky enough to actually get it throw tenure away in favor of something else?", part of the answer to that question might lie in the crucial question of who will administrate (read: pay for) the system that opens up in the imaginary systemic void left by the abolition of tenure. Which brings us directly to silby's point about the tenured endlessly "complaining about administrators". Which is exactly what faculty should do unless and until administrations alter their orientation, which is currently shitty and looks likely to stay that way. Universities are corporations that are run by deans, provosts, presidents, and the members of Boards of Trustees (whose constituents are often drawn from the corporate world, and are often bottom-line oriented and contemptuous of academia as a culture, or see it as regrettably unlike the corporate world). These are the people who would dictate the resulting labor conditions in the wake of some kind of mass-renunciation of tenure by the tenured, and these people have been shown historically to union-bust, and are more likely to favor further adjunctification, rather than some kind of utopian system of universally increased benefits / wages / working conditions for all. There are good schools without tenure, so this kind of change REALLY IS possible (if I recall correctly Bennington, where a friend of mine teaches, has all faculty on five year long renewable contracts rather than tenure; but you have to factor in its size -- very very small -- and its price -- very very high-- and ask yourself if you can imagine a similar structure working at, say, a university with 40,000 students in a way which wouldn't consolidate power excessively in the administrative hands of those who oversee the renewal of those temporary contracts. If those decisions too were collectivized it could work (i.e. only the rest of your colleagues get to decide whether you are renewed or not, a highly laborious process in which everyone's on each other's "renewal committees" constantly with attendant risk of logrolling)- but you would need a system-wide structural shift to put that arrangement in place, and you'll never get entire single departments to commit "tenure-suicide" but STAY at their institution under that new contract if there are other institutions WITH tenure for talented/movable people to go to instead).

actually "complaining about administrators" was especially unfair of me, esp after being privy to faculty disgruntlement with the president during my undergraduate years. (I was a collaborationist but the president got fired/resigned eventually anyway.) My alma mater also had renewable contracts in lieu of tenure, but after you were promoted to associate your contracts were for 10 year terms and the joke was that "ten year" sounds like "tenure" if you say it fast enough.

There are good schools without tenure, so this kind of change REALLY IS possible (if I recall correctly Bennington, where a friend of mine teaches, has all faculty on five year long renewable contracts rather than tenure; but you have to factor in its size -- very very small -- and its price -- very very high-- and ask yourself if you can imagine a similar structure working at, say, a university with 40,000 students in a way which wouldn't consolidate power excessively in the administrative hands of those who oversee the renewal of those temporary contracts.

My understanding was that tenure had mostly been abolished outside Canada and the US. Is this incorrect? How do things work in the rest of the world?

ttws, that sounds just as much like an argument against making any moves at all, essentially because administrations, trustees, legislatures etc have the upper hand, strategically. which leaves faculty where… standing on principle and hoping to convince people who whole the purse strings to loosen up a bit? which sound as good as doing nothing.

xpost In general, academia is caught in a sad and shitty cycle of exploitation and I don't wanna put a smiley face on it because I lucked out and got tenure. Also sorry if I am stating the obvious on this thread. But to ramble some more, given the departments-versus-deans dynamic that typifies these power structures, let's shrink it down to a single hiring decision and say the dept. asks for a tenure line and is told by a dean that there's only enough money for an adjunct rather than a tenure line. The chair can respond that the department ethically objects to adjuncts and the result is that no one is exploited and a stand is taken. Which is GOOD. But . . . . now there is one fewer (possibly bad) job, the person who would have filled that adjunct spot is also not teaching and thus is less likely to be able to stay in the game, keep doing research, and eventually bag that tenure job spot, and now a tight job market is even tighter because the total number of chairs in the game of musical chairs has been further squeezed. I have known adjuncts who are now tenured because they stuck it out and eventually made it up the ladder. I have known people who were denied tenure who now have tenure elsewhere. Happy endings HAPPEN.

But . . . . .

I have also seen people do adjunct jobs for five or six years, never get a job offer, and now they're out after spending decades in training and working trying to find an academic place; one university after another profited from their cheap labor and tossed them aside, with this optimistic bootstrapping narrative about the chance that "they'll get out eventually" making everyone's conscience around them a little less troublesome along the way, and keeping the system going. The people I know who are adjuncts are rendered schizophrenic by the mixture of heavy resentment they justifiably feel and the weird gratitude they feel towards the departments and funding systems that offer them temporary shelter (I say this because my department doesn't overload adjuncts with exploitive teaching loads at the level of courses-taught-per-semester). The Mellon Foundation positions are an example of this: hyper-talented people who just didn't luck out with a job offer get adjunct positions for a year or two at excellent schools. It's a leg up and an advantage for them, and their salaries are covered by the Foundation and their teaching load is very light. But for everyone who lucks out with that kind of soft landing, there are many, many more doing a mountain of adjunct teaching for very little rewards with long hours, too many students and no benefits, offices, or support.

(trigger warning: hateful letter about adjuncts is linked below)
http://chronicle.com/blogs/letters/is-that-whining-adjunct-someone-we-want-teaching-our-young/

it's a particularly obnoxious example of someone refusing to empathize with adjuncts and adopting a callous "sink or swim" attitude; sadly this is not just some freaky Randian outlier / free market apologist. It's a symptom of the broken-ness of the system that this person specifically suggests that unhappy adjuncts *seek a career in administration* instead of teaching. If it wasn't so painful, it would be deeply comic.

A remarkable aspect of the adjunct situation is that there are so many PhD-holding people looking for jobs that remain on the professorial track, even non-TT, that departments can soak up so much undergraduate teaching load with PhDs, instead of a hypothetical class of Master's-holders who are more interested in teaching than research and would happily do full-time teaching loads. guess you gotta get those terminal degrees in front of the undergrads though or your US News ranking goes down

I see no reason to believe that people with terminal masters degrees would be better at teaching undergraduates than people with Ph.D.s. And why would they be? To get a master's you typically take the same courses as Ph.D. students, but you do not write a dissertation. It's not like you do an education course if you stop with a master's. You're just as trained, i.e. untrained, for the classroom as the Ph.D.s

as a probably soon-to-be failed academic I'm happy to think that I'll be able to watch all the carnage from the outside soon.

I have no attachment to tenure or really any aspect of the current academic system anymore as it is. I think it mostly sucks and fosters bad work and coddles bad teachers. I don't expect anyone who has made it to NOT draw the ladder up after themselves (I probably would) so I wouldn't look to tenured profs to initiate any solution.

but I think it's pretty clear that things like tenure will soon only exist in a select few Ivy League type places--regardless of what anyone does or doesn't do.

the current system in the marx-soaked humanities is a joke on the very terms the humanities seem to champion. either admit you're feudalists like all the other disciplines, and stop pretending to be progressive, or reorganize the system in accordance with the fundamental values of the marxism you shove down your undergrads' and grad students' throats. maintaining this hypocrisy undermines the conveyance of knowledge and it casts the progressivism espoused in humanities in a really bad light

it's very hard, maybe impossible, to actualize progressive/socialist values under capitalism except in certain, tiny ways. i don't think you could overhaul academia in ways that rooted out hierarchies and exploitation altogether.

if tenure goes away is kinda like 'if newspapers go away'

I mean, it's happening

dust in the wind, dude

but tenure at research universities isn't going away anytime soon. it's the other places that I take it are the main concern.

in places with a labor tradition, I don't know.

that's just the thing: the status of academic work as "labor" isn't really a given in the public imagination.

or the academic imagination

yeah I dunno I grew up/went to college in the south and then went to grad school / got jobs in the north and there are different public imaginations about academia even in just the usa.

also not clear that tenured professors are actually better teachers

― iatee

this is otm and a point that students only learn later. At my job students often complain about TAs or adjuncts teaching their tenured professor's course, or that the tenured professor can't teach. it disappoints them when they learn, "Well, tenured faculty do research; it doesn't matter whether they can teach."

obv there are tenure track teaching non-research jobs too but I'm talking about the bulk of undergrad ed

To re-amplify what others have noted, there are many different kinds of schools with different agendas/priorities/habits, so tenure at a teaching school would definitely hinge strongly on being an effective teacher, while at a research university it wouldn't be the primary factor.

That said, on a pure anecdotal level, a junior prof at my school was known to be a disaster in the classroom (horrendous student evaluations, very unhappy students, numerous complaints that this person just didn't seem to care if students understood the material) and this person was denied tenure even though this person had written a very smart book. This isn't a "yay! the system works!" story, but it does suggest that research universities won't look the other way if you're really not cut out for the classroom. That said, you can be a **great** teacher in the classroom but if the outside letters about your research aren't glowing, you're not getting tenure at a research university- and that is made clear to you when you are hired at a research university. When you're gunning for tenure at an "R1", the priorities are pretty blatant: research is first, grad teaching is second, undergrad teaching is third.

I would also point out that at my university we are under pressure from above not to let the percentage of non-TT teaching grow past a certain point- it's just as important as keeping student-to-teacher ratios within a certain ballpark- and it's clear that that is the selling point of this institution to students (i.e. to their parents who are paying a great deal of money to send their kids to a private university). YET . . . we are also under pressure to grow our department (i.e. teach more students) and shrink our grad program, but we are NOT given the tenure lines with which to do that- i.e. we can't teach more students AND keep the student-to-TT-track-teacher ratio low unless we get to hire more people on the tenure track. So there's a kind of impossible demand going on here: stay small! but get big! stay TT track! but don't hire!

otm

horrendous student evaluations

I have a real problem with using this as a primary metric for evaluating teaching.

http://studentevaluationsareworthless.blogspot.ca/
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/01/29/evaluate
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/04/student_evaluations_of_college_professors_are_biased_and_worthless.html

oh sure, there are all sorts of problems with student evals, which favor squeaky wheels / people w axes to grind. they're not always accurate, and lord knows sometimes they are wildly biased or vindictive or grade-related, but the person in question was universally panned and that seems telling to me. as in, *nobody* who had been this person's student felt positively about the experience. And that does suggest that something's not working, and this was backedup when peers/colleagues sat in and watched classes. [Also: this person now has tenure somewhere else, so they were obviously able to turn this situation around sufficiently]

*nobody* who had been this person's student felt positively about the experience. And that does suggest that something's not working, and this was backedup when peers/colleagues sat in and watched classes.

Ah, key points. Too often, nothing but student evals are used to gauge pedagogy.

a more efficient and humane system would be means testing incoming grad students. instead of taking the GREs, they can submit their parent(s)'s bank statements and (if applicable) investment portfolios and real estate holdings, along with a report of how much social capital they're bringing to the program. those above a certain threshold will be trained from the outset for tenure-track positions, with seminars in how to publish and organize conferences and so forth. those from the upper-middle classes would be prepped for becoming full-time instructors, with seminars in how to integrate technology in the classroom and the like. the remaining majority can be trained to become adjuncts, with seminars in how to apply for food stamps and unemployment, if they don't already know that from growing up. this system would more accurately reflect academic reality and better correspond to the spirit of the progressive values humanities academics supposedly espouse than the current bullshit "meritocracy"

yeah qualmsley I get that you have serious beef with "the system" based on your experience; but it isn't mine. I'm a Latino and son of an immigrant, neither parent went to college, we lived constantly on the lower edge of middle class. I didn't know what college was until I was 17. social capital? does a convicted felon uncle count? in my extended family I think there are now, all in my generation, four college grads (all state schools except for me). the rest are cops and health techs.

my story isn't ~that~ unusual in academia as I've known it (and I've gotten around). I know *nothing* about people in other humanities disciplines, in particular I haven't known anyone in English (philo's pretty isolated from the rest of the humanities ime) so maybe English scholars are all trust funders.

I'm also a bit sceptical that academia is as classist as qualmsley is suggesting, although it does have its problems, but

the progressive values humanities academics supposedly espouse

Why do people keep saying this? There are plenty of conservatives in the social sciences and humanities and afaik there always have been, including famous ones (the Chicago School of Economics, Tom Flanagan, Allan Bloom, George Will, etc).

never even been middle class, euler, so take that for what it is. but i have zero bones to pick with you. you do philosophy, correct? i'd leave leave philosophy out of my system because i have no beef with the american/british analytic departments persisting however they want to. my complaint is about other humanities disciplines that force their grad students to learn marxian continental philosophy, and then throw those students to the wolves. why mandate marx and his descendants when you so very clearly make one hell of a living in violation of their principles vis-a-vis exploiting the students you're making read those guys/gals? (that is a rhetorical question -- i can think of a million excuses why: the fact remains that accepting people into programs and making them experts about theories designed to critique/undermine our wildly unequal caste system, not only without doing anything about their victimization in that caste system, but reinforcing it, performs the opposite of the supposed intention of teaching marx/etc in the first place. it seems more big hearted / less sadistic to me to just leave marx etc (lukasz? foucault? lacan? derrida? baudrillard?) out of *most* humanities grad training these days)

another note about personal experience (granting that data are not derived from personal anecdote, though what else can i go one when our oh so progressive humanities departments don't release data about socioeconomic backgrounds?): most (but not all!) successful academics i've met whose socioeconomic backgrounds i've been privy to come from some kind of family money, or at the very least, one or both parents is/are professors. i am not naive enough to blast that phenomenon. my complaint is when that's how it is . . . in self-styled progressive marxian humanities departments. when they talk about class, given the state of the profession, it's like sociopaths discussing child abuse

how could 'humanities disciplines that force their grad students to learn marxian continental philosophy' alter their practices so as to be more equitable?

easy -- leave mr. marx out of syllabi and classrooms if you're not gonna do anything about endemic unfairness that afflicts your students. accept that you're just as inequitable as the rest of the system, that you are complicit in this post-reagan neo-feudalism, instead of standing outside and above it all. leave the marx to the revolutionaries, instead of compromising marxism by making grad students who will likely never find decent work in your profession become experts in abstruse marxian theory. that's a fairly straightforward solution

that's kind of defeatist tho?

That would be altering their practices to be less hypocritical, not to be more equitable.

if that

less hypocrisy and more transparency would be a major improvement!

iirc, marx would have considered university academics to be parasites upon the working class.

replace Marx with von Mises and Hayek imo

twentieth century marxism is pretty much obsessed with exactly these questions (role of the intellectual, etc) which makes it pretty central to any attempt by academics to justify their own work!

and that's just the thing. academic writing about Marxism is just that: an academic genre of writing.

the hip hop community understands Marxist critiques of capitalism more than academics!

alfred otm X 2

Bracketing these passionately held expressions of disgust at hypocrisy (which seems like a pretty obvious fish-in-a-barrel move if not therefore wrong, what with the time-honored tradition of scoffing at "champagne socialists" going back as far as there have been socialists of any stripe at all), IF the Marxist critique of capitalism is valid AND/OR worth knowing on its own intellectual historial merits AND if knowing about it helps grad students (of WHATEVER background) to have a slightly better chance at getting what few jobs there are AND puts said grad-students-cum-adjuncts-or-TT-track-profs into positions in which they can disseminate said views to their students at an impressionable age, then surely there's both a capitalist AND a socialist strategic rationale for such indoctrination? Which would mean that on either side of this ideological divide, there's a good reason to read about, think about, and teach Marx.

"Practice what you preach" sounds nice. But if Immanuel Wallerstein's world systems analysis (see "Utopistics" for the short version, the multivolume "The Modern World-System" for the long version) is correct, even communist states themselves, insofar as they had money systems and conducted international trade, couldn't achieve that level of praxis. NONE of which would invalidate the critique. So if you're going to school to study critique, why would you place ANY system out of reach? Out of sheer piety/shame?

In my experience, triggering shame and self-hatred (or at least, pious declarations of shame and self-hatred) among academics about their institutional privilege/cultural irrelevance/alienation-from-the-huddled masses is the easiest thing in the world; such guilt is right there, under the blowhard confident good-in-an-interview-situation surface that most academics have cultivated. And stoking those feelings accomplishes very little.

man, you sound like a dean

That's more or less OTM but I was actually interested in nakh's question, which no one has taken up. What would be a more equitable way to organise academic labour? This seems like it should be central to the thread, as far as the issues in the OP are concerned.

I don't think anyone answered this, either, which still seems relevant imo:

My understanding was that tenure had mostly been abolished outside Canada and the US. Is this incorrect? How do things work in the rest of the world?

xpost

A few questions that come to mind:

Is it true that the tenure system is actually responsible for the casualization of the academic workforce? If so, why? Because when funding becomes more limited, a tenured elite still keeps their positions and salaries and so there's less for everyone else? Is the problem there with funding structures or with tenure? Would we be OK with e.g. senior faculty being laid off in tough times? (I believe this happened in the UK.)

Is tenure necessary for academic freedom? What is academic freedom and why should only tenured professors enjoy this (as opposed to not just non-tenured faculty but also non-tenured librarians, journalists, public sector scientists, etc.)? Imo, adjuncts who are hired or not based on student evaluations (something close to mob rule) might enjoy very little academic freedom. (I could give anecdotes.)

the only reason academics should really feel shame imo is that so much of what they produce is assembly line criticism. the ones touting enlightenment or revolution through literary criticism should just feel embarrassed.

You guys are now specifically talking about the sort of academics that were discussed here, right?

no.

any academic whose work purports to be concerned about changes in practical life is open to the critique that it has an over-large and overly flattering conception of its own practical effectiveness or even relevance.

that is compatible with the most po-faced 'clear' applied analytic moral philosophy work.

xpost I'm not a dean, and have no aspirations to be one.

But I am weary of politics being instrumentalized into an ethical beauty contest about who-is-the-furthest-from-privilege. Not because discussions of privilege shouldn't happen (of COURSE they should!), but because the mere induction of shame into the minds of the privileged doesn't alter the structure of the institutions qua institutions. Unless you think that if enough people feel enough shame then the institution will just magically reverse the gears of the larger global multinational political economy that encompasses it. Again, to state the obvious, schools are corporations enmeshed in a capitalist framework in which their endowments rise or fall with the stock market. Shame can strategically alter what that endowment gets invested in-- just look at 1980s student activism about apartheid for a vivid and heartening example- but shame isn't going to disconnect schools from the surrounding political economy. Only a ground-up revolution can do that.

At the level of guilt-ridden academic X or Y, what is the value of their shame and guilt, exactly? Picture the Onion headline "Privileged Professor Feels Embarrassed About Rich Parents"; you could file it right next to "Gay Youth in High School Is the Only One In the Whole World". It's a cliché. If addressing academia's selection-bias towards privileged kids is the goal, and it is a GOOD GOAL, then the makeup of who is in the institution has to change (more minority applicants to grad school, more working-class applicants to grad school). But I gotta say, in seven years as a faculty member I have never sat in on a meeting about admissions or job searches in which these factors are not discussed, and in my experience competition for qualified minority candidates (economic or racial) is, behind-the-scenes, insanely cut-throat- I've seen AfAm lit grad students go on the job market with only a few chapters of their diss written and they received 8 job offers, 12 job offers- EVERYONE wants academia to be more diverse. One of my grad students was a UK grad student from a working class background; she got a job offer having written only two chapters of her diss because she was just that brilliant, but also, I think, because her identity made her particularly important as the-sort-of-person-departments-want-to-hire-now, precisely because people want to take this skew-towards-privilege and overturn or reverse it, and when they find someone who has the talent and ability and who helps them address diversity issues as a bonus, they jump. The sad structural blocks occur early on, when poor students and minority students are never encouraged, never imagined as having the ability, the intelligence, the aptitude required. The reality of academia's bias towards privilege acts as a deterrent and the result is a self-fulfilling vicious cycle. Who is encouraged to imagine growing up and becoming a professor? Who is discouraged, and why? It starts way before you're in the pile of applications, and solutions need to focus there too.

But . . . if the *very nature* of the institution is to prep people to compete against each other in a scarcity economy for an ever-increasing-in-severity set of limited resources (not everyone gets into school X, not everyone gets into grad school Y, not every one gets a TT job, not everyone gets a tenured professorship), then inequity / selectivity and, yes, elitism constitute the nature of academic institutions as such. We need to make academia more diverse. We need to reach towards the ideal situation of a world in which the quality of the candidates individual work and the race/class diversity of the professoriate as a group are seen as "equiprimordial". But it's a depressing likelihood and, I think, structural feature that even that diverse professoriate will be employed within an inherently elitist institution that is, at present, contained within a shitty and exploitive capitalist political economy.

Also: in my experience most academics (including engagé Marxist ones) know *exactly* how rarefied, ineffectual and preaching-to-the-choir their work is. Which is why I said that triggering their shame or guilt about that fact is easy and accomplishes nothing.

and in the face of the (usually) at best constant reiteration of the realities of the thing and the good intentions of the insiders, what other recourse do those without power or standing on the inside have, exactly?

competition for qualified minority candidates (economic or racial) is, behind-the-scenes, insanely cut-throat- I've seen AfAm lit grad students go on the job market with only a few chapters of their diss written and they received 8 job offers, 12 job offers- EVERYONE wants academia to be more diverse

This statement seems pretty surprising, even gobsmacking, to me.

xpost

I was speaking for English departments at R1 schools. I'm sure it's different in other disciplines, and at other schools. But our school and most peer institutions get (abysmal) diversity ratings and are regularly pressured (as we should be) by higher-ups to improve those ratings. I guess I overstated the case, "everyone" who isn't a racist sexist classist troll wants academia to be more diverse. But I don't have colleagues who are racist sexist classist trolls, and yet my department, like so many others, isn't as diverse as it ought to be.

Also, the heavy competition for the AfAm scholars in question referred to the top candidates from Yale and Berkeley that year, not to people from less prestigious schools. Which reveals the way that elitism-as-a-praxis and diversity-as-a-goal can actually get inter-twined; this "everyone" (a convenient fiction that I invoke, which stands in for "the top 10 schools in discipline X") wants their department to be more diverse, but snobbery about what school you come from is not going away any time soon. So the diverse faculty all seem to magically come from the same, high-ranking places.

hell even the non-academic division I work for at the university will twist itself into a pretzel to court minority candidates for a director/coordinator. I keep telling a buddy finishing his dissertation in American lit at another Florida university to start exploiting his Cubanhood for that tenure track job.

most academics (including engagé Marxist ones) know *exactly* how rarefied, ineffectual and preaching-to-the-choir their work is. Which is why I said that triggering their shame or guilt about that fact is easy and accomplishes nothing.

Your argument here seems to establish that most academics, but most especially Marxists, accomplish little or nothing of value and this fact is so conspicuous that the only consequential response to it is for these academics is to feel shame and guilt. And on this basis you argue that we should refrain from pointing this out, as it will not accomplish anything?

I hate to say it, ttws, but this seems like a pretty damning indictment of the system from top to bottom. If true, then simply hiring more academics from working class or minority backgrounds wouldn't do much to solve a system so universally mired in futility. Better to scrap it.

But then, I suspect there is more going on within universities than the futility and ineffectuality you have so ably described, so buck up!

I'm saying that the sombre realization "my article about topic X isn't going to smash capitalism" is a given, and it is obviously true, and it's obviousness isn't lost on the smart person who writes said article, and that I have yet to meet an article-writer who thought that this would be the case. The goals academics set tend to be of the "maybe this article will change how we read poem X or film Y slightly, from an emphasis on A to an emphasis on B" variety, in my experience. And if they're well written, persuasive, and get accepted at the right journal, that happens, sometimes.

Not true in philo for AfAm candidates or Latino candidates ime

Re tenure outside North America: in France you are tenured after one year, which is usually pro forma if you actually move to your uni's town instead of commuting from Paris (you can do that after a year). I think Spain is similar.

Those are civil service positions in France, though, right? Does tenure mean the same thing?

Not sure? You have a job for life, which is the bottom line with tenure.

Man, I am sorry if I am sounding defensive here. I have tried to flag all the things that suck about academia: exploitive situation, adjunctification, corporate domination of the university as such, administrative bloat, snobbery about the ranking of schools, inherent elitism. Don't wanna sound like I'm the Defender of the Faith, here, really! This thread should be for people who want to talk about tenure, from whatever standpoint they're in. I guess it was wrong to push back when people raised the spectre of the academic who over-inflates the radicalism or importance of their work, because god knows there are some big egos in this line of work and I can certainly imagine some people falling for that. Maybe the crew that I hang with is just particularly bitter and dis-identified?

This thread hits home because I am about to start teaching again after a summer off and I can't wait to be in the classroom, teaching, again. I really love teaching, I love getting people to slow down and take time with texts, I love the collaborative mystery of how a class becomes a temporary community, I love the vulnerability and open-ness and surprise of it, the sense that you can't script it in advance (even if you're a control freak and you've written your lecture out, reality intrudes in the affective gusts of attention and resistance that your students manifest regardless). I love the way that the student/teacher dynamic ceaselessly evades fantasies of control, and goes, always, elsewhere. I am very very lucky to be able to do this with the job security that tenure gives me. I don't take for granted the survival of tenure (it's not a very old system, as my colleague Benjam1n G1nsburg's book "The Fall of the Faculty" makes clear), nor do I regard it as the only possible way that things could be done. And I know that adjuncts love teaching just as much as I do because the adjuncts that I know go through the same cycles of hope and fear about the content of their courses that I do about the content of mine, but they have to do so while also carrying the additional burden of the anxiety and precarity that comes from that institutional position. My security and their insecurity are related insofar as we're both occupying places within a larger structure. I recall an adjunct moving into her office at the start of a two year post-doc appointment at my school. I noticed that she didn't put any paintings or photos or posters up on the wall of her room. I asked her why. She said it was her fifth post-doc in a row and it was just too heartbreaking to enact the ritual of "moving in" when she would just have to leave anyway, so why bother? That silenced me.

This thread hits home because I am about to start teaching again after a summer off and I can't wait to be in the classroom, teaching, again. I really love teaching, I love getting people to slow down and take time with texts, I love the collaborative mystery of how a class becomes a temporary community, I love the vulnerability and open-ness and surprise of it, the sense that you can't script it in advance (even if you're a control freak and you've written your lecture out, reality intrudes in the affective gusts of attention and resistance that your students manifest regardless). I love the way that the student/teacher dynamic ceaselessly evades fantasies of control, and goes, always, elsewhere.

This is lovely! i am going on the job market this fall, in what i plan to be my last shot, and i've been feeling pretty pessimistic and cynical about it. but this evokes exactly why i wanted this as a career in the first place.

i still have the key from my last office because as far as i know they've never bothered to hunt me down for it and i sure as hell am not going to go out of my way just to deliver it to them. they probably don't even bother since there's always a chance they'll spontaneously develop a need for a temp who will save them the cost of 'onboarding'.

ttws, i understand what you are trying to say, there is just something about it all that to me cannot help but carrying implications of, i don't know, indifference given the immovable structural components and our differential positions. i want to get in a classroom for the same kinds of reasons you described, and it's been 9 months since i last was, and now i'm mired in the most miserable job i've ever had, working from home, barely making ends meet doing what is effectively grading a single paper over and over again (an academic's hell). as i hit those periodic lulls that make academics disappear from the social media landscape, stop answering their emails, etc., like the one that's occurring right now as they get ready for classes to start, all my feelings of isolation and resentment are magnified. from my perspective nearly everything anyone with a job teaching says about academia rings hollow, and usually all the more so because of the real fact that they get caught up in their work and their courses and simply have no real time for anything else, and the kind of inadvertently emitted narcissism of a well-running life, which people stuck on the outside can notice, seems to crowd out good intentions.

yeah if there's anything I've realized in the last seven years it's that I love teaching

This was my first week of teaching at my new gig, three new preps, felt like a moron the first two days but since then I've been getting more excited about it and have constantly been thinking about what I want to do in my classes and how to make things more interesting and relevant. Seeing students suddenly get something and use it to go off on their own is a great thing.