Sustainable. Resilient. Free. by John Warner

Author:John Warner [Warner, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948742979
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Published: 2020-11-15T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

The Other Work of Faculty: Tenure, Governance, Inclusion

The structure of how labor is valued and compensated is only part of what we must consider when it comes to the faculty of sustainable, resilient, and free public colleges and universities. We must also consider how faculty go about their work, which means examining issues of tenure, shared governance and administration, and, of course, the question of who is allowed through the gates of academia to begin with.

Tenure Is Already Dead

In recent years, we’ve seen a near constant assault on faculty tenure rights by state legislatures. Tennessee, Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Arkansas have all taken explicit steps to weaken the rights of faculty who have earned tenure. Iowa and Missouri have made similar attempts but ultimately didn’t get far, though even their proposals to essentially eliminate tenure protections would have been unthinkable just a decade ago.

In appealing to the Tennessee system board in 2018 to forgo a policy change that many viewed as a “stealth attempt to chip away at tenure,” University of Tennessee professor Marcia Black “cast tenure as an essential protection, a tenet of democracy, the foundation of academic freedom. It’s what allows professors to teach, write, or do research that challenges the status quo without fearing reprisal.”1

It is a stirring defense of tenure that is, unfortunately, not true.

For college instructors who labor not only without tenure, but also on year-to-year (or even semester-to-semester) contracts, tenure was never alive in the first place. And as this describes the majority of college faculty who teach now, it is difficult to see how tenure can be truly essential to a college’s or university’s operation. I personally have twenty years of classroom experience. I worked every one of those years without the benefit of tenure, with a contract that ended at the end of the academic year. For the large majority of people who work in public higher education, tenure is not an “essential protection”—it is a job perk.

The reason for this comes down to the difference between what I call “tenure as a principle” and “tenure as a policy.” Tenure as a principle works precisely how Professor Black described it to the Tennessee board; it allows faculty members to do their work to the best of their ability. It protects faculty so they can participate in shared governance and pursue their research without falling afoul of administrative or political disfavor. The notion that institutional and intellectual work done in good faith should be protected is a good one, an “essential” one even. The problem is that most faculty do not have these protections. And when that happens, the collective power of the entire faculty is diminished.

This reality has been particularly stark during the pandemic, as faculty have been essentially reduced to writing pleading letters to administrations and boards in an attempt to shape institutional policies around the coronavirus. In many (but by no means all) cases, tenured faculty have been given some measure of personal autonomy—for example, the freedom to choose to

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