"Rethinking Tenure"--In the US Perhaps a Bit Late After All

 

To ask the question, of course, is to announce that one knows that there is an inevitable answer.  The only real question is how, when, and what comes next.

Still, lots of people are asking the question and it has become an object of influencing mass opinion through press and social media organs. Tenure has become a useful cultural transformation object on economic grounds (inefficient for institutions that see humans merely as factors in the production of university income and output, whatever the discursive tropes used to put velvet around economic realities  privileging institutional survival and prosperity; for a taste eg here, here, and here).  It has also become an even more useful object in the political-social battles among elite groups vying for control of social-political narratives and the control of mass values and behavior norms (values orthodoxy must somehow be woven into the institution and deviation controlled or punished, in the form of social justice, free speech absolutism, or other values clusters). For a taste of recent discursive projectiles in these campaigns, see eg here, here, here, here, and here. 

It may thus be worth $39.00 (US) for one to read through the thinking of others. The Chronicle of Higher Education Certainly thinks so. It lays out the story of the end of tenure and its apotheosis into something else like a novel:

Abolish, strengthen, or replace it?

Tenure as an institution has been shrinking for years. Today, tenured and tenure-track faculty members make up less than 30 percent of the nation’s professoriate. Some colleges are experimenting with alternatives to tenure, finding ways to offer job security and a governance role to those outside the system. Others are trying to make tenure expectations clearer and fairer.

In this collection of Chronicle articles, anchored by newly reported analysis, you’ll hear from academics who want to strengthen tenure, recreate it, abolish it, or experiment with something new in its place. Read on to learn how tenure’s place in the academy is changing.

Section 1: New Tenure Models for Changing Times
Section 2: Financial, Political, and Equity Concerns
Section 3: The Future of a Beleaguered Institution

Date: August 2021
Pages: 92
Digital file size: 4.19 MB

The work may be purchased from this website. 

Whatever one thinks of these trends, the underlying values, and the premises on which arguments are made and narratives constructed, it is clearer now that the idealized university of the late 19th through the end of the 20th century is undergoing a transfiguration. And it is clear that in that transfiguration something has died and something else has emerged. From the outside little appears to have changed--it remains an institution into which young humans are inserted, and after a set period of time, they come out ready for insertions in wage labor markets; into elite structures of leadership, or into the political-administrative complex. The university has again become a place for elite training and socialization in preferred political values--in this century built around the ideology of social justice in liberal democratic regimes; development in post-colonial regimes; and a movement toward the communist ideal in Marxist Leninist states. Universities also continue to serve as spaces for the sort of technical training that is a necessary component for the operaiton of complex society. A place for everybody and everybody in their place. 

But the role of the faculty in this new environment remains contested. Perhaps the old ideal will continue to live in in that small space reserved for the self-preservation of the university "type" in the graduate schools where old fashioned values and 19th century sensibilities will be preserved to preserve the form of modernist principles for the production of knowledge. But even that can slip away to a very small segment of elite institution (returning to a pre-19th century model meant to preserve the distinctions of rank grounded in the forms of education available.  One sees a bit of that as well. Knowledge production and the arts are not inherently at home in the university--they could return to the monastery or the library (think tanks and civil society) or be embedded, again, within the research and development departments of large economic institutions--or it can all go back to the state.  Instruction could return to the tutor--a low status job reserved for lower order social classes (though the dissonance with social justice parameters may cause contradiction). And then there is technology--which is obsoleting both the utility of the university as a space for the amassing of knowledge )in libraries); or as a space for the transmission of knowledge through personal instruction. Dissemination as training or as political-moral instruction no longer  needs the ritual spaces of the 19th-20th century university.  The state, however, industry and civil society, may find it a convenient place to monitor and discipline both the producers of knowledge and its  consumers. It is not for nothing that the university has becme to a large extent a great laboratory of public and private compliance.  All of this requires human factor inputs; it does not require tenure or the freedom of otium (related to the Greek term σχολή (skholē, "leisure") necessary for an unsupervised and unguided  approach to knowledge production.

In the end one might better ask the question--is it the institution one should be worried about, or the factors in the production of knowledge and its dissemination? (Melissa Korn, Andrea Fuller and Jennifer Forsyth, "State Colleges Devour Money, And Student Foot the Bill," The Wall Street Journal 11 August 2023; p. A1; A9). )The latter is not inevitably toed to that quite interesting creature that may be the emerging modern university. That institution--bureaucratic, compliance oriented, output obsessed (in terms of fixed data based measures for knowledge production impact and rates of successful implantation of students into appropriate slots in the wage labor markets--is also at its most useful now as a space for the normalization of normative choices by those with the poser to impose them. But that has always been the case.