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Tenuring the trained conformist
At the Chronicle of Higher Education, a recently tenured English professor reflects on how the tenure system works to socialize academics in a manner that runs contrary to the ideal of free inquiry that tenure is ostensibly designed to protect:
Professors are, for the most part, people who learned to please grown-ups when they were children -- and sometimes never stop, even after receiving tenure.Perhaps I have never been "me," since my entire life has been spent seeking approval from teachers, editors, colleagues, and even my students. I find it difficult to think without triangulating my thoughts through the minds of other people.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of tenure is the possibility of slowly and tentatively developing a sense of integrity -- of becoming yourself instead of what you think other people want you to be. But, after a lifetime as a supplicant, it's hard to know where to begin. Is there a "self" within that "construct" who just received tenure?
That pattern of defining oneself in relation to authority figures is so deeply ingrained in academic culture that it may take decades to overcome. How do you know what you believe if you do not allow yourself to think in ways that challenge the values that have made you what you are?
Apart from offering hope for an integrated self, tenure raises the old existential possibility of choosing to be free, of finally taking responsibility for one's actions, instead of blaming one's failings on some oppressive institution. What happens to a self-conscious "outsider" who becomes vested in the garb of the local "establishment"? In time, the pose of exclusion degenerates into the pseudo-embattlement affected by so many privileged and celebrated academic rebels. How does power speak truth to itself when it denies its own power?
The article goes on to rationalize tenure as an opportunity for academics to become active citizens of institutions where previously they were disempowered subjects -- but the rationalizations, eloquent as they are, cannot compensate for the damning portrait of dissociated quasi-intellectualism that the author develops in the paragraphs quoted above. Instead, they raise a series of broader questions about what it will take to fight the well-documented absence of intellectual diversity on campus, suggesting that any analysis of ideological bias in academe, and any program of institutional reform aimed at improving the balance of perspectives represented on faculties and in classrooms, is incomplete without a corresponding analysis of whether--and how--the tenure system selects for and even mandates styles of intellectual (and social) conformity that are incompatible, ironically, with the principle of academic freedom tenure is said to uphold.
It's no accident that the author of the revealingly confessional paragraphs above is an English professor. An analysis of the conformist imperatives of the tenure system would do well to begin with the academic humanities, where one's mastery of one's discipline is increasingly defined in terms of how well one has mastered an accepted political approach to one's discipline.
Posted by acta online at March 17, 2006 09:24 AM
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