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Tenure, Transparency, Corruption
Tenured Radical has written a post that outlines in lurid detail both how the tenure process can be abused by colleagues who have an axe--political or other--to grind, as well as how departmental cultures tend overwhelmingly and irresponsibly to tolerate this type of behavior. "We all have at least one, probably more, colleague who is erratic to say the least, maybe crazy, maybe senile, maybe an alcoholic," TR writes; "And no one ever does a thing about it, even to the extent of saying to that colleague, post-egregious behavior: 'That was wrong.'"
I have a colleague who, in a tenure case I was not part of because of being on sabbatical, wrote a nasty minority report of one (every one else voted in favor of the case) accusing the candidate of being unsuited to the job because s/he is a bigot. An anti-Semite to be exact. And when asked by the department chair why he did this, the colleague responded that he hadn't really meant to damage the candidate, he was just upset with one of the candidate's mentors and wanted to convey that very strongly.Oh. OK. I get it now.
Character assassination at Zenith, as at many other places, is not a new thing, it's just that it is usually done where it belongs, in the bathroom or in a department meeting. It is almost unheard of that anyone writes such a thing down and makes such an evil, stick-to-you-like-gum charge part of an official report. I don't think it will do any damage -- apparently the department, one and all, was appalled across political and ideological lines, rallied around, etc. And I'm sure they are eating baskets of Tums over at the various administration buildings, praying that the case just zips through and that all is forgotten. But here is the thing: at the risk of the candidate finding out this horrible hurtful thing, I don't think we should forget about it. And I think there is something very wrong about the tenure system that practically everyone I have discussed this with since I saw the document has said, Yes, it was dreadful, but nothing can be done.
It is also worth saying that this is one in a long string of horrible things this crazy man has done, and when called on it, he claims that he is only being attacked for his conservatism by liberals who want to marginalize him. Ergo, he also believes that it is his task to go after "liberals" or your Dr. Radical, whom he actually refers to publicly as "the department radical," whenever possible and by any means necessary. This includes spreading false gossip, lying, agreeing to things in meetings and then backing out of them later, and telling students not to take classes from certain colleagues (Dr. Radical, Dr. Victorian, and their younger colleagues are among them) because we "don't teach real history." Whatever that means.
OK, but he didn't do anything to me this time, and actually, since I am now a full Professor he can't do anything to me again but annoy me and waste my time, which was mostly his effect on me before because -- sometimes to my great grief -- I respond poorly to bullying and sometimes just have had to take my licks for it and hope that Dr. Victorian could bail me out. Which she does. But what about his effect on others? My feeling is that we all have tolerated lesser bad behavior because it could be managed, and that because everyone acknowledges that he is crazy, we all manage to stay comfortably beyond his reach. But this time he has Gone Too Far, by making such a vicious attack on a colleague at such a critical career juncture.
The first thing I am going to do personally is tell him that I find this behavior revolting. But I also think he needs to feel the pain, which my personal disapproval will not convey (indeed, it will undoubtedly feed his persectution mania.) My feeling is that he should lose his privileges to participate in personnel decisions for a period of time (forever would be great). But I also think that his behavior as a whole (I haven't even gotten to the hideous things he says in the classroom, which are just racist and sexist, not conservative) needs to be addressed by someone with far more authority than a group of departmental colleagues who will not act, and maybe cannot act, despite the fact that perhaps the only thing we agree on as a group is that we would be thrilled to see him vanish without a trace.
What say the rest of you to this grisly tale? And how do we reconfigure the idea of tenure to link its privileges to a set of ethical responsibilities?
TR outlines several issues here: the shoddiness of a professional review process that cannot deal forthrightly or firmly with individuals who abuse it; the manner in which the shoddiness of this process puts a range of administrators in an ethically questionable position--to honor the assessments in the personnel file as they are meant to be honored, or to look the other way when one of them doesn't conveniently fit with the others; the lack of accountability embedded within academic culture, such that even at those odd moments when someone is called on their bad behavior, and even when that someone admits to it, no consequences follow; and, finally, the abuse of the "political persecution" defense to rationalize unprofessional behavior. Let's be clear on that last point: Whether the individual described by TR is or is not a lone beleaguered conservative languishing in a department of liberals, that does not justify using the delicate and highly imperfect personnel process to try to scupper the career of someone whose views don't tally with your own. The same goes for anyone else--and there are many--who uses his or her academic position to adopt a victimized pose.
Anecdotes such as TR's are common in academe, though this is yet another one of those areas where a lack of hard data makes it impossible to know just how widespread the problem is. My guess is that most people who have been around academic departments for any length of time are in possession of similar tales.
Readers are invited to comment on the phenomena of vigilante faculty members, professional bullying, and political excuse-making. They are also more than welcome to address TR's question: "How do we reconfigure the idea of tenure to link its privileges to a set of ethical responsibilities?" and to consider a subsidiary one: "Is it possible to reconfigure the idea of tenure to link its privileges to a set of ethical responsibilities?"
Finally, TR's comments about the "racist and sexist" statements the problem conservative colleague allegedly makes in the classroom are also worthy of consideration. Though TR does not elaborate on what s/he defines as "racist" or "sexist," TR does suggest--and this is something ACTA has long argued for--that faculty members are not absolutely free to use their classrooms as they wish, and that schools should be doing a lot more to ensure that they know what is happening in classrooms and to guarantee that professors of all political stripes are not bringing ideological agendas in with them. What should schools be doing when a professor gets a reputation for misusing the classroom?
Comments are welcome.
Posted by acta online at December 12, 2006 12:06 PM
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I have a suspicion that your problem here is two fold: 1.) college teaching lacks good operational measures of competence and 2.) that the threat of loss of employment is a salutary constraint on many and perhaps most people, inducing them to keep certain character defects in bounds. Comprehensive abolition of tenure would have the salutary effect of permitting the provost of said college to hand the man a pink slip and of reducing the sclerosis in the academic job market to a sufficient degree that professors unjustly terminated might have greater opportunity to find a niche elsewhere.
We should not be concerned with academic freedom defined as the autonomy of the professor against the requirements of his employer; we should be concerned to generate an optimum of opportunity for aspirant professors to find institutions who have a collective mission with which they can identify and happily advance. And that means tenure must go.
Posted by: Art Deco at December 12, 2006 07:01 PM