A Tour of the Academy

I’m out in Davis, CA today, finishing up some details from my grandfather’s estate.  I had the afternoon free, so I wandered around the UC Davis campus.  I spent 10 years here, but I left in 1994.  So, it’s a bit strange.  The Economics department, for example, is in a new building, and a look at the faculty roster shows that there is only one professor still teaching from whom I took a class (in graduate school—none of my undergrad profs are still teaching).  There are two others for whom I was a TA.  And few others who were around when I was in grad school.  My old office is now a computer lab for Political Science (shudder).  I think they painted my old undergraduate dorm.  And the place I used to work when I was an undergrad is now a locked room with a mirrored window in the door—who knows what Top Secret activities take place where I used to run the VCRs for the campus.  (Note for young’ins—VCRs were like DVDs, but bigger and more awkward.)  The whole campus felt like that—eerily familiar, yet strikingly different.

So, thinking about colleges, it seems like a good time to review Riley’s The Faculty Lounges.  The subtitle tells all:  The Faculty Lounges and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For.  There are two problems with that title: 1) It ends in a preposition—a grammatical failing which always causes me pain, and 2) it is terribly misleading.  The Book should really be called:  The Faculty Lounge: Why Tenure Should be Abolished.   That title is honest, but wouldn’t sell as many books as the title the book actually has.  Such is capitalism.

This book, predictably enough, is not well liked by academics.  I decided to read it now rather than waiting for it to come out in paperback because I kept hearing people castigate it.  I don’t think the people castigating it have read it.

On the whole, there isn’t really all that much shocking in it; it’s not a terribly polemical book at all.  It takes a long and critical look at the rise of adjuncts (visiting faculty) and the problems of the tenure system.  I really have a hard time imagining anyone disagreeing with Riley’s assessment of the situation.  The debate is thus not whether there is a two-tiered system in the academy with a Select Few getting Lifetime Jobs and the Masses ending up in low-paid, low-prestige jobs with absolutely no job stability at best and a guarantee that the job won’t last more than 5 years as the norm.  The debate is what to do about it.  On the one side the well-meaning liberal academics think the solution is just to tenure more faculty.  Such an answer shows a rather shocking ignorance about the cost of such a plan.  On the other side is Riley and people like her, who argue that Tenure should be abolished.  After all, nobody else gets permanent jobs, so why should academics?  Abolishing tenure, Riley argues, would free up the academy, making it more flexible and responsive to students.  Not surprisingly, when you say to faculty that maybe tenure should be abolished, faculty get really agitated and make disparaging remarks about your book even if they haven’t read it.

I’ve read the book now.  It’s pretty good—not earth-shattering, and I didn’t learn all that much, but Riley organizes the facts in a nice way and she writes well.  If you want to read a book about the state of the modern academy, I have no hesitancy in recommending this book to you.

Am I persuaded?  Nope.  And neither, I suspect, are many other conservative academics.  You see, in the modern academy, tenure protects not just deadwood (the technical term for faculty who have retired on the job), but people with opinions which are really unpopular in academic circles.  That would be people like me.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I honestly don’t think I would get fired from Mount Holyoke because of my views.  Indeed, I think Mount Holyoke as an Institution likes having me around—it’s like at the zoo when they have one of those prehistoric-looking birds and everyone can say, “Oh, look at the strange bird over there.”  Having one religious conservative on campus is kinda cute.  And it shows how committed to diversity Mount Holyoke really, truly is—they even have a member of the Religious Right in the Economics Department.

So, the reason that I would argue strongly in favor of keeping tenure at MHC is not that I am worried about losing my job.  It is the other side of the coin—if I was wrong about that and I did lose my job, finding another job would not be as easy as it should.  The problem is the way the academic job market works.  Because schools cannot have a mandatory retirement age for tenured faculty, when schools go out to hire, they want to hire young faculty.  If you don’t hire young faculty at every chance you get, then you run a real danger of having a very old faculty down the road.  So, the market for 45 year old professors, let alone those in their 50s, is very, very thin.

This problem is what economists call a coordination failure.  Now if every school abolished tenure simultaneously, then the market would free up and there would be a market for 45 year old profs.  Perhaps a big one.  Indeed, I could probably get a raise in that new world.  But, now we are living in Fantasyland.  And that is where Riley missed the point—even if she is right that it would be better if there was no tenure, as a policy prescription it is DOA.  How is anyone going to coordinate a massive simultaneous abolition of tenure?

Moreover, Riley spends too little time thinking about what that new world would be like.  I have no idea how things would change in that new world, but it is not obvious that things will get better in any way that Riley or I would like.  The problem is that the academy, unlike most industries, has no real measure of productivity.  So, in the new post-tenure world, schools may scramble to adopt productivity measures to decide when to keep faculty, And it is quite possible that the productivity measures many schools will adopt will be counter-productive.  Class sizes?  Student teaching evaluations?  Performance on standardized tests? 

And (another) moreover, I am not at all persuaded that tenure is really the biggest problem facing the Academy these days.  The bigger problem is the very real question:  What exactly am I getting for $50,000 a year?  To that question, schools have no good answer.  We need a new articulation of the benefits of a 4-year undergraduate education, but the Powers that Be have not yet developed a language to describe it, partly, I suspect, because they don’t really know the answer themselves.  It’s a shame.  It’s not hard to articulate a reason why an expensive undergraduate education is the best thing you can do for yourself or your child, but I think many schools no longer believe in themselves, deep down they think they are frauds, so they buy off the students with nice dining halls and hope nobody notices.  Tenure is irrelevant to that larger problem.  Indeed a school which could forcefully articulate why it exists and charges so much and then put together a curriculum to back up that claim would do very well, even with a bunch of tenured professors.