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February 23, 2010

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"The idea of a disgruntled faculty member resorting to violence never seemed to me to be an especially farfetched possibility."

When I worked in Lower Manhattan post-9/11, and we dealt with devastated and increasingly disgruntled business owners (a small but vocal minority), I used to worry about a workplace shooting. We had an unlocked door to our office right across from the elevator, and a slight (in build) receptionist in front of a partial wall as the only "defense" against anyone who entered.

Then at MIT there was James Sherley's hunger strike after he was denied tenure...

I guess I'm saying I too can see clearly how Bishop's case is the exceptional outcome of a highly fraught, not uncommon situation.

(Add to this the whole Braintree connection and I have obvious been just short of obsessed w/this case!)

I personally like the idea of tenure, but like with union membership, I find there's got to be some way to correct for the calcifying effects of seniority. These kind of workplace security ideas are good...up to a point...and then, like you point out, very clearly, there becomes this blocked opportunity for new minds and research and energy by our elders who literally age in place so much so that universities sometimes seem like rest homes for a small % of emeritus faculty, former stars from their heydays. (Yes, many of them officially retire and then just hang around, but we have no shortage of doddering faculty who have yet to do this, still wandering the halls, practically living at the university). And basically younger faculty are left waiting for that line item in the budget - i.e., that tenured professor - to open up via someone's retirement.

Urban planning as an academic discipline is relatively new, launched in the late 60s, and so this turnover issue is a major problem in the field right now, as the wave of first tenured faculty hang on. And it's infuriatingly absurd hearing how much simpler tenure was when it was given out mostly to a white, male faculty (we have one guy who just retired who was literally verbally offered his job by a professor in a totally collegial way, then spent the next 40 years in our dept) compared to how it is now - and opaque, often - how many pubs are needed, how many should be books, are patents a benefit or a hindrance, etc. And as in the Sherley case, where I honestly think his outspoken pro-life values probably alienated his colleagues more than anything, but he was the only black faculty member in his department, the secrecy and politics of the tenure process just needlessly open universities up to lawsuits.

I don't know if the immediate aftermath of the Bishop case is the best moment to raise the tenure issue (since too many pp are quick to dismiss this case as an extreme outlier), but I'm glad to see some of the publicity given to the tenure process around it. I hope the debate keeps up.

As a former tenured faculty member who left in part because of dissatisfaction with higher ed generally, I can agree that I really didn't see tenure serving the purposes it was supposed to. The most outspoken member of our department was untenured and would never get it. Tenure was the most use to me when I was serving on our local school board and some volatile types wanted me fired. I always thought that AAUP and others wasted good opportunities to establish and enforce themselves high standards of accountability to get at the rot that you both have described. Instead of hauling out an "academic freedom" that seemed to protect best those able to get along well enough to get tenure to start with, we needed to be able to say "here's what good performance is and here's how it's measured and we'll take it on ourselves to help those who can't meet it until it's clear they can't. Then we'll support their removal, tenure or not." But we didn't and now have the situations you describe, not that it would likely have stopped Bishop. The last point is that it's not just a matter of stultifying truly remarkable minds and perspectives. Tenure can also stunt personal growth. It's like "house arrest" when you can't sell your home. The security of tenure when you do have it makes it harder to take second career risks, even when you know you've ossified as a faculty member. I left to do policy work and run a couple of agencies. My wife still stares at me sometimes. But I've never looked back and thought "gee, I had tenure!!" I was lucky to have opportunities, but I was also dissatisfied enough to take them. I think it's pretty clear that there are a lot of tenured types who've missed one or both.

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