The relative silence of blogs in discussing Amy Bishop is almost as odd as the collections of incidents leading up to her arrest.
Bishop - the University of Alabama professor who shot up the Biology Department faculty meeting - puts an interesting wrinkle on both workplace shootings and on mass events at schools. And all of it complicates the usual left/right divides on gun incidents, school politics and the mindsets of shooters.
For me the case has felt unusually intimate: my Mother was Chair of her department for pretty much all of my youth, and ran an undergraduate program until she retired. The ins and outs of tenure process, the dynamics and politics of faculty relations and the occasionally unpleasant employment dilemmas... all of these were part of my growing up experience, and inform a lot of views on higher education as well as my approach to interpersonal dynamics. The idea of a disgruntled faculty member resorting to violence never seemed to me to be an especially farfetched possibility.
And when Amy Bishop's arrest was announced - before anyone knew who the exact victims were - I said to my Mom, "she shot the Chair of the Department. And the head of her tenure committee." And she did.
I don't blame anyone for focusing on all the wild details that have surfaced since the shooting - how unstable Bishop appears to have been, the questionable events that led to her brother's death, the incidents of temper and violence she displayed. People ask about background checks and investigations... but it seems clear that even in-depth checks of official records might well have missed much of her past, and it's unfair, I think, to suggest that Braintree officials were somehow negligent when a family insisted that an accidental shooting was, well, accidental.
But ultimately, Bishop's past, while fascinating, tells us little about the matter at hand: the potential for violence on collge campuses, and the aftermath of difficult personnel decisions like tenure.
As revealing as I think the relative silence in the right is in reminding us that all their gun rhetoric tends to fall apart in the face of actual incidents, the ones that tend to make some basic ideas of gun control seem both reaosnabe and prudent; it's the silence of lefty faculty bloggers that seems more telling. As long as the Amy Bishop story can be isolated down to its odd details, we don't have to ask some harder questions about tenure, and whether Bishop's behavior doesn't raise some uncomfortably close issues that won't go away.
Unlike my Mom, I have a somewhat mixed feeling about tenure. Its much lauded role as a support for academic freedom strikes me as overstated, and its practical effect - which has been to provide lifetime appointments regardless, often, of departmental needs or individual performance - has stifled opportunities for many. Tenure, among other things, tends to serve as an enormous obstacle to diversifying faculty in nearly every way; not just limiting opportunities as minority faculty and women make up a larger portion of the university faculty, but diversification of ideas and challenging prevailing assumptions in a variety of fields, an ironic contravening of the kind of goals tenure was meant to help protect.
This has only gotten more and more apparent over the years, particularly as the Baby Boom generation has aged into senior faculty and administrative roles at most universities. By sheer numbers, the Boomer generation has succeeded in locking younger university educators in many schools and departments out of tenure track options, creating a whole new class of transient faculty who cannot rely on long term appointments (though many wind up in year-to-year roles that stretch on indefinitely). This, in turn, has played remarkable havoc with teaching loads, research expectations, and the student experience, as many classes, especially at lower levels, are left to journeyman junior faculty, while tenured senior faculty take lighter loads and restrict student exposure to what tenure was supposed to enshrine - their experience, knowledge and skills as teachers.
Many universities, too, have exploited all of these tensions in a variety of ways to improve their bottom line. Limiting growth of tenure track roles, many schools will not even allow consideration of new faculty for tenure roles except to attract "stars", set high bars for achieving tenure, and prefer the more powerful position the Administration has over yearly appointments to provide cost control and have more leverage in hiring and firing. And in terms of quality, it's becoming harder and harder to argue that a ten year, nontenured veteran is somehow providing less student value than an elite tenured, but less available senior faculty member.
This growing two tier divide in university faculties has already created tensions that have bloomed into enormous employment headaches for schools: around the country, graduate students with Teaching Assistant roles have begun to take longstanding gripes over poor pay and long hours and unrealistic teaching loads and turned to unionizing - which it turns out, many "liberal" universities suddenly oppose. Many schools have watched charismatic, popular teachers - often minorities - turn their tenure rejections into cause celebres, leading to lawsuits, reinstatements, or simply bad feelings in their wake. And almost everyone agrees the standards for tenure have become incredibly, often impossibly high: "publish or perish" doesn't begin to cover requirements that scholarship be not just good, but highly visible (and in most grant making situations, highly dollar generating as well). And all of this high level pressure has brought with it the increased insistence on professionalization of previously non-degree careers, and the requirements for Doctorates in fields where such degrees are often scarce, and of overall questionable value.
And into all of this... we can now mix in Amy Bishop.
I'm not suggesting that we're likely to see lots more Any Bishops; hers is clearly an exceptional event in so many ways and hard to generalize. But the pressures and limitations of tenure, and the difficult employment climate at many schools is not likely to get better soon; indeed, with the collapse of so much of our economy in the recession, it's clear that pressures to reduce costs, or at least to manage funds more prudently, will pressure schools to make further adjustments. And if its not an ever increasing narrowing of opportunities to get and keep tenured roles... it will be the school that challenges the status quo by testing the possibility of elimination of tenure altogether. And no, it may not stick... but the question, once asked, is unlikely to just go away: why are schools and faculty clinging to tenure... and why won't anyone admit how broken it actually is? I don't think you need to be at gunpoint to see that. At least... I hope not.
"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.
Posted by: Leigh | February 23, 2010 at 07:58 AM
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.
Posted by: mike | February 23, 2010 at 05:16 PM