Mount St. Mary's and Hanging Together

As I watched the debacle at Mount St. Mary's unfold, I was waiting for my tenure decision to come through. As a result, I found that the biggest source of anxiety for me was not the question of whether I would get tenure, but whether tenure would mean anything if I got it. After all, if a business-minded, bunny-drowning president could unilaterally fire not just a provost but a tenured faculty member with no due process, then it seemed like all the work I had done and all the time I had put in to gain tenure might have been a wasted effort, at least as far as the dream of job security went. As I've watched the dust settle, however, I've come to conclusion that Mount St. Mary's and other similar situations, while a loss for particular individuals--and that's not a matter to be brushed aside--may also be wins for faculty generally, insofar as they've demonstrated that the academic community can still fight back.

Watching a tenured faculty member be fired for disagreeing with a university president, I was inclined to agree with Rebecca Schuman's position that, to quote her title, "Tenure Protects Nothing." And to a certain extent, I know this is right. Squid, who left academia to work in the labor movement, has said to me more than once that tenure (at least outside of union contracts) is little more than a gentleman's agreement: there's not a lot to back up the job protections tenure is supposed to provide, beyond university administrations' desire to avoid looking bad in the eyes of the academic community. Even in cases where courts might side with wrongfully-dismissed faculty, it can take years for such cases to work their way through the courts--enough time that the faculty member will likely have needed to move on and find other employment. Steven Salaita very well could have won his case in the courts, particularly since the university's claim that Salaita had not officially been "hired" when he was fired was struck down. But how long would it have taken? Labor law doesn't protect wronged employees while the case is being litigated. How many people can afford to wait around, unemployed, for a year or more for the courts to make them whole?

Legally, then, tenure doesn't offer much protection. But the law is not the only recourse faculty have. As both the Salaita and Mount St. Mary's cases make clear, organized, public outcry from the academic community (particularly when students participate in that outcry) has power. The response to the firing of a tenured faculty member without due process at Mount St. Mary's was immediate and multifaceted. As the Chronicle of Higher Ed reported:

The American Association of University Professors sent a letter to Mr. Newman on Tuesday that sharply criticized his dismissal of a tenured professor without a hearing. By Tuesday evening more than 3,000 scholars, administrators, and graduate students had signed a statement condemning the university’s actions. The Student Press Law Center and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education have also weighed in.

This response from the academic community, both inside and outside Mount St. Mary's, got almost immediate results: Newman's office began backpedalling to an extent that was almost as hilarious as it was inept. Significantly, this backpedalling didn't work. The academic response to Newman's disregard of tenure brought too much negative attention to Mount St. Mary's, and so his head had to roll. Less than a month after he had fired (or tried to fire) a tenured professor without due process, he announced his resignation.

That Newman had to quit--as did the former UIC chancellor who fired Salaita, Phyllis Wise--is important. They were forced out of their positions not because they did something wrong but because the academic community reacted loudly to it--because faculty and students came together to make life difficult for bad administrators and those that protect them. Therein lies our leverage. The best way to stop academic administrations from behaving unethically and contrary to the academic mission of our universities is to make sure that these administrators face consequences for their mismanagement. When faculty are fired for speaking out, we tend to talk about a "chilling effect" that has on freedom of academic speech. But that's a sword that cuts both ways. We can create a "chilling effect" on bad management by holding them loudly and publicly accountable. Administrators will be a lot less likely to dismiss faculty for bad reasons if they know that doing so puts their own heads on the block.

In that sense, I think Mount St. Mary's was more a win for faculty than anything else, because it put other administrators who might be tempted to think like Newman on notice: you can try to fire us, but it might mean your job. But there's also an important lesson for faculty here, too. When we fight, we can win; but all that stands between us and the total domination of administrators like Newman is our willingness to fight. We have to stop acting like our contracts and the law will protect us. Schuman is right: tenure protects nothing. We--the members of the academic community--protect tenure, but only to the extent that we protect each other from wrongful dismissal by standing up against it when it happens. When we fail to do so is when tenure as an idea falls apart. We have to hang together, or we'll all hang separately.

A Modest Budgetary Proposal

[Note: I originally wrote this post a year ago, but decided not to publish it because I was paranoid about the fact that I was getting close to submitting my tenure file.]


When administrators cut liberals arts budgets, they generally cite low enrollments in liberal arts majors; we're not pulling in as much money as other divisions within the university (though it's worth noting that our overhead tends to be considerably less than theirs), so we don't get funded the way the more "popular" divisions do. In a previous post, I made a case for why the university should be willing to subsidize the liberal arts even when our enrollments drop--we may not have the majors, but, unlike the other divisions, we serve the entire campus. Here I want to take a look at a cause of the enrollment problem in order to suggest that university administrations are cutting our budgets for a problem they created, and that the solution to the problem lies in cutting their budgets, not ours.

The usual argument against a liberal arts (and particularly a humanities) major is financial: the question is always, "What are you going to do with a [insert liberal arts discipline here] degree?", implying that a degree is only worth the employment prospects it offers. Those of us who work in the liberal arts are always quick to point out that our disciplines give students the communication and critical thinking skills to excel in a wide variety of careers. But the fact that a philosophy or a history or an English degree doesn't have clearly-defined a career path for many students makes the liberal arts look like a bigger gamble in terms of future prospects. I've had more than one conversation with a student or a prospective student in which they expressed interest in the humanities but were concerned about their ability to find a job out of college. 

At the end of the day, as much as I think this way of thinking is a bit short-sighted, I can't blame students (and their parents) for being worried about their financial futures. The main reason I can't blame them is because of the debt burden most of them take on by going to college. When the average student can expect to leave university nearly $30,000 in the hole, the question of finding a reasonably high-paying job right out of college becomes much more pressing. The student debt problem is of course a product of skyrocketing tuition costs. A Bloomberg report states that a college education costs now nearly 12 times what it cost in 1978, which far outpaces inflation. In a very real way, then, students have been priced out of liberal arts degrees. When obtaining any college degree requires students to mortgage their futures, it's hard to blame students when they focus on majors that give them the best chance to dig themselves out of that debt as quickly as possible.

So if we're looking for a cause of declining enrollments in the liberal arts (or at least enrollments that don't keep pace with enrollments in other divisions of the university), tuition seems like a plausible culprit. If students could leave college with less (or--just imagine!--NO debt), the pressure to choose majors that lead to lucrative careers or that have the highest job placement would be considerably less, and students would be much freer to follow their interests rather than money. Then the question becomes, what has caused tuition to reach these absurd levels?

This is a question much written- and much opined-about, but a recent article in the New York Times makes the case that the real culprit is administrative bloat. This is a point that has been made more than once in the last few years, but it bears repeating (and repeating and repeating) because the problem doesn't seem to be getting better. Administrators make a lot of money--according to this chart, only a tiny handful pull down fewer than 6-figures per year--and their ranks over the last 25 years have been increasing at a rate that far outpaces every other kind of employee within the university. When a school decides to increase the number of highly-paid administrators it employs, this has a much greater effect on the school's budget--and therefore on tuition--than faculty hiring. And hiring administrators does nothing to improve the quality of one of the two primary services universities offer--education--because these administrators (and their staffs--they all come with staffs) don't teach. Neither do many of them support teaching. So students are paying more not for improved quality of education, but to support the administrative hoard that administrators made the choice to hire.

Those of us in the liberal arts should therefore be outraged when administrators cut our budgets not just because this is a short-sighted approach to managing a university, but because they are making us --and our students--suffer for a problem they have largely caused. Administrators make decisions to swell their ranks and hire more administrators; as a result, tuition goes up. Rising tuition creates a strong financial incentive for students to choose majors outside the liberal arts. And then administrators cut liberal arts budgets, citing low enrollments. There are two ways to interpret this chain of events. The more charitable way to view the situation is that administrators are clueless about all of this, that they don't recognize the correlation between their larger salaries and increased numbers, tuition increases, and enrollments. The other option is that business-minded administrators, who may have more in common with Scott Walker and the North Carolina legislature than with the core faculty of the university, want the liberal arts to fail. Neither of these options bode well for us in the liberal arts, or for the health of the university overall.

In light of all of this, I'd like to make a small proposal about how budget shortfalls in liberal arts divisions should be managed. As things currently stand, when budget cuts affect personnel, the first to go are the adjunct faculty. This is a wildly inefficient way to cut budgets, because they make so little money in the first place. A generous estimate of an adjunct wage is $4,000 per course. If you have a budget shortfall of, say, $250,000, you have to cut a lot of adjuncts to get to where you need to be. A deanlet, on the other hand, makes a six-figure salary; a provost-level administrator might make a quarter of a million a year or more. Instead of firing 16 adjuncts (assuming a course load of 4 classes per year)--which affects the quality of instruction either by lowering the number of courses offered and raising course caps, and/or by adding to the workload of already over-burdened full-time faculty, which gives them less time to devote to each student--a university could instead choose to fire two deanlets or a single vice-provost, and the problem would be solved--without affecting instruction at the university at all. Which of these seems like a sounder solution at an institution whose primary mission is education and research?

As faculty, I think this should be our message. Our universities have been mismanaged by people who think the solution to every problem is to hire another 6-figure administrator, and their mismanagement has directly affected our ability to teach and our students' ability to follow their interests rather than their debt burden. So when they come for us, and try to make us do more with less and fire our colleagues, I think we need to come back at them and point out--to students, to alumni, to the community--that they are the problem, not us. Before they start culling our herd, they need to prune their own overgrown, bloated numbers, whether through deep salary cuts or simply firing administrative personnel, re-bundling unbundled tasks and consolidating their work into fewer offices. It's time they started doing more with less. And it's time we as faculty got aggressive about this.

Tenure Oath

[I let this blog go dark about a year ago because my anxiety over the impending tenure process made me paranoid about what I was saying publicly, even under a pseudonym. Now that I’m through that process, I hope to get back to a more regular posting schedule.]

I was recently at dinner with my husband (Squid) to celebrate the news that I have been granted tenure at my university. As we were looking at the menus, I was pleasantly surprised when the waiter arrived at the table with a very tasty bottle of sparkling wine and the message, “Your mother and sister say congratulations on tenure!” (Unbeknownst to me, my sister had contacted Squid to find out where we were eating and ordered the wine for us–I should have known something was up when I noticed he wasn’t looking at the cocktail menu.) As he opened the bottle, our waiter asked where I was teaching and in what discipline. And then he said, “I’m an adjunct, actually, so I know how important tenure is.”

Squid and I heard that comment somewhat differently. For me, it was a quick reality check, a reminder of how messed up everything is in academia. While I feel like I have done the work to deserve tenure–I publish in my field, take my teaching very seriously, and have been an active participant in service roles at my university–it was entirely likely that this man standing next to me had also done the work to earn tenure, or would have be perfectly willing and capable of doing that work if given an adequate opportunity. And there we were, both (probably) deserving of tenure: but I was out for a semi-lavish celebratory dinner with my spouse, and he was serving me wine because his academic job doesn’t pay him enough to get by.* I can’t think of a better metaphor for the inequities of academic employment. I heard his words as a statement about what he is denied–something that is important for him, something that would put him on my side of the table. My survivor guilt kicked in immediately.

Squid, on the other hand, heard a statement about the importance of tenure generally. Though this man has to this point been shut out of the tenure system, he recognized, so Squid thought, that tenure itself is important to the profession, that we need tenure. Whereas I heard an indictment of the inequities of the tenure system, Squid heard support for its potential, for what tenure is supposed to offer.

All of this is of course reading too far into our waiter’s gesture of recognition: really all I think he was trying to say was that he understood why I had cause to celebrate that evening (my feelings of guilt were on me, not on him). But it was a moment that made me reflect on what receiving tenure means, both the good and the bad. The academic freedom tenure is supposed to ensure is a power: it enables those of us with it to stand up a bit more confidently for what we think is right, and to fight against what’s wrong, in our professions, our workplaces, and in the world. Even in the current climate where jobs offered with tenure are rescinded and tenured faculty are fired for disagreeing with the president, it’s hard to argue that, in most institutions, faculty with tenure generally have more security–and therefore more power–than those who don’t. But we only possess this power if we use it. If we are content to let this power be a privilege bestowed on a minority of faculty in part by luck and in part by systematic forces steeped in inequality, we both lessen our power–the more of us there are, the more powerful we are–and we cease to deserve it. Tenure is important to the extent that it gives us the power to fight for our profession. It is meaningless if we don’t fight.

With that in mind, and at the risk of going a little too Citizen Kane (because that turned out so well), I offer a tenure oath–a stab at a set of promises I think we should all make to ourselves and to our colleagues if we are lucky and privileged enough to get tenure. Those of us who get to tenure can’t be content with a system that has some of us seated at the table while our colleagues–at this point the majority of our colleagues–work, often unnoticed, to serve us. We can–and should–use our tenure to do better for all of us.

An Oath of Tenure:

• I promise I will be attentive to the conditions of all my colleagues, whether full-time or part-time, on the tenure-track, off it, or in training;
• I promise that I will never sit silently while conditions are made worse for people lower than me on the hierarchy;
• I promise I will actively guard my profession from all attacks, whether those attacks directly affect me or not, and will fight whenever possible to improve conditions for those that follow me;
• I promise that I will prioritize my responsibilities to others–particularly to junior faculty, faculty off the tenure track, and students (grad and undergrad)–over responsibilities that only serve my personal advancement or those above me on the hierarchy;
• I promise that I will cultivate a personal awareness of how my privilege colors my opinions, try to correct for that privilege, and own up to my failures when I fall short;
• I promise that, when I am in the position of making decisions that will affect others, I solicit and weight heavily the views of those who will be affected;
• I promise that, when I am in positions of power, I will treat that power as a responsibility to those I have power over, not as an opportunity to exercise my will;
• I promise that I will remember that the most important work of the university is done by the faculty and staff lowest in the hierarchy, and accordingly work to enfranchise these people and value their work;
• I promise that I will use what job security I have to support those in precarious positions;
• I promise I will always punch up, and never kick down;
• I promise I will treat tenure as a benefit I must continue to earn.

*I do not mean to suggest that working in the service industry is unworthy work; but from our waiter’s tone it seemed clear that it was not his preference to be working there.