"Casualties of the war over tenure" : suppressions des postes de titulaires à l’université ? Réaction d’un journal conservateur à "l’affaire Amy Bishop", Republican American, 7 mars 2010

Casualties of the war over tenure

BY TRACEY O’SHAUGHESSY |REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

Days before mad scientist Amy Bishop fatally blasted her way through a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the president of the country’s biggest university suggested ditching tenure.

Tenure is the coveted relic that protects academics from getting sacked like the rest of us. Echoing the inklings of many in his profession, Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee told the Associated Press, tenure was outmoded. "Someone should gain recognition at the university for writing the great American novel or for discovering the cure for cancer," he told the AP. "In a very complex world, you can no longer expect everyone to be great at everything."

News reports indicate that Bishop’s failure to capture tenure was what led the 44-year-old mother of four to unleash her resentment on six colleagues, three of whom later died. Now that her lawyers are saying the fratricidal Bishop is crazy, and not just an assassin whose rap sheet rivals her resume, we may never know. What we do know is that the Harvard-educated Bishop was peeved that some peon from a second-rate university got tenure over her. (The nerve !)

Anybody involved in the tenure quest can attest that its bloodthirsty dynamics could drive one mad. But neither that — nor Bishop’s vengeful slaughter — is reason to eliminate it. It should be deep-sixed on its own terms. Nobody who draws a paycheck should be immune to dismissal, least of all a university professor with such critical sway over impressionable students. Tenure, which threatens its contenders to "publish or perish," favors the intellectual remove of professors from their classroom, rewarding them instead for adulation in scholarly journals of mind-numbing prose. Its defenders say that only with tenure can a professor hazard the intellectual daring that makes possible great strides in research and thought. Heaven knows how defenseless crusaders like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs managed their feats of derring-do.

Instead of being rewarded for inspiring and engaging students, tenured professors are fossilized into a pantheon of untouchables, immune from the economic realities with which the rest of the world wrestles. And there is just one of its hypocrisies : tenured professors teaching a new generation of leaders to work under strictures to which they themselves are exempt.

But the real problem with tenure, a job protection that exists exclusively in academia, is not so much that it is a relic available to a rarefied few, is that it epitomizes the obliviousness of higher education to reality. To wit : last month, the University of Connecticut’s board of trustees voted to increase tuition for in-state students by nearly 6 percent in the 2010-11 academic year. When room, board and fees are added, the total for in-state students will increase from $19,788 to $20,968. This is during a time of double-digit unemployment when foreclosures soared 8.1 percent among Connecticut homeowners, 49.1 million Americans face food insecurity and food stamps now feed one in eight Americans .

The University of Connecticut, which ranked a hardly laudable 34th in Kiplinger’s ranking of best public university values, might merit the increase if its salaries and pensions were not among the most bloated on the state’s payroll.

(Kiplinger’s number one value, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with an in-state cost of $15,296, graduates 76 percent of its students within four years. UConn graduates 56 percent of its students within that time frame — for nearly $5,000 more.)

In 2008, the 12 highest-paid state employees all worked for the University of Connecticut or the UConn Health Center, according to the Yankee Institute.

Last year, as many of the country’s public universities cut courses and raised tuition, the salaries and benefits of their presidents rose, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education. Gee, the president of Ohio State University who recommended the shift in the tenure process, topped the list with a $1.6 million salary. The Yankee Institute reports Michael J. Hogan, president of the University of Connecticut, earned $616,240 last year. That’s nearly $200,000 more than the $436,111 median salary of most university leaders.

All of these increases occurred at a time of deep dips to colleges and significant reductions in endowments. Let’s review that equation : Plunging endowments plus shrinking donations plus escalating tuition costs equals increased salaries. Yup. That university economics makes about as much sense as tenure.