A Cease-Fire Proposal in the Tenure Wars

Gabriela Montell at the Chronicle's On Hiring blog was kind enough to link to my tenure post in her recent summation of the latest battle in the tenure wars. She asks, "Can tenure be saved or is it time to chuck the system?" Maybe this is the wrong question. Maybe what we need is a synthesis of the various positions out there that can lead to a cease-fire. That's what I'm shooting for in this post. (Aim high, I say!)

Building on a favorite metaphor of mine, and picking up where my last call for making tenure more flexible left off, here's my big idea: give institutions, departments, and individuals the opportunity to opt out of the tenure system. Of course there's a catch: institutions that opt out must accept unionization of their faculty; departments that opt out must make only full-time hires; and individuals who opt out must agree to the terms of a scholarly performance-ranking system created and maintained by their professional association.

Here's the bare bones of an explanation and justification. On the institutional level, the only way to avoid universalization of the contingency nightmare we've been slouching our way towards for a generation is to recognize that there's no way anyone without tenure can be in any sense of the word "managerial"--which is to say that even by the flawed logic of the Yeshiva decision, the employees of such a college or university would have every right to organize. Only institutions whose administrations make legally-binding pledges to not oppose any organizing drives should be allowed to take this step. [Update: And employees at such institutions should all be represented by the same union, even if they are in right-to-work states.] On the departmental level, everyone needs the same teaching and service load so they're competing on a level playing field. In fact, professional associations should identify [Update: the union members of such departments must join would negotiate] a required teaching/service load for tenure-less departments, so everyone in the country employed at such places is on a level playing field when it comes to research. On the individual level, highly productive reseachers at departments with tenure may want to enter the competition [Update: and join the nation-wide union]. In exchange for the loss of job security, they're basically announcing they're ready to be recruited by the departments and institutions that have opted out of the tenure system. Probably those who had chosen the research-service or research-teaching tenure or post-tenure options in my proposed expansion of the tenure system would be the ones most likely to take the next step. As for ranking the scholarly productivity of individuals without tenure, I'll leave it to the professional associations to come up with a quantifiable set of criteria and develop a formula that has broad consensus. I'm thinking a point-based system like the Rolex Rankings in women's golf may be the way to go. But we would probably need to develop a series of conferences for the tenure-less, along the lines of what I half-jokingly proposed in my first-ever "Around the Web"ed piece here, so we can truly compare performance.

I guess what I'm thinking here is that tenure is a joke at many R1 places: full-time, tenure-track faculty may as well be contingent labor for all the odds they have of actually getting tenure at such institutions. While I was in grad school, the unspoken rule was that "junior faculty should be seen and not heard" and they were explicitly referred to as "temporary faculty," by the tenured and administrative alike. The main function tenure plays at such places is as an incentive for the outside hires they've made at the senior level to actually stay at the institution for a time and as an incentive for their junior faculty to attempt the impossible. In my system, the institution would need to come up with other incentives to keep their top faculty and everyone, not just the junior faculty, would be under pressure to maintain or improve their individual rankings [Update: , while the union they all joined would protect their basic rights and negotiate terms and conditions].

There's more to be said, but not by me. What say ye, Blogoramaville?

[Update 4/1/08: Check out Professor Zero's and Lumpenprofessoriat's proposals.]

The Long and Winding Road II: A Response to Craig Smith; or, Elaborating the Model

It strikes me that Craig and I have been unpacking everything about the "two out of three ain't bad" tenure model except for the model itself. Sure, I've noted that it's really a 4-tiered and not a 2-tiered model, but that's just a correction to my original fragment of a post.

So let's elaborate what, for lack of a better name, I'll call the Meatloaf model (because you can play it on your 4-track?):

Track 1: The traditional tenure-track job, in which you need varying degrees of excellence in varying weightings of the traditional triad to get tenure at a variety of institutional types among the 4000+ colleges and universities in the U.S.

Track 2: The research-teaching tenure-track job, in which, in exchange for a lower teaching load, higher research expectations (or vice versa), and no service responsibilities, you accept a lower salary than those on Track 1 (but equal to Tracks 3 and 4).

Track 3: The teaching-service tenure-track job, in which, in exchange for a lower teaching load, higher service expectations (or vice versa), and no research responsibilities (outside of course design and class prep), you accept a lower salary than those on Track 1 (but equal to Tracks 2 and 4).

Track 4: The research-service tenure-track job, in which, in exchange for a higher service load, higher research expectations, and no teaching responsibilities, you accept a lower salary than those on Track 1 (but equal to Tracks 2 and 3).

Of course these aren't the only ways of elaborating my Meatloaf model. But for now, let's leap into some possible applications of it....

Are we imagining it as something strictly limited to conversions of non-tenurable positions into tenure-track jobs? There are pros to this version of the model, as some of my colleagues on a UUP activists' listserv have noted: 1) it prevents administrators from converting already-existing pretty-darn-good jobs to worse ones; 2) it prevents administrators from doing the same thing over time by making all newly-created positions fit Tracks 2-4 and further reducing the number of Track 1 positions offered; 3) it provides a clear way for people already doing a great job at an institution to compete with outside candidates on the (nearly-)inevitable national search that's involved for (most) any tenure-track position, as it provides something of a disincentive for those who really want to aim for Track 1 to apply for any other kind of position; 4) it provides both greater flexibility and clarity to the people in the non-tenurable positions (as well as to departments) in terms of workload expectations than the current system, not to mention better salary and benefits, security, and advancement opportunities.

Are we imagining it as something imposed from above or proposed from below? This question is implicit in the reasons why it might be a good idea to "test-drive" it, as it were, on tenuring the non-tenurable. Or to rephrase the question, how and at what level are decisions made as to which kind of track a formerly contingent faculty member gets on? I can imagine several models: 1) the administration chooses the track, in consultation with the department, before the position is advertised; 2) the candidate chooses the track, in consultation with the department, after beating out everyone else who applied for the position; 3) the administration, department, and candidate work within ground rules negotiated with the faculty union or AAUP chapter, or, in their absense, the university senate or other faculty governance body, or, perhaps guided by principles set out by national professional associations like the MLA and AAUP and faculty unions like the AFT, NEA, CWA, and SEIU.

But why imagine it only for this limited purpose? Why not start with general principles at the national level and negotiations at the campus level, and then, within the rules hammered out, give administrators, departments, and individual faculty members the widest range of choices they can agree to? For instance, under what circumstances can you jump tracks--or be involuntarily transferred from one to another? Think of the institutions that can't afford to offer sabbaticals all that often--why not have the option of switching from Track 1 to Tracks 2 or 4 at teaching-intensive institutions for those faculty who wish to focus more on research for a set period of time? Why not use it to give teeth to post-tenure reviews? Tenured free rider who's been boycotting service for a decade? Boom--Track 2 for her! Tenured deadwood when it comes to developing new courses and doing any other kind of scholarly activity in living memory? Boom--Track 3 for him! The budding administrator who's been getting course reductions for chairing departments, senates, and chapters? Boom--Track 4 for her!

Hey, why would we need an administration if we had this system? Could the Meatloaf Model lead to the withering away of the administration-faculty divide that Marc Bousquet so vehemently denounces over at How the University Works--or "the administration" itself?

Hold on a second, isn't this moving way too fast? Hey, nobody here but us bloggers.

The Long and Winding Road: Another Non-Response to Craig Smith

Loved Craig's latest post in our highly asynchronous exchange. But as I'm hosting a visiting speaker the next three days and trying in some small way to repay him for the hospitality he showed me during my Fulbright year (he was my faculty mentor at Seinan Gakuin University), I'll have to resort to apologetically nodding Craig's way, recommending Berube's takedown of Bauerlein on faculty work(load) as strangely relevant to our discussion, reporting that my department has voted with its feet, as it were, for a combination of his 3rd and 4th options, and noting that my university doesn't even have a unified policy for the hiring of nontenurable faculty (as in, even finding out what each department does is a major project, much less figuring out the rationale for their procedures).

[Update 3/8/08: Undine surveys the range of takedowns of Bauerlein over at Not of General Interest and adds her own 2 cents!]

Want/Need/Love: A Non-Response to Craig Smith

Craig Smith at FACE Talk graciously and thoughtfully unpacked the issues raised by my fragment of a post on tenure, which was itself a sequel to my post raising the possibility of negotiating in addition to lobbying for more tenure-track lines. In neither post was I advancing an argument that I'm 100% behind, but instead floating possible solutions to longstanding issues that arise when a faculty union (or faculty/professionals one like mine) represents both the tenurable and the nontenurable--and seeking insights from Blogoramaville. So I really appreciate Craig's taking the time to take up these issues in an ongoing exchange with me and I encourage anyone interested to join in.

But since work is actually getting in the way until the very end of the week, what I can do here and now is thank him for making explicit my Queen allusion. Or whatever it is you call it when you've forgotten (repressed?) that you are, in fact, making an allusion. I can't quite say it was unintentional (is this a non-denial denial?)--I must have put it in quotes for a reason--but to the best of my memory it was for a technical rather than musical one (look and clarity, that is). But, yes, I am a Queen fan. Or maybe they're just one of the many bands from the '80s in particular that have burned their way into my memory bank, never to be rooted out. I'll blame Wayne's World rather than my ex, who was the real Queen fan in the family at the time! Who am I to put down her love of Queen when, pre-grad school, my musical tastes spanned Journey, Men at Work, Weird Al Yankovic, "Eye of the Tiger," and more that I really don't have time to confess to.

So, back to Queen, I suppose one of the biggest problems with the actually four-tiered tenure system (RTS, RT, RS, TS) I was proposing in a thought experiment kind of way is that it institutionalizes the dichotomies of want, need, and love posed in my not-quite allusion. And not only from the perspective of the institution but also from that of the faculty member. I'll really have to finish unpacking this later. Lots to do before I drop the girls off at day care!

[Update: Reading over Craig's post again just as quickly as the first time, it strikes me that I may have been working my way toward a quibble--and maybe more than a caveat--with his proposed starting point. And with that perhaps-suggestive fragment, back to work!]

[Update 2/28/08: I am SO tempted to erase all evidence of my humiliating Queen/Meat Loaf switcharoo here, which Craig was ever so kind to point out in comments, especially since Inside Higher Ed decided to feature the first two posts in our exchange. But no, let the historical record show that I am an idiot! I'm just glad they didn't link here.]

We Take Requests II

When Hug the Shoggoth asks about one of the section titles of next week's talk, CitizenSE listens. And excerpts:

Westward Expansion, Manifest Destiny, and the “Opening” of Japan

It makes sense to begin a history of shifting American images of Japan with the expeditions headed by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853 and 1854. But I want to start in the previous decade with the Mexican War of 1846-1848, for there is a direct connection between it and the appearance of the Black Ships off Edo Bay. Beyond the fact that Perry himself was a celebrated veteran of the Mexican War, I will go further and claim that the “opening of Japan” was made possible by the “winning of the West.” To see why this is so, let’s review the larger history of U.S. westward expansion over the course of the nineteenth century and examine notions of American manifest destiny that became popular by mid-century.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the United States went from being a small nation of thirteen states on the east coast of North America to a large nation in possession and control of much of the continent, including the noncontiguous territories of Alaska and Hawaii. Before the Mexican War, the largest expansion of U.S. borders occurred in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase. What we now know as the Haitian Revolution, the world’s only successful slave revolt, made this purchase possible, as France lost interest in its North American holdings after losing the most valuable colony in the New World at the end of the eighteenth century. It took most of the first half of the nineteenth century for the U.S. to actually control the territory it purchased, as Indian Wars and Indian Removals punctuated crises and compromises over the expansion of American slavery. But by the mid-1840s, after the purchase of the Oregon territory from England, a border dispute between the recently-independent nation of Mexico (formerly New Spain) and the even-more-recently independent Republic of Texas (formerly part of Mexico) provided a pretext for the U.S. to start the Mexican War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war in 1848 on highly favorable terms to the U.S., along with the California gold rush in 1849, gave the U.S. government great incentive to turn their paper purchase of what is now the American Southwest into actual U.S.-controlled territory, not least to have Pacific ports for exploration, trade, and projection of military forces and strategic interests. Although this process was interrupted by the Civil War and took up much of the second half of the nineteenth century, even by mid-century many American explorers, scientists, and missionaries had joined the whalers and traders criss-crossing the Pacific—not to mention Herman Melville, who published several novels set in the Pacific and Pacific islands years before Perry arrived in Japan.

Having reviewed this process of U.S. westward expansion over both land and sea, we are now in a position to appreciate how white Americans’ prior experiences with, and representations of, enslaved Africans and their African American descendants, American Indians, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, and peoples of the Caribbean and Pacific influenced their views of Japan and the Japanese people. The Perry expeditions also relied on European, particularly Dutch and English, accounts of Japanese culture and society, which were shaped in part by their own histories of colonization of Asia and elsewhere. Combined with the fact that the U.S. delegation wasn’t permitted to visit major Tokugawa cities, it’s no wonder the earliest American representations of Japan focused on exotic landscapes, architecture, and clothing, on village culture, non-Western religion, primitive technology, and simple weaponry, as John Dower’s Black Ships and Samurai documents. They fastened on what their history prepared them to see.

Please tell me how to make this better! And, if possible, shorter!

We Take Requests Here at CitizenSE

A Japanese colleague of mine whom I've responded to here before recently asked me what I had on the sketch "The Intelligence Office." I emailed him back with some quick ideas and promised an update here. This is it (or maybe the first part if I can't finish it between classes today!).

As you can see here, the only time I've previously blogged on "The Intelligence Office" is to link it to Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen in an aborted larger argument aiming to show Hawthorne's intimate knowledge of the importance of international trade (including the slave trade) on the fortunes of Salem, colonial New England, and the northeastern United States. The narrator's comment, "Judging from its description, it was beautiful enough to vanish like a dream, yet substantial enough to endure for centuries," could apply to the idea of America as easily as it could to the estate of the "man of deplorable success." And indeed there are several sharp ripostes at American politics and imperialism sprinkled throughout the sketch.

But as you can see from the following excerpt from my email response to my colleague--

I think "The Intelligence Office" is a very interesting sketch. If you have time, I strongly recommend Kristie Hamilton's arguments on the importance of Hawthorne's sketches in general, in The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne (2004) or in her book America's Sketchbook (1998).

My own interest in the sketch is different from her emphasis on Hawthorne's anticipation of modernist (and even postmodernist) aesthetic and social issues. I'm interested in the 19th C and earlier resonances of his emphasis on "proper place" (which I use to investigate Hawthorne's ideas on race, class, and gender politics).

--what I am most interested in is the way "The Intelligence Office" provides evidence that Hawthorne in the early 1840s was engaging his culture's interests in the relations between the external and the internal, the material and the spiritual, the physical and the psychological, the real and the symbolic, between manners and morals, appearances and essences, in everything from transcendentalism and romanticism to phrenology and physiognomy to the American School of Ethnography. If you read the sketch alongside such earlier meditations on these subjects as "Fancy's Show Box," "Roger Malvin's Burial," and "Young Goodman Brown," you'll see it reworking that earlier interest in the relations between thoughts and actions. And if you read it alongside contemporary or later tales and sketches like "A Virtuoso's Collection," "The Procession of Life," "The Birth-mark," "Rappaccini's Daughter," "The Christmas Banquet," "Earth's Holocaust," and "The Custom House"--or novels like The House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun--you'll see Hawthorne's abiding interest in classification schemes of all kinds.

The scholarly work I'd most recommend for understanding the context for Hawthorne's engagement of these issues is Samuel Otter's brilliant study Melville's Anatomies--I can't think of a better evocation of the times or investigation of an author's engagement with them than any other recent work except Eduardo Cadava's Emerson and the Climates of History, and Otter more systematically analyzes the various attempts to know (human) nature in the antebellum period than Cadava.

As for myself, I find Hawthorne's suggestion at the beginning of the story and confirmation at the end that the agent of the sketch's "Central Intelligence Office" to be the "Recording Spirit" a fascinating anticipation of Destiny in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series of comics and graphic novels. Certainly Hawthorne is engaging religious themes that energized the Puritans--the difficulty of reconciling God's omniscience, omnipotence, and benevolence--when he has the agent reveal

"My agency in worldly action--my connection with the press, tumult, and intermingling, and development of human affairs--is merely delusive. The desire of man's heart does for him whatever I seem to do. I am no minister of action, but the Recording Spirit!"

Thus the opening simile--"He looked like the spirit of a record--the soul of his own great volume--made visible in mortal shape"--and the intermediate elaboration of the book of life metaphor within it--

Human character in its individual developments--human nature in the mass--may best be studied in its wishes; and this was the record of them all.... It would be an instructive employment for a student of mankind, perusing this volume carefully, and comparing its record with men's perfected designs, as expressed in their deeds and daily life, to ascertain how far the one accorded with the other. Undoubtedly, in most cases, the correspondence would be found remote. The holy and generous wish, that rises like incense from a pure heart toward heaven, often lavishes its sweet perfume on the blast of evil times. The foul, selfish, murderous wish, that steams forth from a corrupted heart, often passes into the spiritual atmosphere, without being concreted into an earthly deed. Yet this volume is probably truer, as a representation of the human heart, than is the living drama of action, as it evolves around us. There is more of good and more of evil in it; more redeeming points of the bad, and more errors of the virtuous; higher up-soarings, and baser degradation of the soul; in short, a more perplexing amalgamation of vice and virtue, than we witness in the outward world. Decency, and external conscience, often produce a far fairer outside, than is warranted by the stains within. And be it owned, on the other hand, that a man seldom repeats to his nearest friend, any more than he realizes in act, the purest wishes, which, at some blessed time or other, have arisen from the depths of his nature, and witnessed for him in this volume. Yet there is enough, on every leaf, to make the good man shudder for his own wild and idle wishes, as well as for the sinner, whose whole life is the incarnation of a wicked desire.

--allows the story to be read as a gloss on abstract, even universal problems of theology and ethics. But I think even this version of the sketch is an interesting anticipation of Gaiman's Endless.

Now, the classic take on the sketch is Melville's claim in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" that the seeker after Truth is Hawthorne's own self-portrait, although I wonder whether the person the narrator jokes is "invariably out of place" and who cries in anguish--

"I want my place!--my own place!--my true place in the world!--my proper sphere!--my thing to do, which nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought, all my lifetime! Whether it be a footman's duty, or a king's, is of little consequence, so it be naturally mine."

--might be an ironically distanced sketch of a younger self. Of course, it's also possible to see in the figure of the Recording Spirit himself Hawthorne's own wishes for his art, or to argue that Hawthorne dispersed his own wishes and desires throughout a range of characters, so I'm not sure how productive this line of argument ends up being. The seeker after Truth's comment to the Recording Spirit could well be Hawthorne's commentary on the sketch itself:

"And what are you?" said he. "It will not satisfy me to point to this fantastic show of an Intelligence Office, and this mockery of business. Tell me what is beneath it, and what your real agency in life, and your influence upon mankind?"

So the sketch could just as easily be linked with Hawthorne's exploration of various writer analogues--whether artist or scientist--in his fictions of the 1840s and 1850s, and thus be autobiographical at a remove, in the sense of exploring the functions and powers of literary texts and the roles of authors in the antebellum U.S.

In the end, though, I would emphasize that Hawthorne's idea of the Intelligence Office is connected to the Herald's Office that runs throughout his writings in this same period. I've blogged on heraldry in Hawthorne's and others' fiction a little bit here already, so I won't say too much more right now. But it would be both interesting and informative to explore the ways the Intelligence Office discloses Hawthorne's interests in subjectivity (a la Pfister, Gilmore, Goddu, and others who look at the emergence of the middle class and domestic/affective life in this period) and the Herald's Office in genealogy (a la Bentley, Yellin, Carton, and others who look at the emergence of whiteness and classification schemes/racial sciences in this period).