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**JUNE 21, 2023**
Kuttner on TAP
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**** The Republican Attack on Tenure
The defenders of tenure as protecting academic freedom would have more
credibility if they had resisted the plague of adjunct appointees, who
have neither job security nor decent pay.
At least five states governed by Republicans are attempting to end or
weaken academic tenure. This is part of their ongoing war against
liberal intellectuals accused of indoctrinating children. Killing tenure
would make it harder to recruit first-rate scholars to public
universities in these states, some of which are world-class, including
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Texas
at Austin, and Georgia Tech.
The campaign has gone farthest in Texas, where the legislature very
nearly passed a law abolishing tenure outright. The bill was championed
by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, after a group of faculty at UT Austin sponsored
a resolution objecting to the legislature's ban on the teaching of
critical race theory in primary and secondary schools.
Patrick's bill passed the Texas Senate in April; but in May, the Texas
House approved a more moderate bill making it easier to fire tenured
professors, and the Senate agreed to the House bill. Several other
states, including Florida, have mandated five-year reviews of tenured
professors, which are weak on due process and fall short of traditional
grounds for removal such as "moral turpitude."
These bills are a slippery slope. The war on tenure is continuing, and
tenure as protection for academic freedom is worth defending. But I
would have more sympathy for America's professoriate if tenure
hadn't already turned into something close to its opposite.
When tenure was invented in the late 19th century, donors to
universities and some state legislatures had been putting pressure on
public universities not to hire scholars with reformist views. In an
epic case in 1894, the Wisconsin legislature and business interests put
pressure on the University of Wisconsin to fire the great progressive
economist Richard T. Ely, who advocated strikes and labor law to defend
unions. But the university's board defended Ely, who kept his job.
In 1915, the modern tenure system was codified by the American
Association of University Professors, and gradually adopted by nearly
all universities. One key argument was that since college teachers were
not as well paid as counterparts in the private sector with comparable
credentials, they would at least get job security and academic freedom.
Fast-forward a century. Tenure is not doing a great job of protecting
academic freedom, because increasingly scholars of heterodox views never
get tenure in the first place. This leads to insidious pressure on young
academics to pull their punches and accommodate to the orthodoxy, some
of which cries out for dissent.
Meanwhile, the percentage of college professors who are in tenure-track
jobs has steadily fallen, in favor of lowly adjuncts. Between 1987 and
2021, according to the AAUP <[link removed]>, the number of
university teachers with contingent jobs rose from 47 to 68 percent. By
definition, adjuncts have neither job security, decent pay, nor academic
freedom. They are on short-term contracts that are subject to
nonrenewal. Counting prep time, they earn about minimum wage.
Academia, like so much of American society, has divided into a nicely
compensated dwindling elite, and an army of serfs who are so harried
that they lack the time to be first-class instructors, much less
researchers. The AAUP, representing the elite, has issued reports and
statements of outrage about the state efforts to abolish or weaken
tenure. They would have more credibility if they put as much effort into
resisting the plague of contingent teachers.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
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Dueling Bipartisan Proposals to Seize Pay From Failed Bank Executives
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Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill with widespread Republican support,
but Sherrod Brown replaced it with his own. BY DAVID DAYEN
The Socialist Emergence Inside the Democratic Tradition
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At a conference for socialist elected officials, the task is to
'represent the movement of the future in the movement of the
present.' BY MICHAEL KAZIN
Drowned in the Stream
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Hard-hitting filmmaker Amy Ziering on why journalistic documentaries are
facing extinction BY PETER HONG
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