296. Can Professors Now Defend Tenure?

Soon-to-be Presidential candidate Scott Walker of Wisconsin and leaders of the Republican-held legislature are proposing changes to the tenure rules for college professors there that has quickly provoked "hundreds of faculty members to sign a letter opposing the changes" (NYT, 6-5-15).

There's apparently a national debate coming and before my still-active colleagues get into it I'd like to show what Walker and his friends in the  legislature could hit them with.

But first some recollections.  I became a college teacher at a time (1948) when many of my older colleagues were fresh from — or more accurately, wearied by — the fight to get tenure established, as it was in 1940 in a joint statement by the American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Colleges and Universities.  This, the famous "1940 Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure," accepted by administrators, legislatures, and courts, nailed down what we have now.

What needs remembering here is the primacy of academic freedom.  It came first in the statement, and it justified tenure.  Tenure was "a means to certain ends," the first of which was "freedom of teaching and research and of extramural activities."  Economic security and the attraction of able people were secondary.

The ground we in the AAUP stood on when we argued in public — as with a legislator — was the common good.  And the common good "depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition."  The search is not free if you have religious trustees ready to fire you if you teach the wrong thing about God.

"But suppose you teach communism.  Is that in the common good?"

"Yes, because we teach communism without advocating it.  We give knowledge of communism.  We college professors are not advocates of anything.  We are searchers — disinterested, impartial searchers — for truth.  And presenters of results."

That's the way the argument went and that, after a lot of tiring repetition (it started in 1934), is what won it.  Professors had to be secure in their jobs or they couldn't serve the common good in their peculiar, truth-seeking way.  Against the possibility that it might be a truth-imposing way, an imposition of my truth — my philosophy, my politics, my group's politics —  you as an administrator or legislator had their promise: we are not advocates.

Now for what you have to keep in mind as you argue with Scott Walker and the Republicans.  The two statements below appeared in 1990 in College English, the teacher's journal with the largest circulation.

"[For equality and democracy] the teacher must recognize that he or she must influence (perhaps manipulate is the more accurate word) students' values through charisma or power — he or she must accept the role as manipulator.  Therefore it is of course reasonable to try to inculcate into our students the conviction that the dominant order is repressive." 

"I would argue that political commitment — especially feminist commitment — is a legitimate classroom strategy and rhetorical imperative.  The feminist agenda offers a goal toward our students' conversions to emancipatory critical action." (Lead article, April, 1990.)

Were these statements (uncontested in the journal, as far as I can find) a sign of what would be accepted in our universities?  If Wikipedia, easily accessible to Walker and his legislators, is to be trusted they are.  Wikipedia will tell him that feminist pedagogy, "a form of critical pedagogy," challenges "the view that education is a neutral cognitive process,...that knowledge and teaching methods can be value free." He will find that "the standpoint of a feminist teacher is of the political nature" and that the aim of " feminist analyses [is] to inform and reform teachers’ and students’ ways of acting in and on the world." 

So, by what's laid out under feminist pedagogy or critical pedagogy (worth your checking) either Wikipedia can't be trusted or what English departments accepted 25 years ago is pretty well still accepted.  And Scott Walker can make an issue of that. "Professors," he can say, "no longer have special support for their specially secure position."  

Coming down from that high ground we once argued on does not mean that there is no other good ground.  One might even argue that the common good is better served by a teacher's service to a higher cause, like social justice, though seen by others at the time as just his or her truth. 

That's possible ground, but it's no place to stand when you're arguing with Scott Walker.  A ground on which you would lose fewer points would be the need for economic security.  Legislators will understand that but it's so widely shared in the world of employment that there professors will just have to fight it out like everybody else.  Get ready for this, from the streets:  "Right on, Scott.  Talk about special!  Those people never get laid off.  Who the hell are they?"