July 11, 2011, 8:30 PM
In her new book, “The Faculty Lounges: and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For,” Naomi Schaefer Riley brings together two subjects that are usually treated separately in the literature.
The first is the increasing tendency, on the part of students, legislators, administrators and some faculty members, to view higher education in vocational terms and to link questions of curriculum and funding to the realization of career goals. The second is the debate about academic freedom: what is it, who should have it, should anyone have it? What Riley does is take the standard rationale for academic freedom seriously and then argue that the ascendancy of vocationalism, in combination with other factors she names, undermines that rationale and leaves very few college teachers in need of, or deserving of, academic freedom.
The standard rationale for academic freedom is that the business of the academy is to advance knowledge by conducting inquiries the outcomes of which are not known in advance. Since the obligation is to follow the evidence wherever it leads rather than to a “pre-stipulated goal” (a phrase Riley takes from my writings), researchers must be free to go down paths as they suggest themselves and not in obedience to a political program or an ideology. That is why (and again she is quoting me) “the degree of latitude and flexibility” that attends academic freedom is “not granted to the practitioners of other professions.”
But, Riley observes, “a significant portion of [the] additional degrees that colleges have added in the past few decades have been in vocational areas,” and those areas “simply do not engage students in a search for ultimate truths,” but instead have pre-stipulated goals. “Do we need,” she asks, “to guarantee the academic freedom of professors engaged in teaching and studying ‘Transportation and Materials Moving,’ a field in which more than five thousand degrees were awarded in 2006?”
Riley makes the same point about “vocational courses” that have been around for a while. Freshman composition, for example, “does not demand that faculty ask existential questions.” Ditto for courses in “Security and Protective Services,” and “Business Statistics.” These are, she says, “fields of study with fairly definitive answers” and it would be hard to argue that they are “essential to civilization.” Those who teach these and similarly vocational subjects “don’t really need the freedom to ask controversial questions in discussing them.”
Another category of courses that Riley believes does not merit academic freedom includes “area, ethnic, cultural, and gender studies.” Here the issue is not an absence of intellectual content, but an intellectual content that goes only in one (leftward) direction. Often, she complains, “the entire premise of the discipline … rests on a political agenda.” Courses “often appear to be a series of axes faculty would like to grind.” Since “the endpoint of their academic study is predetermined,” the departments that offer them “are advertising their lack of a need for academic freedom.”
Now, one might think that by looking askance at vocational and political instruction, Riley is calling for a return to traditional liberal arts education with its emphasis on open-ended inquiry and intellectual risk-taking. But in fact she is preparing the way for an argument against tenure.
It goes like this. Tenure, like academic freedom, depends on a certain picture of what goes on in college and university classrooms — high-level discussions tied to cutting edge research into intellectual problems. Tenure protects the freedom of instructors to engage in such research. But in many classrooms, dedicated to vocational or corporate or political goals, that’s not what’s going on, and the instructors who preside over those classrooms need neither academic freedom nor tenure. Only those engaged in the “search for ultimate truths” do.
But wait (I mimic the key moment in late-night infomercials), there’s more. So-called “advanced researchers,” who by this argument alone merit academic freedom and tenure, are churning out work with no connection to a real social need. Riley quotes approvingly the judgment of educational theorist Richard Vedder: “…most of the research done to earn tenure is darn near useless. On any rational cost-benefit analysis, the institution of tenure has led to the publication of hundreds of thousands of papers that are … read by a dozen people.”
So it turns out that the very people who, under traditional definitions and standards, would be protected by academic freedom and tenure, shouldn’t be in colleges and university classrooms in the first place because they are selfishly pursuing their own narrow interests and contributing little to the well-being of either students or society. The entire machinery of tenure is based on the imperative “to say something new,” but, Riley contends, there aren’t very many new things to say, especially in the humanities: “With thousands of PhDs being minted every year, topics are drying up by the minute.”
Wouldn’t it make more sense, Riley asks, to hire broadly educated persons who made no pretense of “advancing knowledge” to teach most of the courses? “Wouldn’t someone who has spent more time on that broad education and less time trying to find some miniscule niche on which to write a dissertation be the better teacher for most of those classes?”
In other words, let’s get rid of the research professors for whom academic freedom and tenure make some sense, at least historically, and have a teaching corps that understands itself to be performing a specific task (the imparting of basic skills to undergraduates) and can be held to account directly when their superiors determine that their performance is inadequate. In short, we need more instructors who don’t merit tenure, and once we have them Riley’s conclusion is inevitable: “There is no reason why tenure shouldn’t be abolished at the vast majority of the four thousand degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States.” There is no reason because every reason usually given in support of tenure and academic freedom has been shown to undermine itself in the course of this quite clever argument.
By calling the argument “clever” I don’t mean to signify agreement with it. My admiration is for the performance of the argument, not its content. Yet I welcome the content too, although for a reason Riley would probably not approve: it demonstrates the practical and political necessity of defining academic work in a way that justifies the resistance to monitoring by external constituencies.
What Riley shows is that vocation-oriented teaching, teaching beholden to corporations and politically inflected teaching do not square with the picture of academic labor assumed by the institutions of tenure and academic freedom. She says that, given the direction colleges and universities are going in, faculty members have little claim to the protection of doctrines that were fashioned for an academy that holds itself aloof from real world issues, either political or mercantile.
I say, and have been saying for years, that colleges and universities should stop moving in those directions — toward relevance, bottom-line contributions and social justice — and go back to a future in which academic inquiry is its own justification.
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