Academic Keywords

A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education

Cary Nelson, Stephen Watt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135962166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Cultura popular en el arte

Know what academic freedom is? Or what it's come to mean? What's affirmative about affirmative action these days? Think you're up on the problem of sexual harassment on campus? Or know how much the university depends on part-time faculty? Academic Keywords is a witty, informed, and sometimes merciless assessment of today's campus, an increasingly corporatized institution that may have bitten off more than its administration is ready to chew. Cary Nelson and Steve Watt use the format of a dictionary to present stories and reflections on some of the most pressing issues affecting higher education in America. From the haphazard treatment of graduate students to the use and abuse of faculty (as well as abuses commited by faculty), Nelson and Watt present a compelling and, at times, enraging report on the state of the campus.

ACADEMIC KEYWORDS
The Dictionary

A

Academic Departments

The good newsfor students, parents, legislators, donors, administrators, and facultyis that academic departments are very efficient mechanisms for .They assign courses, schedule them, hire teachers, obtain rooms, and do so with remarkably low administrative overhead. Its a complex task, balancing student needs, interests, and requirements with staff expertise and the limits of time and the physical plant. But the job gets done all over the country, and departments are efficient units to handle it.With reasonable diversity of expertise on the faculty, a departmentcan deliver a full curriculum fairly easily. Often you can simply let each instructor do what he or she wants, and the results give you sufficientcoverage and variety. Small departments have to negotiate more intricately, but careful hiring will still insure an adequate and successful curriculum. A department that functions well is thus sort of like a railroad;it schedules trains and dispatches them.

Yet these are about the limits of the enterprise. Academic departments are not for the most part centers of collective intellectual life. A faculty members natural interest group tends to be the people around the countryin other departments in similar specializations and subfields.You may be the only medieval historian in the history department, and in the end youd rather talk with other medieval historians than with the expert on World War II down the hall. The medieval historians in the German and English departments may be better suited to work together than any two people in their own departments. Faculty members on a campus may well form voluntary associations within or across departments that are immensely fruitful, but departments in their entirety are rarely intellectuallyproductive units.

Many faculty members nevertheless persist in imagining that a departmentsomewherein the next state, down the road, over the hillwill be a vital center of intellectual collaboration and interaction, but mostly such places do not exist. Some of the people who devote themselves to departmentalliferather than to their own teaching and researchdo so because they are desperately unhappy and looking for institutional salvation.They make careers out of petty power struggles and are generally not reservoirs of psychic health. Successful and happy departments are often places that simply leave faculty members alone to do their own work.

Departments also often reproduce in miniature the intellectual tensionsand disputes in a discipline, and from that real misery can follow. For debates that are stimulating when carried out in journals and at conferencescan become disabling when reenacted in departments as personalstruggles. Philosophy as a discipline has long been divided between those who work in Anglo-American analytic philosophy and those who work in continental philosophy. Geography is divided between physical and human geography. For decades English was split between those who identified with the theory revolution and those traditionalists who rejected it; the theory folks have mostly won and the traditionalists are thoroughly embittered. Sociology is very nearly an armed camp, with quantitative sociologists finding little or no common ground with qualitativeor interpretive sociologists. History is now pulled as a discipline in two directionstoward the traditional large-scale narratives of the political,military, and diplomatic history of nation-states and toward the more recent project of describing the daily lives of ordinary people. Foreign language departments now encompass two very different faculties— those who make language learning pedagogy their exclusive focus and those who study a countrys literature and culture.The biological sciences are divided between those who study whole organisms and their systems or tissues and those who believe all the important work is done at the molecular level. Speech communication is divided between those who fancy themselves social scientists because they stare at actual fragments of business conversation and those who see themselves as rhetoricians with a humanistic tradition dating back to Aristotle.

In biology this has sometimes led to departments splitting in two. In philosophy or sociology, on the other hand, often a department specializes in one or the other tradition while hiring a few alienated and mistreated representatives of the other school. On occasion these differences erupt into open hostility, and then departments can go collectively crazy, with faculty members cursing at one another in the hallways and doing everythingpossible to sabotage one anothers careers when serving on universitycommittees and review boards. At that point, the operative definition of academic departments might be something like “fratricidal congeries of learned persons.” In extreme cases departments become unable to performkey functions. They cannot agree on who should be head or who should be hired.Warring camps try to demolish every one of each others tenure cases. Fluctuating enemies lists shape basic decisions like teaching schedules and travel awards. At some point, as Charlotte Allen reports, receivership may be the only option: someone from another department has to come in and run things. The department may have to be virtually mothballed until retirements make it possible to rebuild.

Departments can also deteriorate for other reasons.A distinguished Ivy League universitys English department, notoriously out of date for nearly three decades, was finally rebuilt with outside help in the 1990s. Amazingly enough, it continued to be ranked highly for all that time, in the academic equivalent of respect for a decayed but once proud monarchy.For years its department members resisted hiring intelligent new faculty, partly to eliminate potential competition and partly because the existing members hated the way the discipline had developed since 1970. It was in the mid-1980s, however, in the final days of the ancien rgime, that this Brahmin English department heard revolutionary tidings and decided to make one belated effort to save their kingdom. They offered a job to a young modern poetry specialist with a decidedly theoreticaldissertation about to become a book. We interviewed her at Illinois that same year, and by then shed been told she was the more elite universitys likely choice. “If I dont go there,” she told us in our more modest hotel suite, “Ill spend the rest of my life wondering what things would have been like if I had.”What she soon found out, alas, was exactly what things were like there.

At a formal department dinner at the faculty club her first semester, the most distinguished English professor in attendance had obviously begun celebrating the occasion before setting out for the evenings festivities.He made a series of orotund pronouncements and then passed out face forward into the first course. While the prospect of watching him drown at the dinner table was not altogether without appeal to his colleagues,they were uneasy about potential wider recriminations if they failed to come to his aid. So they lifted him up, wiped him off, and propped him up as best as they could. It was business as usual at their boys club. Indeed, our assistant professor was the only female faculty member in attendance.The others were either unwilling to come or uninvited. Soon she was in the job market again.

Just a few years later, by the early 1990s, a midwestern Slavic departmenthad completed a similar downhill slide.¹ Its faculty, either delu- sional or embittered, included two accomplished scholars, but the more influential of the two was apoplectic about the humanities’ move toward “theory” and thus unsuited to make cutting-edge junior faculty appointments.He persisted in conflating academic Marxist theorists with membersof the international communist conspiracy. Feminism earned a contemptuous sneer. The third person in the departments pecking order was unfortunately in the habit of publishing his books on a basement printing press in his house. Meanwhile the departments reputation made it nearly impossible to attract qualified graduate students. The admissions committee, staffed by faculty members, performed a service that might as well have been handled by trained chimpanzees: offering admission to 100 percent of the undergraduates who applied to the Ph.D. program. Those poor souls who did make their way to the rural campus soon abandonedall hope, for the department exploited its graduate students remorselessly, paying those who taught about one-third what the English department did. I suggested that Slavic be renamed the Gulag department,preparatory to closing it down. In the end the campus decided to try delayed rebuilding because it had such strong Slavic studies resources in other units. The fact that the faculty in Slavic did not care for one another seemed the least of their problems.

Yet when departments become the terrain of open warfare, it is not merely because civility and collegiality have evaporated but also because the veneer of academic civilization is pretty thin these days anyway. Departments that mirror fractured disciplines essentially get along by agreeing to ignore their intellectual differences. That means among other things giving up any serious effort to define a common mission. A sociologydepartment evenly split between quantitative and qualitative methodshas little grounds for compromise and no basis for a unified vision of the field. So if people get along they do so in part by ignoring one another.

Whats left is entrepreneurial disciplinarityevery man and woman seeking personal achievement, advantage, recognition, and reward. If a crisis comes, theres no real common bondexcept the abstract commitmentto excellenceto hold people together. Since intellectually divided disciplines encompass partly incompatible intellectual paradigms, there may even be no local departmental history of negotiation over a coherent curriculum. In a fractured discipline, curriculum planning frequently amounts to a turf war. Indeed many departments maintain relative peace only by avoiding large-scale curricular planning. People agree not to trespasson one anothers territory and thereby maintain departmental peace.

The Bloods and Crips have nothing on these departments when it comes to the animosity required to reign supreme in ones “hood. ”

These disciplinary tensions have been exacerbated by increasing personalproblems among department faculty. Put simply, many departments have been overtaken by the midlife crises of their faculty. The long hiring drought of the 1970s and 1980s, when many departments did little facultyhiring and some did none at all, has left a number of departments overburdened with faculty whose career ambitions have collapsed. Departmentsthat begin hiring after a decade or more of abstinence often end up with generational splits, rather than with a continuum of people of different ages at different stages of their careers.

New assistant professors can easily indulge in dreams of fame and influence.Faculty members in their fifties and sixties have to begin to face reality. Those who cannot sustain themselves internally too often look to their departments to tell them they have not failed, that they are really wonderful and successful people after all. The departments have a hard time delivering this message, an even harder time delivering the financial rewards people want as proof. Those who have the least fun are probably department heads who have to serve as psychotherapists as a result, a position for which they are largely untrained. Decreased junior faculty hiring tends to intensify this problem, as does the much more limited facultymobility we have seen in recent decades. The senior faculty member who sends long memos or e-mails to his colleagues regularly is often looking for something he will not find. When an academic department is dominated by people frustrated in their careers, it is not a pleasant place to work.

Over the last two decades a third source of trouble has been added to these intellectual and personal conflicts: the increasing inequities of academicemployment. A department that sustains high salaries for tenured and tenure-track faculty by ruthlessly exploiting adjunct faculty with Ph.D.s is hardly well situated to be honest about any of its other differences.Often enough in the arts and humanities, moreover, it is not astronomicalsalaries versus substandard wages that divide a department but rather bare middle-class incomes for one group (the full-time faculty) versus migrant labor wages for the part-timers. Then no one has anything they can afford to give up, and short-term personal interests dominate every negotiation.

There are certain conclusions to draw from all of this. In many departmentsfaculty should look to their teaching, their research, and their close professional relationships for their career satisfaction. It is a bad idea to depend on collective department life to sustain your identity. A mix of professional relationships at your home campus and elsewhere in the country is generally better than exclusively local ones. But the absence of some common departmental conversation is increasingly untenable. The imperative issues to address, however, are not disciplinary but economic. Departments are first of all workplaces, not intellectual structures or alliances. It is the conditions of academic labor we must first confront. From that conversation, perhaps, we can learn the basis of commonpurposes and common goals. Whether that can lead to disciplinary coherence remains to be seen. But it is a place to start.

CN

Academic Freedom

Academic freedom is the glue that holds the university together, the principle that protects its educational mission. It is the principle that guarantees faculty members the right to speak and write as they please without interference from the university, the state, or the public. It is the principle that gives both studentsand faculty in the classroom the right to say whatever they believe is pertinent to the subject at hand. It is the principle that affirms there are no limits to what subjects and issues educational institutions may study, investigate, debate, and discuss. As Louis Menand writes in The Future of Academic Freedom, it “is not simply a kind of bonus enjoyed by workers within the system, a philosophical luxury universities could function just as effectively without. It is the key legitimating concept of the entire enterprise” (5).

From the outset academic freedom was vested simultaneously in individualsand in institutions. It was designed at once to protect the independenceof disciplinary inquiry and to protect individuals from the exercise of political and economic power, including the power of those who pay professors’ salaries. The first American efforts to define academicfreedom at the turn of the century, as in John Deweys 1902 essay “Academic Freedom,” came at a time when academics had no job security. They were hired on yearly contracts and could be fired at will, as indeed they were. Job security, it became clear, was the only way to protect the speech of individual academics. The American Association of University Professors linked job security with tenure when the organization was founded in 1915. At the same time, business interests were already arguingagainst it.

As Hofstadter and Metzger note in their classic study, the first

American academic professional organizations were founded in the 1880s, and it was these organizations and the disciplines they represented that were to lend authority to individual academics’ claims of expertise. But academics were to be protected not only for speech directed internally,at the university community and the discipline, but also for speech directed toward the world of politics and public policy, at least when events in that larger world pertained to their expertise. Indeed, the struggles over faculty termination that led to the formation of the AAUP and the definition of academic freedom were most often struggles over faculty members’ public statements, either about national policy or universitygovernance, not their scholarship or their classroom speech.

Academic freedom is also, for better or worse, an ideal, not a fact of nature. It must be put into practice for it to have any meaningful effects, and the quality and nature of its observance vary within departments, across institutions, and between countries. The protections it offers differ for different classes of academic workers, with the highest degree of protectionenjoyed by tenured faculty. That tenured faculty have the most secure and protected form of intellectual freedom is not inherent in the concept of academic freedom; it is a function of how academic freedom is deployed and given material reality in various social practices.

Even tenured faculty, however, cannot assume their academic freedom will withstand all forms of assault and all historical conditions. All faculty members lose their academic freedom in a dictatorship, as faculty membersdid in Nazi Germany.The guarantees academic freedom offered were also widely abandoned in the United States during the 1950s, in the long postwar inquisition that culminated in the McCarthy period. As Ellen Schrecker demonstrates in No Ivory Tower, many progressive faculty memberslost their jobs during this period and none were able to speak freely without fear of punishment. Academic freedom must thus be relearned and defended continually.

The widespread betrayal of academic freedom in the 1950snot just in higher education but also in high schoolsdid not do away with the ideal but rather proved its value. The existence of the concept of academic freedomhelped faculty understand what they had lost, what they must guard more carefully in the future. As Joan Scott has written, “it was precisely in its loss that the abstract principle acquired concrete reality” (164).

Although tenure could not guarantee academic freedom in the 1950s, it has served academic freedom well in the decades since then. Its relationshipto academic freedom is less philosophical than practical.Tenured faculty have legal protections against arbitrary dismissal; they can thus speak and write freely without fear of the ultimate professional penalty, the loss of employment. They can take intellectual positions as they wish and defend them with conviction. They can embark on unpopular research projects without fear of retribution. When the British parliamentdefined tenure, as the Chronicle of Higher Education reported in August 1988, it called it ...