Railroad to Obscurity: The Tenure Track

[Deck Knight]

I didn't want to derail the Teenage Drivers thread with this response. Lets bring the train wreck of the tenure track away from those poor drivers.

Later is a stongly-worded response to Luduan to offer you some goodies later.

The ostensible purpose of tenure is to protect professors from saying controversial things. It also acts as a barrier to firing and tenure-track programs are an incentive to bring in new faculty.

Tenure can and has, however, been abused. Most of the practical areas of knowledge like business, technology, criminal justice, and the hard sciences are unaffected by this plague. Usually they are too busy doing actual work instead of harboring power to protect flawed philosophies. While the Business professor is bringing in speakers from corporations, someone in humanities or victim-studies is stacking the tenure-board with like-minded ideologues. Generally speaking the more humanities professors you have, the less humane the ideological groupthought is. It is very easy to remove yourself from reality when your only contact is with the like-minded.

Indoctrinate U naturally delves into this with more detail(mostly full video) then I can provide.

Academic Freedom is thwarted when the people who control tenure are vested in the ideologies of tyranny. Tyranny, not liberty, is the history of the world. And tyranny has sadly corrupted the academy to an amazing extent.

Ultimately the balance of history shows that when tyranny confronts liberty, liberty eventually wins, but at great cost. If the tyranny on campus is not addressed, the Academy will be little more than a laughing stock. A breeding ground for ignorance and oppression that destroys prosperity as a whole and indeed, condemns individuals who should not have to be sacrificed for a backward endeavor supported by cloistered eggheads wrapped in their own self-absorption in the first place.

Ultimate irony: Academics are the first to be disposed of when the revolution they so pine for actually occurs. Ask your friendly neighborhood Che T-shirt wearer.

Related:

Oh, come on; this is incredibly stupid. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to gain tenure?

First: be an ostensible statist and a minority in a tenure-track program. Survive three years without revealing yourself as a closet conservative and you're pretty much guaranteed tenure. It's harder for the white male professors there days, given they have to run courses essentially devoted to self-flagellation and thus they look ridiculous.

Do you know how difficult it it to remove tenure? Ward Churchill, fake Native American, had to be kicked out of the University of Colorado, Boulder only after his shame to "the Academy" consisted of plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification of other works. Good thing it was the Board of Regents that made the decision and not the Privilege and Tenure Committee. Otherwise we might still have a tenured professor calling the 3000 people killed on September 11th, 2001 "Little Eichmanns."

Speaking of 'ol Ward:

Churchill began working as an affirmative action officer at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1978. He also lectured on Indian issues in the ethnic studies program. In 1990, he was hired as an associate professor, although he did not possess the academic doctorate usually required for such a position. The following year he was granted tenure in the communications department, without the usual six-year probationary period, after being declined by the sociology and political science departments.

Amazingly hard to get tenure, that. But if you think just the right way and throw in some ethnic chutzpah well... the rules can be bent. The standards can be lowered. No wonder this clown supports racial preferences (better known by its PC name affirmative action).

The Academy is a naked emperor ruling over an empty tower. A monument to its own loneliness and obscurity. The view of the little people is gorgeous up there, but the doors are closed and barred, the shine is off the crumbling statues, and the delapidation continues day by day as society marches onward, away from the porcelain obelisks of educated ignorance.

If you don't produce (i.e. publish), you don't get a job, especially in the humanities and social sciences where there can be literally hundreds of applications for a single position.

You mean the academy is just like everywhere else in the real world? Most of us normals, however, do not have the luxury of propagating voluminous tomes of lies to get ahead, and need to have actual experience in fields outside bullshitting, illogical thought, and dogmatic adherence to the religion of Statism.

Now, I know that your real quarrel here is with some nebulous 'leftist ivory tower elite indoctrination program', but still, try to be reasonable. Just because you don't like or consume their product (publications, lectures, etc.) doesn't mean others don't. (This leaves aside the more tangible benefits from scientific research.) If your sole criterion for productivity is necessity then we have little reason to rise above the level of subsistence agriculture. Turning universities into little more than vocational schools, which is what you are effectively advocating, is retrogressive to the extreme.

Talk is cheap, and publications are merely talk that employs primarily one group of men who oversee the modern printing press. It is too bad that so much of that publicly funded talk propagates theories destructive to actual production. How ironic it is that capitalist enterprises publish the greatest number of anti-capitalist books, signs, and t-shirts.

Grocery baggers are obviously not the be-all and end-all of economic prosperity. They are in fact just another part of work specialization that brings advancement and prosperity. And professors are not in and of themselves bad. Unfortunately the professors who seem to have the most time on their hands tend to be in the humanities and victim-studies courses. Probably because the only jobs in those fields are humanities and victim-studies professors. When your dissertations are only required to use buzzwords and scratch the surface of a predetermined menace like "patriarchy" or "heteronormativism" or "white privilege," it's pretty easy to sound scholarly while contributing to the debasement of academy and society at large.

 

[b0b3rt]

Ya, I pretty much agree, along with having real-life experience with such.
My first English teacher in my university disagreed with a paper which I wrote. As a result, the rest of the English teachers who I had tried to "disagree" with me as well.

 

[Luduan]

As usual, your preferred currency is not evidence and statistics, but conservative talking-points, anecdotes, and shrill vituperation. Wading through this wall of reactionary cant against those damned leftist professors, etc. etc., the only point you have made that purports to be backed by argument and evidence, and can therefore be answered factually, is this:

First: be an ostensible statist and a minority in a tenure-track program. Survive three years without revealing yourself as a closet conservative and you're pretty much guaranteed tenure. It's harder for the white male professors there days, given they have to run courses essentially devoted to self-flagellation and thus they look ridiculous.

Unfortunately this appears to be wrong:

The bivariate analyses in this study reveal many differences in the characteristics and outcomes of full-time instructional faculty across race/ethnicity and gender. Asian/Pacific Islander faculty had higher base salaries and were more likely to have tenure and be full professors than each of the other three racial/ethnic groups compared; white faculty also received these rewards more often than black faculty members. White faculty, and to some extent Asian faculty, had more experience than black faculty members, and the research activities and productivity of these three groups also showed some differences. For example, black full-time faculty were less likely to hold doctorates and were less likely to be engaged in research than white faculty. The results for Hispanic faculty members were even more complex; for many variables considered in this report, Hispanic faculty were not significantly different from any of the other three racial/ethnic groups, and the ways in which Hispanic faculty members differed from white, black, and Asian faculty did not follow a consistent pattern. However, white faculty tended to be older, to have received their highest degrees less recently, and to have held their current jobs for more years than Hispanic faculty; white faculty were also less likely than Hispanic faculty to work in two-year colleges. When statistically controlling for a host of human capital and structural attributes, Hispanic, black, and Asian faculty members did not receive significantly different base salaries than white faculty, despite bivariate results showing that many differences did exist among these groups in those background characteristics.

Male and female faculty differed on most of the characteristics examined in this study. Men had higher salaries and were more likely to be tenured or full professors, and they had more experience than women on all indicators considered. Men spent less time teaching and were more likely to teach graduate classes. Further, male faculty spent more time in research and produced more recent works, and they spent more time in administration and were more likely to be department chairs than women. Female faculty were less often located at research universities, and more often at 2-year colleges, than male faculty, and the fields in which they worked varied as well. When these differences were taken into account, women still received lower average base salaries than men. (Source, pp. 21-22)

"On average," notes the AAUP, "women earn 80 percent of what men earn" (source).

It is also incorrect to say that tenure-track positions are easy to come by:

The period since 1972 has seen a steady decline in the percentage of college and university teaching positions in the US that are either tenured or tenure-track. United States Department of Education statistics put the combined tenured/tenure-track rate at 56% for 1975, 46.8% for 1989, and 31.9% for 2005. That is to say, by the year 2005, 68.1% of US college teachers were neither tenured nor eligible for tenure; a full 48% of teachers that year were part-time employees.

Faculty and staff are being eroded by undergraduate and graduate labor and the proliferation of contingent positions, which leads to poorer working conditions and restrictions on academic freedom, and reduces the quality of both research and teaching. Contingent faculty are largely excluded from decision-making and are forced to take on greater teaching responsibilities for less privileges, wages and benefits than those in tenure-track positions. If they don't like it, they are easily replaced. (See here, here, and here.)

The rest of your post is simply David Horowitz's screed in different words. If systematic left-wing bias permeats all aspects of American university pedagogy, one must ask why no evidence of it has been found, and why it appears thoroughly inconsequential. Marc Bousquet rightly wonders why the student victims of such all-pervading professorial tendentiousness have not taken advantage of opportunities to protest grades purportedly resulting from political bias. In those instance in which allegations of systemic bias have actually been investigated, no unambiguous evidence has been found. To take a typical example:

The co-chairman of a state legislative committee that’s investigating whether Pennsylvania’s public colleges are rife with liberal bias and discriminate against conservatives says his panel has not found overwhelming evidence of such abuse, The Patriot-News reported today. “We have some pretty good institutions that are following standard procedures,” Rep. Thomas L. Stevenson, a Republican from Allegheny County, told the newspaper. (Source)
​

"Three sets of researchers recently concluded that professors have virtually no impact on the political views and ideology of their students," reports Patricia Cohen:

If there has been a conspiracy among liberal faculty members to influence students, “they’ve done a pretty bad job,” said A. Lee Fritschler, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and an author of the new book “Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities” (Brookings Institution Press).
​

The notion that students are induced to move leftward “is a fantasy,” said Jeremy D. Mayer, another of the book’s authors. (Bruce L. R. Smith is the third co-author of the book.) When it comes to shaping a young person’s political views, “it is really hard to change the mind of anyone over 15,” said Mr. Mayer, who did extensive research on faculty and students.
​

“Parents and family are the most important influence,” followed by the news media and peers, he said. “Professors are among the least influential.”
​

A study of nearly 7,000 students at 38 institutions published in the current PS: Political Science and Politics, the journal of the American Political Science Association, as well as a second study that has been accepted by the journal to run in April 2009, both reach similar conclusions.
​

“There is no evidence that an instructor’s views instigate political change among students,” Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner, a husband-and-wife team of political scientists who have frequently conducted research on politics in higher education, write in that second study. (Source)
​

 

[b0b3rt]

Read the statistics in the following column:
http://townhall.com/columnists/LarryElder/2003/01/30/leftist_bias_in_college_-_the_denial_continues

This quote also bothered me, just a little:

University of California San Diego Provost David Jordan agrees, "Why should I teach a point of view I don't agree with? I should teach what is useful to the student. I don't know that I have a responsibility to teach somebody's view that is benighted or irrelevant."

 

[Luduan]

Read the statistics in the following column:
http://townhall.com/columnists/LarryElder/2003/01/30/leftist_bias_in_college_-_the_denial_continues

I read them and fail to see the import. I could just as easily do a poll of medical doctors or kindergarten teachers (or Congressmen and -women, for that matter...) and post their political orientations. You have provided no evidence of (1) systemic discrimination against conservative viewpoints inherent in the university, or (2) systematic instances of classroom discrimination along political lines, or (3) routine and widespread professorial proselytism for a particular political viewpoint to the exclusion of all competing viewpoints and discussion. You have also failed to indicate (1) what constitutes "liberal bias" and (2) how such bias purportedly manifests itself. Whether or not most professors happen to be broadly left-wing (and I consider most Democrats to be moderate conservatives, anyway) is irrelevant. What matters is whether access to intellectual life is free, not whether it is fair ("fair" in the sense of the Fairness Doctrine). Requiring students to read and seriously discuss Karl Marx's ideas does not prove bias any more than requiring the same of Milton Friedman's or Edmund Burke's ideas.

As I tangential note, I must say that I wish the ivory tower would do a better job in disseminating left-wing politics. Even hippie-land California is failing in their duty: how dare they let Condeleezza Rice (Professor of Political Science, Stanford) and John Yoo (Professor of Law, UC Berkeley) slip through the cracks! Damn, foiled again!

 

[akuchi]

Why on earth did that quote bother you? They clearly said they were going to teach what is relevant to the student.

 

[Bam]

Obviously the professor wasn't referring to some irrelevant topic such astrophysics being taught in a law class. Yes, it is the professor's job to decide what to teach the students, and there is undoubtedly always going to be some form of prejudice against teaching principles he doesn't believe in, but outwardly stating that his students should and will only ever hear one side of an argument - his subjective opinion - and even indoctrinated against the opposing ideology, is absolutely degrading and unfair to his pupils.

That's the first time I've seen that video, and I was honestly appalled by what I saw. Almost makes me want to go to college out of country (assuming they're any better).

ps - oh yes I'm sorry that I'm only presenting one opinion here. I guess I'm just as bad as the quoted professor >:\

 

[Deck Knight]

What, again, does salary have to do with political bias? Salary has little or nothing to do with the flaws in the tenure system. It'd be like quoting the salaries of baseball players as a means of addressing steroid usage.

Moreover the source you used makes it unclear whether it accounts for the percentage of white or black faculty.

It's easy to say "more" white professors than black get tenure if, in any particular sample, 40 white professors do so along with 20 black, asian, and "hispanic (a ridiculous grouping, btw.)" professors. That the professordom is say a mirror of society with 70% white population and 12.5% black population (and thus minorities were disproportionately receiving tenure) would not be reflected if not controlled for.

Needless to say this is why I posted the link to an excerpt of IndoctrinateU to provide physical evidence of left-wing trickery. The very existence of FIRE is indication that indeed, bias does exist on campus in numbers large enough to support a private legal defense firm to fight such cases.

Condoleeza Rice and John Yoo Uberconservatives?

When was anyone in the Bush Administration outside of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove conservative? I know everything to the right of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin (who all hated each other [and therefore must one or all be right-wing or something], btw.) looks extreme right wing to the statist, but really now, surely you can do better.

David Horowitz supports liberty. That alone makes him less dangerous to me than known statists in Academia: Ex: William Ayers, Pentagon bomber, Professor of Education, ghostwriter of Obama autobiographies, husband of another domestic terrorist and murderer, etc.

What purpose does the Department of Education serve, anyway? They must be pretty lousy given how badly the rest of the first world and sections of the third world trounce our K-12 education system. This is why we must fight for academic freedom in the university against tyranny, against speech codes, against all manner of student and faculty sponsored intimidation. The only true defense some entrenched vagabonds have is tenure, to be gatekeepers of their own kind, insulated to the reality of the outside world.

Incidentely it would not take me long to find more FIRE videos on various "orientation" practices designed to intimidate and humiliate students and force them into victim-mentality groupthink. The information is out there for all those to see.

In fact my own alma mater had its own segregated program for non-white students. I would have understood the logic if it were just orienting the international students, but what orientation towards dealing with other races could a Dominican-background kid from Boston possibly need?

 

[obi]

Doug Cassel: "If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?"
John Yoo: "No treaty."
Doug Cassel: "Also no law by Congress — that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo..."
John Yoo: "I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that."

I think calling him an extremist is justified.

 

[b0b3rt]

John Yoo isn't necessarily conservative, he's just a presidential mouthpiece for wartime propaganda (doesn't believe in the 4th amendment?).
Extremist, yes...

 

[Ancien Régime]

30% of professors on tenure track is still a horrible number imo.

But the REAL problem in higher education is the absurd emphasis of professors on research rather than, i dunno, actual teaching - a good researcher = / = a good teacher (which is why i recommend community colleges or distance education).

Also, there's almost certainly a statist bias in education (as the government pays a lot of the tab), but a particular leftward or rightward bias can be subtle depending on the school. And there are some extremes as well - for every Hillsdale (I like Hillsdale and so does Ludwig von Mises!)there's a Sarah Lawrence, for every Pensacola there's a Warren Wilson, etc.

 

[Caelum]

Firstly, in the hard sciences and the more factually-based social sciences / humanities (economics, linguistics, archaeology etc.) this is rarely a problem. So looking at the less rigorous (in terms of pure facts) academic fields is the only area that matters. I cannot remember the actual study, but there is an element of a self-selection process. For example, sociology was one specific example given. Conservative-leaning sociologists tend to go into private industry to work for corporate or advertising consultants. Liberal-leaning sociologists tend to go into university research. This was established with a fairly high margin, wish I could remember the study name =(. This probably has something to do with conservatives valuing private enterprise over public institutions, as opposed to liberals. While this wasn't in the study and I don't claim it to be scientific; but it seems plausible, a friend of mine who does study sociology once mentioned that the conservative leaning professors tend to be less research proficient. Again, this is probably because the more skilled conservative sociologists are going into the private sector, draining that from academia, and so, naturally, the liberals in that department are going to perform better - and so get tenure!

Anyway, I don't see how the issue of left-leaning professors really matter; to be perfectly honest.

(edit: There is some validity that academics do resent republicans maligning of them constantly. This is brought up somewhat in this article, presented solely to annoy deck knight, by Krugman in NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/opinion/05krugman.html)

On the note of teaching "other opinions"; it depends on the subject. Certain "opinions" are not as valid as other opinions - that's a fact!

What purpose does the Department of Education serve, anyway? They must be pretty lousy given how badly the rest of the first world and sections of the third world trounce our K-12 education system. This is why we must fight for academic freedom in the university against tyranny, against speech codes, against all manner of student and faculty sponsored intimidation. The only true defense some entrenched vagabonds have is tenure, to be gatekeepers of their own kind, insulated to the reality of the outside world.

Many educational researchers and intellectual historians have attributed the poor overall performance to localized control and the democratization of the school system (see Baier, Tamura or Meyer on educational history). You'll also notice the schools that perform better than us, it's the countries where the federal government regulates it entirely.

But the REAL problem in higher education is the absurd emphasis of professors on research rather than, i dunno, actual teaching - a good researcher = / = a good teacher (which is why i recommend community colleges or distance education).

One could also say the community college professors, due to the lack of research background, will not be as proficient in the latest theories, ideas, or information and may not be able to intellectual stimulate certain students due to the lack of background. Each has their significant disadvantages.

 

[The Plant]

Why is college teaching so venerated? I don't see why its so hard to get a job teaching hamlet.

 

[akuchi]

Why is college teaching so venerated? I don't see why its so hard to get a job teaching hamlet.

Was that actually serious?

 

[Luduan]

Incidentally, according to a recent survey, only 6% of American scientists identify as Republicans. Perhaps one should consider other reasons (like the Republican party itself) for this rather than hiring bias, as it seems rather difficult to widely discriminate against scientists based on their political beliefs.