higher ed: the texas skew

Music: Japandroids: celebration rock (2012)

Tis the season for academic service, which means writing letters of recommendation for the associate and full professoriate: letters of recommendation for grad school, law school, visiting and tenure track positions, Fulbrights . . . but mostly letters to help graduates and colleagues secure a "tenure track" position (for those of you reading who are not keyed to what that means, it basically means a position for which there is the possibility of becoming a "partner" in a university or college---in law firm analogy---which means the employer has decided to "invest" in you after a six year trial run).

Letter writing is a kind of labor that is surprisingly time-consuming, but also one I'm coming to realize may be a luxury only ten years hence---maybe sooner, deity forbid. I don't say letter writing is a luxury because writing them is a total pleasure. Ah, but were that so. It is a pleasure to praise a student or colleague whom one adores, to be sure; there's a joy in writing that first draft of a letter for someone pursing a job. But gone is the day in which someone applies for a handful of jobs for which she is suited; today (and even when I was on the market), one applies for dozens of jobs and hopes to get one or two bites. So letter writers are often writing dozens of versions of same letter.

Or at least, in my field; in other fields, like English, a single, generic letter is written and sent to a service or clearing house that then doles them out as the applicant requests. We can reflect on what the development of this kind of service represents, but we won't. And I evoke "we" not in the royal sense, but rather, in the sense that Sister Sledge made famous, with bubbles.

In any event, writing a letter today and thinking about the person I wrote it for, whom I adore, I recalled a conversation I had recently with some very smart, friendly, and engaging graduate students in a cognate program in my home state of Georgia. I was visiting with a seminar a friend and mentor was conducting on a topic that is close to my heart/mind (psychoanalysis). We were talking about the "publish or perish" mandate that has been circulating in the academy for decades, at least at research-oriented colleges and universities. I cannot remember the context, but a student quipped in response to a comment, "but will there be tenure track positions when we're on the market?"

It was a good question, couched in a cynical tone---and that in the key of the rhetorical---but a question that still opened to possibility. I responded in kind: I said that I thought his, and perhaps the cohort after him, may be the last cohort for whom tenure as we know it today is a possible achievement. As higher education finally admits to itself that the for-profit model has taken over management, as higher education realizes that the "reforms" that have taken over and over-made secondary and primary education as a "race to the top," the coming concession is all but imminent. We're already there; we've just not fully owned up to the sell-out.

Tenure as it was is no more. I'm not sure what it was, frankly, because my generation came up through promotion and tenure as the achievement of a kind of "due process," that tenure means one cannot be fired without a hearing, and this after or over many years.

I gather that tenure used to mean one could not be "fired" except by gross negligence or crimes of moral turpitude. Once one achieved tenure, she could stay on indefinitely as a faculty member, and in many cases, whether or not one continued to publish or teach well. Tenure was granted with the expectation that one would continue to teach well and publish as one had before the honor was granted (a tacit agreement). As I understand it, tenure reform came as a consequence of folks taking advantage of this kind of job security: they didn't publish and teaching worsened. "Post-tenure" review was established as a way to keep tabs on, admonish, and possibly get "rid" of the proverbial "bad professor," dubbed "dead wood" during my graduate school days. On the face of it, this is not a bad turn of events, especially when I hear about stories concerning the academy of old (naughty professors, the sort featured in, say, The Man Who Fell To Earth by Rip Torn).

When I took my first job as a professor, however, "post-tenure review" was a different mechanism---a way to measure "productivity," but with a metric external to the discipline in which one toiled. The measure of one's productivity was determined by the institution and less so one's peers. Post-tenure review seems to rest now at this stage across the country as a default---not a guarantee of continued employment, but rather the promise of due process in the event of one's firing. In Texas, however, post-tenure review is something different: it is now the province of the political---politicians demanding "outcome based education" and so forth. "Accountability." A couple of years ago our state was featured in the national media: a partisan policy "think tank" pushed through an initiative to evaluate a professor's performance in respect to student teaching evaluations (basically, customer surveys) and the amount of tuition and grant dollars the professor brought into the university as compared to her salary. The measure of tenure---here code for job security---became an economic metric.

This "new" metric shifts value from a measure of quality to quantity. "We" are hardly surprised; Robert M. Pirsig made this Marxian thematic famous with his 1974 oddity Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: to economize the soul is something like shock treatment (or as I would prefer, the lobotomy: WHAM! quick adjustment). Nothing I say here is news, as the story is rehearsed in so many ways over so many decades, really; it's the academic's "inherency," the trending status quo that higher education is supposed to (perhaps always?) resist. To put it efficiently: neoliberalism is the death of the academic romance that goads so many of us to follow the life of the mind in the first place, and we must resist the forces that seek to turn teaching into a profit-making venture.

I so often want to check what I identify as a "chicken little" tendency implanted in me by the apocalyptic "structure of feeling" of my Baptist upbringing; surely I exaggerate the demise of tenure? But then, I have had so many conversations with older, more experienced academics who say things like, "in my forty years of teaching I have never seen higher education under assault like this." Or worse: "Josh, it's over. There's no going back. The university has changed."

My viewpoint is admittedly colored by my experiences in Texas public education. The university I work at is a political football; indeed, I've never been at an academic institution that is not that, but it seems to me in Texas the politics of education is much more blatant. Our self-identified "conservative" vice governor ("lieutenant governor") just ousted the democratic senator in charge of the higher education committee in favor of someone who would bring "conservative" solutions to the issues faced by the public university system. I do not think my job is in jeopardy, nor that what I do in the classroom is necessarily in danger. What I worry about is that those who come after me, who have to teach and research in the brave new world of post-tenure review---this benefit-less world, this adjunct land of "accountability" in which the number of degrees granted is more important than what they are supposed to represent. What I worry about is this evaporation of what Pirsig dubs "quality" in exchange for the number.

What I worry about, in the thick of the Texas skew, is the death of a certain kind of idealism. Not the idealism that I am quick to critique as a "materialist" (mind over matter, dreams trumping structural change, Oprah Winfrey), but the idealism that is invested in the conviction in scholarship as a form of battling the demons of darkness, of teaching as a way of inspiring curiosity, free thinking, and critical acumen. The kind of idealism at work in a graduate seminar, the freedom to "work-through" difficult ethical problems concerning how to be in the world with others. The kind of idealism that prods a budding academic to ask the question, "but will there be tenure when I'm looking for a job?" Such a question is not only about dutiful employment and job security. Such a question is also just as much about the freedom of thought, the enterprise of thinking, and the value of thinking for its own sake.

Rest assured a total cynicism about the academic enterprise will kill it. I do not ever want to come around to the position of saying, "hey, don't do grad school. It will lead to a job of unrewarding drudgery." I've been reading that sort of sentiment a lot in academic trade publications, and it makes me angry because it seems to buy into the a larger, cultural transmutation of critical thought into an economic measure of worth. Still, as an educator of educators, I think we need to be clear about the stakes now: pursuit of the life of the mind is no guarantee of job security. You don't pursue this for that. If you pursue a vocation in higher education, realize that justifying your existence is now part of the job . . . and the calling. And without the help of the coffer. Academic endeavor has become, effectively, a religious practice.