Tenure Bedevils the University

The tenure system sustains many of the problems in contemporary higher ed.
by Matthew J. Franck
November 1, 2011

What ails the modern university? Well, where should one start to catalogue its ills? Too many colleges and universities fail to provide their students with a liberal education in any meaningful sense—that is, an education that enables them to liberate themselves from error and baseness. Too many faculty, particularly in the “softer” disciplines, pursue “research agendas” of dubious worth, and build high the silos they inhabit so that they have nothing much of interest to say to many of their colleagues, let alone to their students.

Yet alongside this extreme heterogeneity due to faculty specialization, an almost equally extreme homogeneity prevails among the faculty politically. The social sciences and humanities display more ideological conformity than one is apt to find in almost any other workforce in the economy. This ideological unity produces a range of narrow, specialized courses, too many of which ring the familiar changes of “progressive” grievances regarding race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Throw in a commitment to “diversity” that is only skin-deep, and it is increasingly hard to take university faculty—as a group—very seriously as disinterested pursuers of truth.

Turn the university to another angle, and one sees another set of problems: administrative bloat, increasing use of poorly paid adjunct faculty, and empty “mission statements” about “excellence” while instructional quality suffers. Turn it a few more degrees and see over-reliance on student evaluations, rampant grade inflation and pressure to raise graduation rates, plus appeasement of students as “customers” and fierce competition to attract them with increasingly posh residence halls, food courts, recreational facilities, and entertainment opportunities. Turn it yet again and watch costs rising much faster than inflation for those students and their parents, coupled with opaque admission and financial aid systems, and cumbersome bureaucracies that teach unintentional lessons in caprice and contradiction. One more turn to a new angle: now one glimpses the alcohol-fueled “hook-up” culture, a joyless pursuit of joy with hearts and souls in the balance while faculty and administrators ignore what’s going on under their noses, as student affairs staff piously preach a faith consisting of two moral doctrines of surpassing inadequacy, “consent” and “safe sex.” the rest