CSUN University News Clippings

Commentary: Stanley Fish: Academics Under Siege

(October 20, 2009)

The responses to last week’s column sent a clear message, and that message is bad news for the academy. The perspectives represented were various, but they converged on a single judgment: the academic world is marked by venality, pretension, irresponsibility and risible claims.

The posters were reacting to my review of Amy Gajda’a new book, “The Trials of Academe,” which tells the story of how courts that used to practice “academic abstention” and defer to internal academic decisions now intrude themselves into every corner of university life. Not a moment too soon, more not less and what’s so special about the academy, anyway, were sentiments often expressed.

Academics are of course aware that there is a certain amount of hostility toward them and their practices, but they like to attribute that hostility to the public relations efforts of conservative critics who, they contend, construct caricatures that are too easily accepted by the public. But the comments I received come from readers of all political persuasions and from both inside and outside the academic world, about which almost no one had a good thing to say.

The complaints are made on behalf of multiple constituencies, students, faculty, other professions, society. Students, Melissa said, are often victims of “bait and switch” tactics when university bulletins list classes that have not been offered in years “due to faculty moving on and/or retiring.” The universities then charge exorbitant rates for services they do not deliver. If ordinary vendors did that, she adds, “they would be in jail in short order.”

But this is an instance where the assertion of “academic difference” does have a point. When a business loses an employee it can either promote from within or hire from a qualified pool of applicants. When a college or university loses a professor, the process of replacing her may take years: first there are department meetings and then meetings with an administrator who may or may not authorize the hire; then the search (at least a year), the offers, the counter-offers and the possible rejection, after which you have to start all over again. (I’ve known departments of English that searched for a senior Americanist for 15 years.)

Meanwhile, catalogue copy is prepared yearly (sometimes twice yearly), which means that universities are almost always “lying” about their programs. Let’s say a student applies to a department because it offers a specialty he is interested in, and he arrives to find that the key players — the ones he wanted to study with — departed last month. It’s hard to see why he should have a legal remedy. There is really no one to blame, no policy change that could protect students from encountering the same unhappy situation, unless you wanted to make a rule that no one could resign or accept another position without giving five years notice. In this case it seems perverse to invoke the terms of contract law, as so many posters did. Should a university be compelled to a performance it was incapable of rendering given the conditions of its marketplace?

Complaints on behalf of faculty go in another direction and emphasize the absence of fairness and due process. “The truth,” says LZ is [that] universities are notoriously horrible employers.” Al is even harsher: “Used car salesmen have better corporate standards.” Betsy reminds us of “the blatant and harmful discrimination against women (and minorities) that characterized academia into the 1970s.” Joseph Lefet calls the tenure process “unethical” and asks us to imagine “a process in which the accused is not given the opportunity to challenge the accusations and the accusers.”

“Accusations” and “accusers” is not quite right. What the candidate for tenure undergoes is serial judgment. First there is the judgment of the department, based on internal reports, teaching evaluations, outside letters from experts in the field and the candidate’s own report on the content and progress of upcoming projects. After a vote, a recommendation is sent to the dean’s office, where the file is scrutinized by a dean’s committee usually made up of elected members from a variety of departments in the college. After that committee votes, the file is scrutinized again by a university-wide committee that reports its conclusion to the provost or vice president for academic affairs, who then forwards his or her recommendation to the office of the president or chancellor. The final determination, usually pro forma, is made by the board of trustees. (The details of the process may vary at different institutions.)

The problem is not so much the procedure (which is, like all procedures, vulnerable to manipulation and bias) but the nature of the judgments being made: whether a body of work is derivative or constitutes an advance; whether the methods used are up-to-date or outmoded; whether the accomplishment is sufficient to merit career-long support. These judgments are subjective, not in the pejorative sense of being whimsical or arbitrary, but in the blameless sense of not having been produced by an objective calculus. Disagreement about the outcome is therefore inevitable. No candidate ever says, “Yes, they were right not to promote me,” and no court that is brought in will end up doing it better, only differently.

Again, it is hard to see how the process could be reformed, short of promoting everyone, and while there are some who might favor that solution, it would bring its own problems: departments would soon be tenured up and the aspiring generation of scholars would be without positions to occupy. Why not then get rid of tenure altogether, as several posters urged? If you did that — if all employment in universities were employment at will — the anxiety, uncertainty and low salaries now experienced by the ever-growing army of adjuncts would be experienced by everyone, and, as a bonus, political meddling would quickly become the order of the day. Misery may love company, but that much?

Once it becomes clear why students cannot be thought of as customers (the “product” they pay for is continually in flux) and why faculty members cannot be thought of as factory or office workers (standard measures of performance are not and could not be available), the claim of academics to be different begins to make a certain sense. Not the claim to be special, to be a rarified race of beings purer in their motives and aspirations than other mortals — that is nonsense (although some academics subscribe to it in their heart of hearts) — just the claim to be working in an area where the usual criteria for assessment and productivity do not apply and the usual contractual obligations sometimes make no sense. So that while SAM is certainly correct to say that “the notion that any institution is . . . exempt from compliance with the provisions of our constitution is bizarre,” it is not bizarre to think, as Steve does, that “there remain some areas where academic abstention makes sense.”

One of those areas is the assessment of academic performance. Courts are surely capable of determining whether a product warranty has been honored, but are they knowledgeable enough to determine whether the interpretation of a literary work is worthy of promotion? “If a panel of Shakespeare scholars agrees that a certain book on Hamlet is a bad book, then who is to question that judgment?’ (Stephen). Grading, admissions decisions (so long as they are not blatantly discriminatory), the assignment of courses, appointment to committees and to department offices are just some of the contexts where courts would do better to tread lightly, if at all. If academic abstention means that courts stay away from “do-overs” and don’t set themselves up as arbiters of professional merit, it seems to be a sensible doctrine that falls far short of giving the academy a free pass on any and all matters.

But I fear that no defense of academic practices, however nuanced and moderate, will be successful because, on the evidence of the comments, the anti-academic animus that depresses Thomas Zaslavsky is deep and pervasive. There is a general sense that academics have cushy jobs they don’t even perform, that they inhabit a wonderland of “privileged sleaze” and display an “overweening sense of entitlement” (Victor Edwards). dan1138 speaks for many when he proclaims, “We simply don’t need a cosseted privileged class able to demand lifetime job security in exchange for some hypothetical intellectual function.” They just don’t believe that the yield of maintaining us in a protected enclave is worth the enormous cost.

It was not always thus. In the early sixties, when I taught at UCBerkeley, faculty members received special and respectful attention from merchants and shopkeepers. Weeks after the Free Speech Movement of 1964, we had already learned that it was best to keep our university affiliation under wraps. A corner was turned and it doesn’t seem that there is a way back. David Berman tells us that “the solution is to stop whining and behave well.” I have been preaching that lesson myself, but even if it were heeded (an unlikely outcome) it probably wouldn’t be enough.

Publication: The New York Times