The Grass is Greener on the Other Side

Here is the first of my responses to Ken's Ten Things we all should know...

The original conception of the college was a fine one indeed. It would have been wonderful to have the college planted with native plants and grasses found in the Pine Barrens. Had this been done from the outset then I believe a different aesthetic could have been established and might even have been award winning.

I would strongly encourage the college now experiment in this area, committing itself to making a gradual shift over to this plan, maybe making a commitment to converting a certain amount of square footage of the grounds to these alternative plantings over a period of years.

The reason that this should be a gradual process, I think, is that we are competing with other colleges who, like ourselves, cater to people who have a certain aesthetic. This is how a college should look – lots of lawns on which gentlefolk might have wonderful tea parties! But challenging this aesthetic, and announcing that we are going on an alternate route, could work to our advantage. We could get national attention for the college if we made a grand announcement that by a certain date we would have removed grass from the college (except on the athletic fields). If we lead, others may follow, and we could even have this named the Stockton, or South Jersey, aesthetic.

Of course, how we would handle golf courses (at the newly acquired Seaview Hotel) in such a case (even though the athletic exception was in place) would be an open question!

A final point: it would be worth actually determining how much of the campus is devoted to green lawns, and how we compare with other colleges in this regard. Looking around the campus I am struck by the fact that we have less terrain devoted to grass than many of the colleges with which I am familiar. If this impression actually reflects reality, it would be worth considering whether or not this is a result of the original vision being put in place and perhaps having an impact on what we did over the years.

10 Things Everyone Should Know About the Early College

In my judgment one of the sad facts about the College is that we have not passed on the early culture or, at least, the best parts of that early culture. Because we haven’t done so, faculty joining the College from the mid-1980s until today have had to “invent” a culture and, as might be expected, that culture reflects graduate experience at major universities.

Thus, there is a reason for us early folk – those who came here at the beginning and into the 1970s – sensing that we are more like those major universities each day.

Let me hasten to add that some of the ideas we had when the College opened were not good ones. Perhaps the best example, was the idea that we would not have a remedial writing program here; instead, each faculty would teach writing in the context of their courses. In a sense we would not have a “writing problem” because all of us had a writing problem and we would deal with it individually.

All of this made sense in the months before we opened but, in practice, and given the types of students who came here, it was a bad idea. By 1975 we had a full-blown writing program.

Still many of our ideas were good ones; at least I thought so then and still do. It is those ideas that haven’t been passed on and, thus, few faculty know about them today. I hope in this brief listing of the 10 things everyone should know about to, at the very least, suggest that there are reasons why we are the way we are.

Finally, in case you are wondering why some of the ideas are still not part of our culture, I blame the early faculty. A few simply did not accept the innovations we had put in place and wanted to replicate their graduate experience.

Grass

The original plan for the College was to use grass only on athletic fields. The campus was supposed to have been planted with native plants and grasses found in the Pine Barrens. In a recent email exchange with Richard Schwartz – the first College Planner – he confirmed this plan.

Had we followed the original plan, we would not now have constant mowing – usually outside my classroom windows while I am teaching – and the resultant noise and pollution. I am uncertain why we moved so quickly to planting grass but it was everywhere around the original buildings by 1974.

Modular Construction

Given the pervasive modular construction of public (and private) buildings today, the fact that the College is constructed of modular metal panels comes as no surprise. In 1971, however, using them here was noteworthy if not unique.

First of all, the buildings were designed using a “5 foot open module”. This means that anything inside the building can be changed easily. It also means that the metal used to construct the buildings was available in standard sizes; comparatively little cutting or welding was necessary thus speeding the construction process.

But there was another reason – a more subtle one – for modularity. As Richard Schwartz describes it:

….the physical plan had to meet the educational criteria, in both site and building development. Stockton’s educational plan was based on academic divisions rather than traditional departments. Therefore individual buildings for departments were not considered, and all of the building units were designed to be part of one continuous facility, with each multi-use wing or pod, connected to a central spine or gallery.

This means that our buildings can respond quickly to changes in pedagogical design and purposes. The Founders envisioned an institution that would change its curricular direction as needed and do so quickly. For example, as computer technology advanced, the College could construct labs in a variety of configurations. No one department or division had control over space as is so often the case in older institutions.

An even better example would be the open science lab concept which the College started with in 1971. This idea was very new – as far as I know it was only used at one other college in the US;  there would be one big room for all science labs. A chemistry class might meet there in the morning and in the afternoon a physics class might use it. Each class could set up the lab space needed by moving lab tables and by plugging into gas/electric/water receptacles in the floor.

It sounded wonderful but, unfortunately, it didn’t work in practice. There were safety concerns, some experiments had to be left for long periods of time, equipment storage became a major problem and setting up took time out of the class.

Finally, the overall College design had a “street” (commonly called the Gallery) with classroom wings off from that. This street would be a place to meet, buy things, eat and commune. It would remain but all other buildings inside could be shaped according to academic needs.

No Chairs

There is a simple reason why the institution has no departments and departmental chairs; the Founders had had bad experiences with them. Each of us had had chairs – in the 1960s they had both budget and hiring/firing power – who abused their power. We openly sought for other ways of organizing faculty. We were, of course, not the first college to experiment with not having department chairs but we were the first in New Jersey.

Basically, we thought chairs could undemocratically influence the pedagogy, the level of faculty competence, would exacerbate class differences to control and would favor some faculty over others. We had real-life experiences to confirm these fears.

By creating elected co-ordinators we could produce a rather powerless office in which all members of a program would serve, we could instill in programs a democratic decision making process, we would eliminate favoritism and rank differences by insisting that all faculty work together for the common good. At the same time we shifted power up to the dean’s level to whom we gave budget and hiring/firing power.

It seems to me that recent suggestions to change this arrangement to Department chairs would vastly move the College into the problems we worked so hard to avoid. Some programs at the College already act like departments by allowing the co-ordinator to make unrestricted and un-reviewed decisions. That is never tolerated in other programs who see the value in the original arrangement.

Scattered Offices

The recent wondering about why faculty offices were not clustered around disciplines – as they are at other colleges – almost convinced me to write a general note to the faculty explaining why. Again, it was not an accident.

The Founders’ thinking was that the natural tendency for faculty is to group by discipline (or by the closest distance to mail and copy machines). Given our insistence about innovation and change, we decided that we would have “scattered offices” where faculty would be grouped by the variety of disciplines and not by one. Thus, in my first faculty office in H-Wing there was a senior psychologist next to me with a nurse on the other side. Across the hall, was a real estate expert, a very young mathematician and the nearest LITT person was well down the hallway.

I have always relished the many discussions – and a few arguments – that took place as we shared our perspectives on classroom problems, administrative actions and student silliness. More importantly, we found a community of folks whose similarities vastly outweighed their few differences.

In spite of the distances that faculty might have to walk to get mail or make copies, I suggest that this is a practice worthy of strong opposition whenever someone who doesn’t understand attempts to change it.

Choice

When I was an undergraduate in the early 1960s, I had two choices – Music Appreciation or Art Appreciation – in four years. The rest of the courses I took both in the English Department and in general education were chosen for me on a mimeographed piece of paper. The Founders – once again – were determined to give students as many choices as possible. Also, again, we didn’t invent this idea; it was very current in the new colleges that were popping up almost every year between 1965 and 1975. One other factor, at least, was an influence as well. Students had just been allowed to drink at 18 and were going off to Viet Nam to fight. Our thinking was that if they could drink and risk dying for us, they could certainly choose among a panoply of courses.

Choice was critical for the General Studies course offerings. In the programs, we left it up to those trained in the discipline to determine which courses students needed and in which sequence.

We never kidded ourselves, however, that students would arrive at the College prepared to make intelligent choices. Thus, teaching students how to choose was a central requirement for faculty preceptors. We thought that – through questions and discussion – students could be guided to identify their interests, their goals and their abilities and from those could be guided into appropriate choices.

Precepting Was Teaching

For the Founders, it followed, therefore, that precepting was a critical and central activity and should be part of the faculty load. We envisioned preceptors seeing their students whenever there was a need; faculty would be available to assist students in whatever issues they faced at whatever time of the day – within reason, of course.

Precepting, we insisted, was advising only when students needed to actually choose courses. For example, a freshman arriving might be challenged by the question “What do you REALLY want to do?” The student might answer that she had always wanted to be a physician. Fine, we might respond, but do you know what courses you will need to take to become a physician? Do you know how long it will take and how much money you will have to borrow? Perhaps, the Preceptor might assign readings to get at answers for these questions. Perhaps, the Preceptor might know a newly-minted MD for the freshman to talk to, etc.

Today, I doubt that discussions like these often take place. Precepting tends to be a review of program requirements (originally our Preceptees were NOT assigned to us on the basis of their interests and our discipline as they are now). We can, if asked, provide answers about how to dodge and weave through other College issues – financial aid, General Studies requirements, etc. But it is infrequent for Preceptors that I have talked to be asked about personal problems, cultural issues, Greek Life and all of the other concerns that students have.

Faculty got credit for one teaching hour per year – one course for the four years. Once again, faculty perceived their lives as being totally devoted to students and so pushed hard for this system to be converted into the present system of advising. We have, in the past, required students to see us; now, of course, that expectation has been abandoned and it is possible for students to attend the College without ever having seen a Preceptor.

No Privilege

It is no accident that there are no faculty parking lots, faculty dining hall and other evidence of faculty rank and favoritism. The Founders saw that privilege leads to class and class leads to inequity, deference, status and, ultimately, resentment. We have managed since the beginning to keep privilege out (mostly) though every once in a while someone suggests how nice it would be if faculty had their own dining room.

We came to this conclusion as part of the insistence on democracy and equality that we laid down in 1970. Once again, we didn’t invent such ideas; they were in the air and water in the 1960s. Those of us who regularly protested for both the Civil Rights and Anti-Viet Nam War movements were more than suspicious of those in power who had information the rest of us didn’t.  As a digression, there is a direct correlation between personal computers produced in the late 1970s and the rejection of a special class of information holders of the same period.

There are concomitant practices to all of this; not only don’t we have special faculty dining rooms but we are universally not called Dr. or Prof., all have the same size offices and furniture, all teach in similar classrooms and all have to follow the same procedures (generally) that students do.

No In Loco Parentis

One of the distinct aspects of the earliest Stockton – very few, if any, colleges asserted such a policy at the time – was the rejection of in loco parentis. When I say “rejection” I mean just that. The first President was adamant that the College was not going to act like a parent to students who could drink, vote and fight in Viet Nam as adults. He said this at a time when most institutions were developing strong programs to support student life – psychological counseling, health care, financial advising, Greek Life, career counseling and other services performed by parents or high schools at home.

Bjork’s thinking was clear: students were defined as adults in the larger society so the College necessarily had to reflect that definition in its policies and practices as other community agencies (e.g., police departments) also had to do.

Frankly, the Founders and the early faculty didn’t see the implications of this policy at first. Some faculty and all students – and their parents – immediately raised questions. The College’s Admissions staff began to hear complaints from parents of prospective students that not having such services as the other State colleges was a “deal breaker” in selecting a college.

Many of the early policies were changed by faculty as I have said; this policy is an example of the market place and its wider community having a powerful influence on an early idea. Within a year or so after the opening in 1971, the College was hiring Student Affairs staff.

January Term

A January Term was not, of course, a new idea in 1971. Other colleges (e.g., Dartmouth) scheduled their courses this way. For us, it offered both students and faculty an opportunity to shape intensive courses off campus (January was an ideal time to fly to Europe), to create very focused courses (e.g., a study of one playwright’s play culminating in attending a NY city performance) or to invent a totally new course (e.g., The Block – oppressed sub-cultures of the central city)

The January Term was a critical aspect of the whole General Studies effort because it encouraged new course design – especially courses with some “risk”, moved faculty into teaching outside of their disciplines, offered the opportunity to add activities away from the campus and, for students, confirmed “engagement”.

Sadly, faculty did not like this arrangement having been used to the post-holiday time off, needing to attend professional meetings frequently held at this time and, basically, refusing to grab the opportunity to develop new courses.

The January Term was gone by 1973.

No Grades

The Founders’ rejection of traditional grades was based on research that argued that very precise calculating of GPAs and other ways of numerically assessing student performance created enormous stress on students. Tragically, in some cases, this stress led to suicide. Also, our distrust of much of higher education practices in 1970 eventuated in our rejections of A – F grades. Most of the new colleges of the late 1960s – e.g., Hampshire – had also rejected grades so the possibility was in the air.

Rejecting traditional grades was relatively easy; replacing them with some other notation was hard. Some colleges simply had Pass/Fail or Pass/No Record. This latter arrangement appealed to us and after much debate we chose it. Our variation was H – S – N. The “H” was for outstanding work. The “S” was for satisfactory work. The “N” meant no grade would be recorded for failure.

This arrangement, too, became very unpopular with faculty. What if, they asked, there was a student who wasn’t doing outstanding work yet the work was better than satisfactory. Didn’t we need something (e.g., a “B” in the traditional system) between H and S? Wouldn’t students, they asked, be troubled with this system because they would go from a high school record of A – everyone knew its meaning – to an H which no one knew what it signified? What if, they asked, graduate schools rejected our students because they couldn’t exactly interpret what our grades meant?

The compromise proposed by the faculty was to have the students choose. For example, a student might chose A – F for courses in her major but chose H – S – N for her General Studies course. That compromise was accepted and was offered for many years until the College simply discontinued H – S – N totally because no student had chosen it.

Final Observations

I have argued for many years – indeed, I argued in the 1970s – that we needed to test these ideas for, say, a period of five years. If, after that time, members of the community (mostly faculty) still wanted to change these original policies, so be it. But, I argued, to abandon them within a few months of the College opening and, seemingly, merely because they were different from our undergraduate experiences seemed hasty and unwarranted.

Most of the aspects I’ve written about here were gone by 1975 at the latest. Most, not all, were rejected by the faculty. Most, in my opinion, had some merit and should have been modified but not abandoned. Most faculty at the College now know little about them; they should because these 10 things were part of what made us distinctive and unique.

Finally, a central document in our thinking was a small booklet entitled The Hazen Report (1968). Briefly, this report examined the situation of the American College Student in 1968 and found genuine problems. It also argued that American higher education was rapidly changing and a new university was being born which so radically different that present institutions needed to change to meet the new student, new faculty and new academic culture. The Report deserves a new reading.

To See What He Would Call Them

Shakespeare had it wrong; names mean everything: acceptance, financial success, loyalty or rejection, satire, failure and abandonment. A quick search turns up the five or twelve rules for naming a company or organization:

• has to be memorable
• should have a visual element
• has to have a positive connotation
• needs to include a hint about what the company does
• has to be fairly short

Colleges, today, will name anything for a specific contribution. In a Los Angeles Times article (November 30, 1999), about the practice of naming objects on a campus, the following list of examples is compiled:

• Your name on an elevator -- $50K
• Your name on a scholarship to put a quarterback through school -- $350K
• Your name on a street light -- $15K
• Your name on a bench -- $12K
• Your name on a School -- $45M

Naming something like these provides proof of generosity, a kind of immortality, family recognition, and evidence of being on the cultural pecking order.

Thus, it should come as no surprise, that the naming of Stockton has become a legendary event. There are, for example, at least three publically told stories about how Stockton got its name.

One First Cohort faculty tells the story of the Stockton Board meeting at one of the service areas on the New Jersey Turnpike. Not yet having a name for the College they decided to name it after the person for whom the service area was named – Richard Stockton.

Both Dick Bjork – the First President – and his wife Joan have told the story about having a small boy in their Lawrenceville, NJ neighborhood coming to their house. He had heard that the College was looking for a name and he told the President that he had a couple to suggest. Neither the President nor his wife remembered all of the names; the one they did remember was Richard Stockton State College – thus naming the college after one of the five signers of the Declaration of Independence from New Jersey.

Another First Cohort faculty says that he heard that there had been a disagreement from the beginning of the College as to whether it was going to be a distinctive liberal arts college, which would draw from all over the state, and perhaps beyond, or whether it would be a college that would cater primarily to the needs of South Jersey. Dungan and Bjork favored the former position and some of the trustees, supported by many in the outside community, favored the latter. These trustees were putting pressure on Bjork to name the college in a way that would identify it with South Jersey and so he asked Dungan to preempt that discussion by imposing a name that would not identify the College with South Jersey. Dungan had to do this in a hurry in order to close off the discussion before the next meeting of Stockton's Board of Trustees. He and the folks at Department of Higher Education grabbed Stockton's name, as a signer of the Declaration of Independence from New Jersey, to meet the deadline without undertaking a thorough investigation of Richard Stockton’s credentials. 

The Board of Trustees had previously requested suggestions from the pubic in the spring of 1969. By August they had received 64 names, which fall into three general categories: places, things and people.

For places there are the expected South Jersey shore areas:

Atlantic Highlands College
College By the Sea
Garden State College
New Jersey East College
Ocean Sands State College
Southeast College of New Jersey

For things there are some unusual suggestions:

Berry Bottom Bog State
Blueberry State College
Boardwalk College
College of the Sand
Gull College
Sand Piper State College
Jersey Tomato College

For people, there are also some strange possibilities:

Einstein State College
Farley State College
Pinky’s Corner College
Virgil I. Grissom State College
Woodrow Wilson State College
Richard Stockton State College

Some brief explanation seems warranted. Berry Bottom Bog State or Jersey Tomato College cannot be considered as serious suggestions. Einstein was living in Princeton, NJ at the time, and though Woodrow Wilson was long deceased he, too, was connected to Princeton. Pinky’s Corner is a long-running interview show on radio and tv in Atlantic City. Farley State would have been named for an incredibly powerful State senator who was instrumental in getting the legislation establishing the College passed in Trenton. Finally, Virgil Grissom -- an Astronaut -- has no connection to New Jersey and is a strange suggestion perhaps based on the fact that his death was in 1967 – two years before this list was collected.

The process following the public request for names was this:

1. In June, 1969 the Board of Trustees had received 30 names from its public request.

2. In July, 1969 Jim Judy (Secretary to the Board) reported that 40 names had been received.

3. In Aug, 1969 there are 64 names included in the Board of Trustees minutes (see below).

4. By the Sept. 1969 meeting, the Board had received a list of 12 names and the Trustees chose five to vote on.

5. By Oct 1, 1969 the Board of Trustees has decided officially on RSSC.

The name RSSC is in the original list of June, 1969 so it seems to be a contender early in the process. Given this fact, the question of who came up with the name is perhaps less significant (since the name was offered up early in the process) than why it was that the name progressed from being at the bottom of the major contenders to being picked, This certainly lends credence to the story about Dungan making the decision.

The other question is why none of the other four signers of the Declaration – Abraham Clark, John Hart, Francis Hopkinson, and John Witherspoon – were ever contenders as possible names for the college. Each one of these men might have been appropriate for different reasons, bringing something different to the college – Francis Hopkinson, for example, was a musician, composer, and a man of letters; John Witherspoon, for another, was President of New Jersey College.

What was clear, however, was that no investigation was undertaken about any of the names offered and certainly not that of Richard Stockton. He, after all, was the one signer who had signed an oath of loyalty to the Crown after he had signed the Declaration of Independence. There were extenuating circumstances for this act (which are contested), nonetheless this might well have given the college founders pause had they known about it. Moreover, the fact that the college was being established in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement and at a time of growing awareness about the history of slavery in the United States, would perhaps have led the Board to shy away from Stockton, had they known that he had been an unrepentant slave owner.

SUGGESTED NAMES FOR NEW COLLEGE – ADDENDUM
(presented to the Board of Trustees in Aug, 1969)

A-1 COLLEGE

ALL WARS MEMORIAL COLLEGE

ATLANTIC BEAUTIFUL COLLEGE

ATLANTIC CITY COLLEGE

ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS COLLEGE
ATLANTIC LIGHTHOUSE COLLEGE
ATLANTIC-SEABOARD COLLEGE

BARREN PINES COLLEGE

BEACH COLLEGE OF SOUTH JERSEY
BERRY BOTTOM BOG STATE

BLUEBERRY STATE COLLEGE or BLUEBERRY COLLEGE
NEW JERSEY STATE BLUEBERRY COLLEGE
SOUTH JERSEY BLUEBERRY STATE

BOARDWALK COLLEGE

CAPE SECURITY
COASTAL PLAIN STATE
COLLEGE BY THE SEA
COLLEGE IN THE PINES

COLLEGE OF THE SAND
CONVENTION CITY COLLEGE

DELANTA STATE COLLEGE (Delaware and Atlantic)
EASTERN COLLEGE
EDGE STATE COLLEGE

EDISON STATE COLLEGE
EINSTEIN STATE COLLEGE

EXCELSIOR STATE COLLEGE

FARLEY STATE COLLEGE
GARDEN STATE SOURCE

GARDEN STATE SOUTHERN COLLEGE
GREAT EGG HARBOR BAY COLLEGE
GULL COLLEGE

JERSEY TOMATO COLLEGE

JONATHON PITNEY STATE COLLEGE

LEED COLLEGE
LENAPES STATE COLLEGE
LOWER JERSEY LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE
MCKEE STATE COLLEGE
NEPTUNE SHORE COLLEGE

NEW AIR COLLEGE
NEW JERSEY BAYSIDE STATE COLLEGE
NEW JERSEY COLONIAL COLLEGE

NEW JERSEY EAST COLLEGE

NEW JERSEY SOUTHERN COLLEGE
NEW JERSEY STATE BELL COLLEGE

OCEAN SANDS STATE COLLEGE
OCEAN STATE COLLEGE
PINKY'S CORNER COLLEGE

RESORT COLLEGE
RICHARD STOCKTON STATE COLLEGE

SAND PIPER STATE COLLEGE

SANDY HARBOR STATE COLLEGE

SEABREEZES COLLEGE

SEASHELL COLLEGE

SEA SPRAY STATE COLLEGE
SOUTH ATLANTIC DELWARE COLLEGE

SOUTHEAST COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY
SOUTH JERSEY COLLEGE

SOUTH JERSEY COLLEGE BY-THE-SEA
SOUTHERN PINES OF KNOWLEDGE

STAR OF THE SEA_COLLEGE

TRIANGLE COLLEGE

TRI-COUNTY COLLEGE
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH JERSEY
VIRGIL I. GRISSOM STATE COLLEGE
WHITE CAP STATE COLLEGE
WOODROW WILSON STATE COLLEGE

Nowhere Man

In December 1974, only a few years after Stockton had opened its doors, a faculty member, Allen Lacy, published an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, “What Happened to Erewhon?” The core of the argument, summarized right below the title, was this: “The new colleges of the 1960’s have not realized the utopian goals set by their founders.” Early on in the piece, Lacy elaborated on this argument, writing: “To put it bluntly, no new school has succeeded in realizing the ideals stated in the original rhetoric. I am coming to suspect that the fault lies not in the times, but in the ideals themselves, and in the peculiar nature of new colleges as institutions with utopian blueprints.”

Almost immediately, the reader is left wondering two things: First, did the founders of these colleges have utopian goals and blueprints? And, second, was the brief period between the founding of these colleges and 1974, when Lacy was offering his judgment, sufficient time in which to assess whether or not they had “realized” their goals (utopian or otherwise)?

Perhaps, before dealing with these two questions directly, it is worth taking a moment to outline the argument further. Fortunately, Ken Tompkins has provided me with an excellent synopsis of Lacy’s major points that I do not think I could improve upon:

“His argument in the piece seems clear: (1) new colleges will never stand the weight of conservative, academic culture; (2) new colleges are reverse images of all other institutions; (3) new colleges are not new; (4) educational idealism will get you nowhere; (5) new colleges will let you down – they promise much and deliver little; (6) new colleges offer great possibilities for conflict and for collective disappointment; (7) finally, new colleges offer ‘unusual chances for academic degradation’."

This is a strange mixture of saying that these Utopians haven’t been able to achieve any of their goals because of the nature of “the institutional inevitabilities of higher education,” and saying that they have been placing us in danger of undermining higher education. While it is not impossible to do both of these things (the two positions are not entirely contradictory), it is difficult to imagine that everything good that was suggested by these Utopians was either not new or unable to change anything, whereas everything bad that they initiated was in danger of causing “degradation.”

The long and the short of Lacy’s position appears to be that he just did not like the alternatives these “Utopians” had come up with. As he indicated at the end of the essay, “Were I to help start yet a third new college [he had been a charter member of Kirkland College before coming to Stockton], my advice to the founders would be to forgo excessive claims about the innovational wonders to be achieved, to strive to some extent to be …ordinary! I have a growing hunch that in the ordinary—even, to use a word in disrepute at Erewhon, in the traditional – there is much good to be found, even for Erewhon.”

Erewhon, Erewhon, what is this? Lacy’s mention of this name brings us back to the question of Utopianism. Erewhon refers, of course, to Samuel Butler’s utopian novel by that name, one of many that appeared in the second half of the 19^th century on both sides of the Atlantic. Utopianism was something that captivated many people’s minds at this time. Social theorists, like Butler, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ignatius Donnelly, among others, saw the creation of the literary utopia as a device through which they could excoriate their own society and promote change.

Two more negative visions of utopianism should also be noted. The notion of utopianism was often cause for derision – a dismissive charge made by one theorist against another. Left leaning theorists argued that, instead of taking up a critical posture or recognizing that social change and the conflict that created it was on-going, utopians merely endeavored to invert the present and envisioned a static and unchanging world. In the process they ended up promoting their own highly bureaucratized and regimented world. Those on the right averred that, instead of recognizing that all societies were formed around social inequalities that were nigh on impossible to eradicate (and this was undesirable anyway), the utopian put forward dangerous and fanciful notions that only made things worse. One might suggest that the criticisms proffered by Lacy fit with this last view of Utopianism.

So, we ask ourselves whether any of these descriptions fit the founders of these new institutions. Such people were clearly critical of the society and the educational system of their day, as Lacy himself noted. “Anyone on a university campus in the mid-1960’s,” he wrote, “is familiar with the litany of complaint. Education had become a bureaucratized, impersonal process in which students were stapled, mutilated, and destroyed by aloof administrators. The person was reduced to a Social Security number in the campus computer. The lockstep curriculum was outmoded and rigid, the educational analogue of the industrial assembly line. Faculty members were elite grantsmen-researchers, shamefully delegating undergraduate instruction to exploited graduate assistants. Colleges and universities were perverted by involvement in Cold War geopolitics and easy acceptance of shabby domestic corporate practices.”

Lacy believed that these new educators were given the opportunity to create Nowhere, and they seized this opportunity to do something completely different from that which was being done elsewhere – and at no point does he indicate these people were in any way incorrect in their assessment of the academic landscape. There clearly was a sense that something new or better could be accomplished, but what is clear from looking at Stockton’s early days is that there was never any sense of a unity of vision, right from the outset – a Plan or Blueprint. The founders seemed to have recognized that they could deviate from the norm and make some changes, but they also immediately recognized that they were working with others who didn’t share their vision to the same degree as they. They also recognized that they were part of a state educational system, that they were located in Southern New Jersey (and so would be working with particular kinds of students and in particular kinds of communities), that the labor market and labor relations would have a say in certain areas, and many other things besides. Given that conflict seems to have appeared in different guises very early on, once the doors of the Mayflower Hotel opened, it seems that to suggest that these founders believed that they would create something that would be moved forward simply by consensus around a unified blueprint or plan, when so much about the political and educational landscape at the time was fraught with tension, seems unfair to them and the projects in which they invested their energies.

The left criticism of Utopianism also doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny in terms of the Stockton transcript. Who would the Utopians be? The Board of Directors, the President, the Vice-President, the Deans, the faculty, the students? All of these people had different visions and different goals. They all may have wished to change some of the problems that they saw endemic in academia, but beyond a few ideas that they may have held in common, they do not seem to have been on the same page with regard to the purpose or the method of these things. Take the Collegium, for example. This was a very strange superstructure molded around the preceptorials, with faculty, staff and administrators making up small communities – almost college-like communities without colleges. But the President, Vice-President, the Deans, and faculty all seem to have had different ideas about what the collegium should look like, how devoted faculty should be to their collegia, and whether or not it was to have some formal political role to play. Not surprisingly, the collegium didn’t last for very long. Some would complain they were given up before they had been fully tested; others would argue that they were never workable and needed to be quickly discarded along with some of the other innovations. This was experimentation not with a view to creating Utopia, but rather, in the vein of a Franklin Roosevelt, with a view to determining what might work better than current practice.

Only the third notion of Utopian seems to fully fit the view of Stockton. But, if any such experimentation and tinkering with the system as it then was, is sufficient to dismiss someone as being Utopian, then it covers almost anyone from the most pragmatic to the most idealistic, and applies to anyone who wanted to see some form of change. It reminds one of the dichotomy that Karl Mannheim draws in Ideology and Utopia. The former represents the ideas of that which exists, the status quo; the latter applies to any idea thought up to supplant it. While Mannheim himself (as far as I can remember) was not dismissive of the notion of Utopia, one can see that this kind of duality can very quickly make the notion of change itself suspect, leaving the social being in a position of being forced to accept that which already exists.

As Lacy noted, there are indeed “institutional inevitabilities of higher education,” which put constraints on those who would attempt to build something new. But do these inevitabilities necessarily mean that the endeavor to create something new is a waste of time and energy, and simply hubris. Is it a case of the Nowhere Man not knowing what he is missing, and suggesting that he should take his time and not worry, as the world is at his command? Or are there alternatives, which Nowhere men and their gender-inclusive ilk may lead us to yet? My own view is that even after all the limits of the way in which things developed are taken into consideration, it is still evident that things are done differently (and frequently better) at Stockton than at many other colleges and universities (particularly with regard to the areas of complaint noted in the 1960's). This was not the result of a blueprint being created in the first years; it was rather the product of many different people undertaking, in divergent ways, to right some of the wrongs they themselves had experienced. It was certainly worth the effort.

The Road Not Taken, or Reinventing the Wheel

I have taught a course on sports history since the summer of 1986, when I was a graduate at the University of Pennsylvania. My course was fairly unique for its day, not looking at sports in one society, but focusing on them comparatively. Students in my course would learn not just about the history or sociology of baseball in the United States, or football in Britain, but the history of sports around the globe, including many sports with which many American students, at that time at least, were unfamiliar. Since then, rugby, cricket, and soccer have become more mainstream in the United States, and much globalization has occurred, so my course may not seem as much of a stretch to my current students as it once did. But while becoming familiar with more sports, students have become less aware of both their own history and that of other nations and societies.

One aspect of sports history with which they are certainly unfamiliar is what I would term “the road not taken.” There is a feeling that what exists is natural and inevitable and the rules of each game and the manner in which they came into being do not require explanation. There is no sense that contestation over the way sports are played and who profits from them is a major part of the story, except with regard perhaps to the policing of the performers, either in terms of their propensity to act in corrupt ways – throwing games for money, or performing no-balls at particular moments to make large sums of money for sports gamblers – or otherwise cheating – by taking body-building drugs, for example.

But one of the things that teaching the history of sports brings immediately to the fore is the fact that each of the sports that developed did so in the way that it did for particular reasons that relate to the social conditions of the time at which it developed into its modern, organized form. Association football (or soccer), for example, was fundamentally shaped by the conflict between the elite amateurs and the working-class professionals of the 1890s, the resolution of which would enable it to spread rapidly throughout much of the world, but would fundamentally limit its ability to compete for many decades in the United States. Rugby would have similar kinds of class divisions that would lead to bifurcation into a working-class sport (League) with heavy policing (refereeing) and numerous stoppages, and a middle-class sport (Union) that would be heavily reliant on notions of gentlemanly behavior and self-restraint that could be free-flowing and loosely policed (at least in the eyes of its advocates). While the Rugby League game could be easily adapted to conditions in the United States, with the creations of downs and the assumption that every action needed some form of intense surveillance to assure conformity to the rules, Rugby Union would only spread initially to those areas where English middle-class communities were vibrant.

Contestation in other areas occurred also. Societies that were divided along racial lines, like the United States and South Africa, witnessed different kinds of development in their sports – the United States instituting segregation within sports, South Africa generally doing so between them (Rugby for Afrikaners, soccer for Africans, Cricket for the English). And gender would also play its part, both in divisions between sports prescribed for women as opposed to those limited to men, and the impact of these developments on fluctuating notions of masculinity and femininity.

Such contestation within sports is similarly reflected in the historiography related to the subject. Historians and writers on sports offered different theories about the relationship between sports and society. The most important intervention, perhaps, was to begin acknowledging that sports were important social phenomena in their own right, not simply confined to leisure hours and diversions from more important occupations like earning a living wage. Two people did more in this area than perhaps any others – Ranjitsinhji an Indian prince and cricketer playing in England in the 1890s who wrote about the significance of cricket in Victorian society, and C.L.R. James a Trinidadian Trotskyist and cricket journalist who wrote the transformative work in sports history, Beyond a Boundary. The former contested the notion that sports weren’t a significant part of English life, the latter fundamentally altered his own earlier political beliefs that sports, like religion, were just an opiate keeping workers from challenging via revolutionary methods the inequities in the larger society. Without mentioning Gramsci (and before he became vogue in the Anglo-American academy), James provided a description of hegemony forming around important cultural phenomena – preeminent among which were cricket and football.

But, and we will soon get to our point of connection with Stockton College (thankfully, I hear), there were other ways of looking at sports that were less positive or complimentary than those offered up by Ranjitsinhji and James. The three most significant, which came to the fore at the same time that Stockton was being conceived (at the end of the 1960s), were those of neo-Marxism, radical feminism, and black nationalism:

The neo-Marxist moved beyond the Marxist assumption that culture (the superstructure) merely reflected the economic and social conditions of the society (the structure), to look at how the development of the corporation and the profit motive had totally infused the sports world – thus, in effect, making that world a part of the fundamental structure of society. So for the neo-Marxist, the rise of media corporations, the growing power of the owners, commissioners, and entities like the NCAA, symbolized the corruption of sports that otherwise would have been played by people for their own sake and for the joy of participation.

Along parallel lines, the radical feminist argued that sports reflected the patriarchal society in which it was embedded and these organized games simply reaffirmed the dominance of men in society. Radicalizing the notion of the “separate sphere” and assuming gender differences, radical feminists advocated their own sports, which could be built around field hockey and “girls rules” basketball, for example, or could extend to different types of less competitive and testosterone-driven games.

Finally, the black nationalist focused on the racial oppression evident in the way sports were structured, with black athletes, when they were not completely excluded, being underappreciated and exploited more than their white counterparts from the high schools all the way through the college farm system to the majors. At a time when athletes were producing Black Power salutes on the Olympic podium, many at the college level wanted to challenge the institutional and behavioral manifestations of racism.

Being informed by any of these theories would lead one to the conclusion that to just play the game along the lines defined and controlled by a white, male, or corporate elite, would only mean that one was continuing down a course and implicating oneself in a system that was fundamentally objectionable.

Enter Marty Miller.

Assigned by the Provost to oversee the development of sports at Stockton, Ken Tompkins (Dean of General Studies) had hired Marty Miller and assigned him to develop a proposal. Clearly informed by a radical critique of the role of sports in society, Miller came up with “Life Sports at Stockton: An Alternative.” This would be an attempt to chart a completely different path for the development of sports at the college, one that would differ from that found within those enmeshed in the NCAA.

Miller made his sentiments clear right at the outset, “Though the American University has professed [a goal of developing a mind-body synthesis],” he wrote, “too often college athletics has become associated with professionalism, anti-intellectualism, and practices antithetical to a purposeful academic life.” Given this situation a new college could take a different, more salutary, course. He continued,

Stockton State College has an opportunity to enhance the unique principle which govern the general college community, by forming a sports program which complements these basic tenets. Namely, the egalitarian nature of Stockton must be mirrored by athletic endeavors having mass participation by men and women, faculty and administration and having these participants provide internal direction for sports policy. Stockton will not withdraw from sports in an attempt to avoid well-publicized “excesses”, but seek excellence in this “art form” in the same manner as traditional academic departments desire a high level of competence. Similarly, the interdisciplinary nature of academic departments may have its analog in a flexible sports program which relates to other forms of motion and crosses into conventional academic courses. Sports should be a rallying point for social interaction and provide a holistic approach to the learning process which would coincide with Stockton’s total community approach. Just as one does not belong solely to a Division, the athlete is not circumscribed in a specific role which alienates him from the general student body.

This is a very radical conception, shaped by a neo-Marxist critique of college sports and making overtures to the feminist and nationalist visions (the former here, in terms of “mass participation by men and women”, the “holistic approach”, and the “art form”; the latter at other points in his proposal).

Miller’s vehement opposition to the current state of affairs in sport is most pronounced in his response to the Intercollegiate Task Force concerning the college’s relationship with the NCAA. He espoused a position that was pro-club and anti-NCAA. He writes of the NCAA:

1. I believe that the NCAA leadership has had a racist orientation, or at least has been extremely insensitive to the needs of black athletes. For example, James Decker, Syracuse Athletic Director and NCAA head of all televised sports, is the same man who in 1966 answered charges of racism leveled against one of his coaches by saying, “haven’t you ever heard a man use the word ‘nigger’”? The leadership has allowed various schools to remain in the NCAA while excluding blacks from participating in team sports – under the rationale of “manifest disobedience” or blatant segregation. (University of Washington is an example of the former case and Alabama, Mississippi, ad infinitum, are examples of the latter).

2. Philosophically the NCAA had a clear mandate in its formative years to combat the growing commercialism in college athletics. Needless to say, the NCAA which funds itself from gate receipts gleaned from the NCAA Basketball Tournament has helped college athletics become a huge industry, with millions made at various games.

After further analysis of the NCAA, in which he suggests that joining it would limit the possibilities for Stockton students, he concludes: “Thus, the NCAA framework does not seem compatible with the goals of having sport open to the general student population, and for the most proficient athletes to develop their skills to the maximum.”

In another document, the outline of a “Proposed Supporting Program in Life Sports,” Miller proceeds to expand further on what he sees as a more ideal relationship between sports and the academy. He writes:

Throughout traditional academic history, a professed goal of the college curriculum has been the study of man in his entirety; a synthesis of mind and body, spirit and matter, which encompasses the multi-faceted human experience. Sport, that, broad area of movement, evolving from games, ritual, drama, and the arts, has been relegated to a rather subordinate and very often meaningless role in understanding man’s interaction with the structures of society. On one hand, a burgeoning interest in spectator sports has generated separate professional and commercial athletic institutions on the periphery of academic life which creates the antithesis of the organic scholarly community. Yet paradoxically, this proliferation of athletic activities has not prompted a concomitant growth in serious academic commitments to study the purpose and effects of sport in modern society. To a large degree, Thinking Man and Athletic Man will remain casualties and reflections of a fragmented and specialized human emerging in a technological era unless sport begins to be integrated into the main body of academic thought.

The analysis here is dialectical. The thesis is “games, ritual, drama and the arts”; the antithesis is the form of sports found currently in the academy, with the alienation of humans and the fragmentation into Thinking Man and Athletic Man; the synthesis, will be whatever Miller and Stockton manage to create that will bring these fragmented and alienated elements back together.

From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, Marty Miller’s Life Sports proposal seems very utopian, and one’s immediate response to reading these documents is along the lines of wondering how he could have imagined his program would have gained a foothold at the college. But using hindsight in this manner is rather unfair. As I noted, his approach was informed by the critical analysis of the time, and it was that same analysis that was leading to significant changes that were occurring and that would take care of some of the more egregious and negative aspects of commercial and college sports. And this was indeed a time of change, perhaps not of revolution, but a time when people believed that things could be altered dramatically. Why couldn’t new approaches to sports be formulated along the lines that he described? And, indeed, haven’t some of the kinds of sports that Miller would have supported appeared in different guises since that time? While the college would later join the NCAA and have Division III varsity sports (which are far less invidious than is the case for Division I), it is also the case the intramural world of sports at Stockton has been very vibrant. And the sports world itself, while previously highly monopolized around major leagues that were protected by the Supreme Court from conformity with Anti-Trust regulations, now finds that these sports are competing with all kinds of games and pastimes that vie for participants and spectators through cable television and other media. So while Miller was up against a behemoth in the form of the NCAA, such that he was unlikely to have been able to keep the college from resisting its blandishments, he was not merely a deluded utopian by any means.

This is most clear in the fact that he initially received encouragement and even support from those who appointed him. Ken Tompkins was clearly up for any kind of experiment; Wes Tilley, the Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Richard Bjork, the President, also seem to have been intrigued by the ideas he was presenting. In the end, they would not be able to resist the NCAA, but they certainly gave the idea serious consideration. Perhaps the thought of trying to create and administer something totally new and extremely radical – when they were doing so much else besides – was too much for them to take on. But this does not mean that the ideas didn’t resonate and make considerable sense to them.

But the sports world is not merely divided into the world of those who have power who control things, and those who are either controlled or who endeavor to create something entirely unique to replace that which they think oppresses them. As both Ranjitsinhji and C.L.R. James knew, the sports world is one that inspires non-participants to participation -- it is one that excites the imagination. This is not merely the case of an opiate being given to the masses so that they switch off and tune out; it is rather the case that people get excited enough either to root for a team or to endeavor to advance within the structure that exists (however corrupt one imagines it to be). One reason the NCAA would have been appealing to college administrators in the early 1970s, in spite of all that it was doing to which many objected, is because inter-collegiate athletics could help to create identification with the college, to bring in revenue and so forth. Sport could be a source of recruitment and the basis for prestige. Such things are enticing, because they do, in the end, excite people.

Of course, what Miller had been suggesting might have ended up exciting many members of the Stockton community as well -- and by all accounts he was a very popular faculty member; but the wheel that he was trying to reinvent was going to be very difficult to construct, and when fabricated it would only move a cart slowly along a dusty road. The NCAA’s wheels were already so well lubricated by this time that it would not be long before the cart drivers and their passengers looked longingly over at the sports car as it zipped by leaving dollar bills flying around in its wake.

The Train Has Left

There is probably no more cantankerous, anger-producing, intractable problem in the history of the College than the issue of the "tenure quota" beginning in 1972 and lasting for at least a decade.

In many ways, it is the defining issue of that decade setting the tone of the College community and extending from the faculty to the Board to the President to the Chancellor.

Ironically, if you ask any of the younger faculty -- those that have been appointed in the last ten years or so -- about the tenure quota they will all say that they have no idea what is being asked. It simply has disappeared as an issue; most have no idea about the struggle that obsessed us as a College for so long.

If you find an older faculty and ask about the quota, they will tell you that it was a device invented by the first President to make sure the administration had "managerial flexibility". That phrase is almost never heard these days.

I have been going through the relevant documents recently and the history of the tenure quota here is complex and sometimes unclear. It is, however, essential for us to understand how this became a dominant issue, who were the players and what caused it to disappear.

To understand how the tenure quota became such a defining issue we have to understand higher education in New Jersey in the late 1960s.

At that time, the six State colleges were really teacher training schools. They tended to duplicate each other's curricula and, as it finally came to everyone's attention, a high proportion of their faculties had tenure. Over all, in September, 1971, 63% of the faculty across the State had tenure; this rate climbed to 71% in early 1972 but was expected to drop back to 65% in 1972 because new faculty were hired to meet increased enrollment. One State college had a 75% tenured faculty.

The other causal issue was the fact that, by State statute, faculty in New Jersey State colleges were tenured in three years. This may, on the surface, seem an advantage. From the faculty's standpoint, the College has to commit to a young teacher at the end of three years so the waiting and stress of defending one's teaching and research is over quickly. From the administrator's standpoint, if the faculty member shows no aberrant behavior in that three year period, the college can make the commitment and move on. It would seem like everyone wins.

This might work for experienced teachers -- those at the rank of Associate or Full Professor -- who will have a verifiable record. But what about Assistant Professors who have minimum teaching experience? How valid is a judgment made about teaching after three years?

The concatenation of a short probationary period and high proportion of tenured faculty certainly caused State officials to wonder whether a tenure quota might not solve both problems at one blow.

Stockton's founding falls between these issues.

The President, Richard Bjork, in January of 1971, wrote a document Adminstrative Working Paper IV: Faculty and Staff Evaluation outlining a Promotion and Tenure Policy for the college. In this document, Bjork lists the various State laws and regulations that defined tenure and the probation period including Title18a:60, Chapter 271, Public Law 1967 which defined the probationary period as three years.

Interestingly, no mention is made of tenure quotas. Also, of equal interest, a Report of the Faculty Committee on Administrative Working Paper IV (the document written by Bjork) does not mention tenure quotas once. At this point (1971) neither the administration nor the faculty considered tenure quotas worth mentioning. Things were about to change dramatically.

That change came in the form of a report on Tenure At the State Colleges of New Jersey (June, 1972) ordered by the then Chancellor of Higher Education, Ralph Dungan. This 34 page report covers the tenure situation in the State colleges, what the Department of Higher Education had tried to do about the short probationary period, what other reports had recommended about tenure quotas and, finally, what the report recommended.

Briefly, this report stated that a tenure quota of 60% should be instituted at the State colleges. To insure compliance, each college was to submit an annual report to the Department of Higher Education.
Coincidentally, the AFT was elected as bargaining agent in February of 1973 -- just between Bjork's document on Promotion and Tenure and the DHE report on tenure quotas. These three facts shaped the firestorm that followed.

When the NY Times ran an article on October 22, 1972, the bargaining agent was the Association of New Jersey College Faculties -- and NJEA affiliate. It attacked the quota plan as being against State law and the US Constitution. They also saw Chancellor Dungan as overruling local boards. Montclair's president resigned over the issue and the reporter states that Stockton's faculty was especially "infuriated".

And so the issue was joined. Four months later the bargaining agent elected -- with incredibly strong Stockton support -- became the AFT. From that point on the tenure quota was the center issue for the Union because to lose the fight would have meant that the Union could not protect its members and if that had ever happened it would have lost all credibility.

Tenure quotas appeal to administrators in times when education is expanding. If a college isn't hiring many new faculty, quotas are not impressive or needed. But, when Stockton doubled its faculty in two years after its founding, quotas made sense to administrators who feared that if the faculty ever achieved 100% tenure, change would have become impossible. At a place like Stockton -- which prided itself on constant change -- full tenure would have been anathema.

On the other hand, Stockton's faculty was uniquely young in the State system so it saw the quota as a direct attack on being here, teaching, doing research and becoming a successful academicians.

Once these lines were drawn there was no turning back to the excitement of the earliest days and to a communality of purpose.

Indeed, Bjork wrote and presented testimony before The New Jersey Assembly Education Committee in November, 1976. In his short statement he argues fully against tenure. By then, the issue was already beginning to fade -- though it wasn't a dead issue until at least a decade or more -- and Bjork's speech is an elegant rear-guard action. As they say: the train had left the station (see Rob's remark about his speech below).

With 40 years hindsight one is forced to wonder if all of the anger, effort, talk, arguing, planning and writing was not wasted. Other issues of power sharing, faculty governance, tight budgets and benefits occupied the Union -- and rightfully so. Once the halcyon days of the Founding had passed, the College had to survive in a radically different world from 1971 as the new kid on the block. It had to compete for funds, for faculty, for lines, for students and for the excellence it had so long assumed.

No one talks -- or writes -- about tenure quotas today; this is true, at least, in my hearing. Concomitantly, no one becomes much excited about any issue either. As I said: the train has left.

Logical -- and Wrong

It seems evident that the first President of Stockton, Richard Bjork, was very interested in doing away with tenure, or, if that was not possible, imposing a quota so that the negative effects of permanent employment status, as he saw them, would be limited as much as possible.

Two of President Bjork’s key advisors were also very much interested in reevaluating the institution of tenure in higher educaion. Richard P. Chait and Andrew T. Ford argued in a Chronicle of Higher Education article that tenure would most likely disappear in the academy because it was both no longer necessary and an impediment in the way of constructive change.

It was no longer necessary, they felt, because of the rise of unionism. Every protection that tenure provided – with regard to academic freedom in particular – could be secured through employment rights. If tenure had been established to secure such freedom then it had now been made superfluous by the union’s grievance procedure. Moreover, the process of attaining tenure might even provide its own barrier to academic freedom, with young faculty needing to tow the line in order to gain acceptance from their tenured colleagues. The more that unionism became established in the academic landscape, the more likely it was that tenure would go by the wayside. If the union needed to protect all its members, the tenured, the untenured, and those not in tenure-track positions, it would find itself obliged to question tenure privileges that placed many members beyond their control.

With regard to being an impediment to change, tenure was by its nature a source of inflexibility. The more a faculty was tenured-up, so to speak, the less it would be responsive to change. In the past this meant that new trends, new ideas, and new technologies faced stiff resistance, and this was definitely an inconvenience. But by 1973 there were more pressing concerns. In order to provide redress for past discrimination colleges were required to hire more minorities and women. If there were no lines available because faculty were all tenured moving towards a diverse faculty would be extremely tough. Not only this, owing to past discrimination, or the life experiences of those who were previously excluded, the requirements for tenure themselves were problematic. Stringent requirements bolstered the status quo; and tenure decisions were made at about the time that many women were taking time away from the labor market to have and raise children -- past discriminations would therefore not be overcome. Tenure, Chait and Ford argued, was not really an appropriate institution for the academic landscape that seemed to be emerging in the 1970s.

As Ken Tompkins wrote to me after reading the Chait and Ford piece, “it is a good example of something that is logical – and wrong!” Ken is exactly right. The argument of the article is well developed and fundamentally very persuasive. So persuasive, indeed, that one puts it down (or turns away from the screen) and wonders why it is that one is now, in 2010, working in an institution that still enshrines tenure. This cannot be, surely! But while logical, the argument is fundamentally flawed – perhaps because its understanding of history is somewhat cockeyed, but perhaps more because it doesn’t seem to comprehend the psychology (or recognize that it might need to consider this) of those who they believed would oppose the continuation of tenure.

Regarding history: unions have never freely given up rights that any of their members have attained. Moreover, they are and have always been founded around their strongest members. They don’t give things back or make concessions to management because the rights of one portion of their members interfere with the rights of others. The AFL was based around crafts; these unions comprised the aristocrats of labor – the closest thing to tenured faculty that existed in the industrial landscape. In order to protect positions, they needed to reach out to the unorganized, lest their position might have been undercut by the rise of new industrial organizations. While the CIO did later form around organizations that endeavored to cover the whole workplace, across trades and work classifications, it did not displace the AFL.

The unions that formed in colleges and universities brought together members who were already tenured or who were aspiring to that status. The notion that they would find this status problematic and something they ought not to have because it was unfair to others in the academic workforce, is a little absurd really. The primary goal of the union would be to protect the right of tenure for its members and to ensure that no infringements, like quotas, were established by management. Other issues that might relate to the protection of untenured and transient labor would always remain secondary, because these concerned issues with people who were not fully established, long-term members. There is nothing sinister about this, it is just a fact that unions and their leaders were going to perform in ways that they always had done, and there was no reason to expect otherwise.

Re psychology: people who have been discriminated against seldom want to replace the system from which they have been excluded. Women and minorities didn’t look at the institution of tenure and say that it negatively impacted them in some way and therefore needed to be replaced. Rather they noted that they wanted to be represented in the ranks of the tenured on a more equal basis. So, while affirmative action might cause some stresses in colleges and universities, it would almost never be the case that this would be made grounds for replacing the system of tenure; and those who were endeavoring to break into the ranks of academe would never be leading the charge to achieve such a goal.

So Chait and Ford were very logical, and they clearly believed that they were in the vanguard of change, but they also were fundamentally wrong – so much so that they had retreated from almost all their positions by the time they wrote Beyond Traditional Tenure in 1982. They were obviously also very influential in terms of the development of Bjork’s own thinking on this subject. In November 1976, Bjork went before the New Jersey Assembly Education Committee, to speak about academic tenure in public schools. In his presentation he came out strongly against tenure. “No reasonable claim can be made,” he exclaims, “that the extent of tenuring today is essential to, or even helpful to, risk taking and free inquiry.” He continues:

In an effort to provide a condition of special freedom for a select few, education has developed a protective shield for the many who work under its umbrella. Critics have made it clear that this shield probably protects the less competent more than it does the exceptionally competent. I agree that such may well be the case. But what concerns me more is that the shield of tenure protects its holders form the refreshment of criticism while permitting the tenured the irresponsibility of whatever criticisms or ideas they believe worth uttering.

This argument had been part of the Chait and Ford case made against tenure regarding flexibility and the need of institutions to have the ability to change.

Added to this, Bjork referred to the employment aspects of tenure, along the lines developed by his two assistants:

In public education, tenure is not the sole instrument of protection for the work and person of teachers. Tenure is one layer. Added to tenre are protective layers of employy-employer agreements, civil service regulations, civil rights regulations, statutes, and court decisions which accord individuals property rights in their positions. The suggestion that the individual is not well protected in a job from the ravages of a vindictive group and/or an arbitrary or capricious manager can only find sustenance by reference to the isolated and often bizarre.

Bjork ended with a flourish: “Those who are truly seeking are seldom fettered by their critics, rather they are stimulated. Education as a crucial arena of free inquiry needs several protective layers removed and tenure is among those layers.”

But if that were the case, Bjork and others who agreed with him would still find those protective layers difficult to remove. Tenure was something that the union fought for bitterly, even at a new college (perhaps especially at a new college) like Stockton. Those creating a new college may have believed that it would be easy to move against tenure; those who stood in their way knew that they needed to be extremely vigilant on that score.

So, if eradication of tenure would be difficult to achieve in its entirety, perhaps its negative effects could be limited in other ways. Back in 1973 Bjork and Stockton’s Board of Trustees had already established for the college a relatively strict tenure quota. For Bjork, conforming to this quota would remain of fundamental importance to the healthy development of his fledgling college.