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.