Momentary Language

Nonsense on stilts (cont.): Camille Paglia edition

The utterly unfounded assault on the Academy and the liberal arts continues -- this time from Camille Paglia (here).

As in the case of Mark C. Taylor and others, Paglia introduces her discussion under the pretense of analyzing the effect of the Great Recession on higher education.  Paglia then uses that pretense as an excuse for a further attack on the liberal arts that is utterly devoid of any foundation in evidence.

Paglia begins her piece with a string of flat assertions unsupported by even the hint of data:

• "Meaningful employment is no longer guaranteed to dutiful, studious members of the middle class in the Western world."

Fact check: according to recent figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate among college graduates was 4.5% -- less than half that of those with only a high school education.

• "College education, which was hugely expanded after World War II and sold as a basic right, is doing a poor job of preparing young people for life outside of a narrow band of the professional class."

Fact check: unlike earlier decades in which a college education was seen as preparation for life as a "man in a gray flannel suit," college grads can be both motorcycle mechanics and Fellows at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. 

Particularly if one is concerned with preparation for life -- and not merely preparation for a career -- there is no evidence at all to suggest that the lives of college graduates are more impoverished or less fulfilled than those of non-graduates.

• "There is little flexibility in American higher education to allow for alternative career tracks."

Fact check: see previous.

So all of Paglia's unwarranted assertions are dubious at best.  What about her suggested remedies?

Paglia's big-picture remedy is the gutting of the liberal arts.  She suggests:

Jobs, and the preparation of students for them, should be front and center in the thinking of educators. The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense.

Of course, if this were taken seriously, many educators would have to abandon their chosen professions.  Philosophy?  Clearly not germane in an education system in which "the idea that college is a contemplative realm ... removed from vulgar material needs ... is nonsense."

Okay, perhaps that's not so terrible -- who cares about the philosophers, anyway? However, there would also be no need for theoretical mathematicians (other than to teach prerequisites for engineering, econ, etc.), physicists (ditto), astronomers (at all), biologists (other than for pre-med requirements), cognitive psychologists, historians, ... the list goes on.

What about how Paglia herself boils down her big-picture lesson into a more immediate solution for higher education?  Here's her solution, in her own words:

Jobs, jobs, jobs: We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted. Concrete manual skills, once gained through the master-apprentice alliance in guilds, build a secure identity. Our present educational system defers credentialing and maturity for too long. When middle-class graduates in their mid-20s are just stepping on the bottom rung of the professional career ladder, many of their working-class peers are already self-supporting and married with young children.

Wow.

The Great Recession has seen the utter collapse of the housing industry, and with it the attendant loss of thousands of jobs in construction and handwork trades, and Paglia's brilliant solution is ... to train more people for those jobs that no longer exist. 

Remember those statistics cited above -- working class peers with young children are finding it increasingly harder to support themselves and their families in an increasingly tight job market.  Add to this the increasingly small share of wealth belonging to those working class families, and Paglia's prescription becomes even more baffling.

One might have thought that a better diagnosis would lead to a recommendation that we do a better job both of training college students for the complex, ever-changing, information-intensive, highly quantitative, cosmopolitan jobs that will become increasingly more important in the 21st century global economy, and of training them for the many hours of the week when they are not working -- training them to appreciate fine art, literature, the marvels of science, the joys of community service ... wherever it is that their passions take them when they are not at their paying jobs.

Paglia's solution, in contrast, is to prepare students for the jobs of the 18th century, where perhaps -- in her romantic vision -- under a spreading chestnut tree a village smithy stands.  (Longfellow's pre-industrial idyll was already becoming an outdated romanticization when he wrote it!)

That the Chronicle would publish such absolute drivel is completely baffling ... not to mention depressing.

Anderson Cooper - Terror Baby Killer

It's difficult in an age as media-savvy as the current one not to be jaded by seeming examples of nobility or courage on the part of journalists.

Given the way that everyone seems to see themselves as their own brand and to calculate their every action for the purpose of brand-promotion, it's hard to take those examples at face value as truly being courageous or noble.

And certainly, someone as aware of the history of American journalism as Anderson Cooper is probably has a poster commemorating Edward R. Murrow's take-down of Joe McCarthy on See It Now (more on that here) hanging on his bedroom wall.  Indeed, Cooper's just got to be on the lookout for opportunities to channel Murrow -- what else is the source of Cooper's whole "keeping 'em honest" persona?

Still, to see Cooper's calm, implacable demolition of Rep. Louie Gohmert's McCarthy-esque terror baby nonsense, one can't help but be impressed.

WHAT'S the case for abolishing tenure?

In a recent post on Slate, "The case for getting rid of tenure", Christopher Beam seems largely to rehash points made by Mark C. Taylor against the tenure system. These points have received a great deal of attention elsewhere (e.g., here), so I thought it useful to consider them in detail, point by point.

1. Tenure is expensive.

Here Beam:

Mark C. Taylor, chair of the Columbia University department of religion and author of the forthcoming Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming our Colleges and Universities, calculates that someone who serves as an associate professor for five years and then gets tenure for 30 years costs a private university $12.2 million. Public universities pay $10 million over the same period.

I don't know about Taylor, who as an expert in Derridean deconstruction is perhaps seeking to overthrow the phallocentric hegemony of basic arithmetic, but Beam, as a putative journalist, ought at least to apply a little common sense to these numbers.

$12.2 million over 30 years would mean that an associate professor at the -- average! -- private university would be earning around $400,000 a year. Even if one includes benefits like health insurance, 401K, etc., I know of very few star professors at even the top universities who earn that much.

Furthermore, I don't understand the argument here. Even if there were no tenure, universities would still have to pay their faculty. Suppose we thought that a fair system of remuneration would reward experienced faculty on a non-tenure system an average of $120,000 per year, including benefits. If those faculty are doing well, the university would do well to retain them -- say, for 25 years or so. Over the course of those 25 years, the cost to the university would be $3 million.

According to Inside Higher Ed (here), the average salary for a full professor in 2008 was slightly over $100K -- with benefits, close to our figure of $120K per year. This means that right now, under the current system, the cost to the university is the same as it would be without tenure.

This, of course, assumes that we wish to retain good teachers, pay them for their skills adequately, offer salary increases that keep pace with inflation, etc.  Note, however, that except for retention, tenure itself does not tie an institution's hands with respect to any other aspect of the contract between professor and institution.

So the cost argument is utterly bogus. It's embarrassing for Taylor to make it (he ought to know better); it's perhaps more embarrassing for others to parrot it unthinkingly.

2. Tenure, because it forces professors to focus on their research, is bad for students.

Again, Beam:

Then there's the effect of tenure on students. "Publish or perish" is the maxim of tenure-track professors. The corollary, of course, would be "teach and perish." Tenure committees claim to weigh publishing and teaching equally, but in practice publishing counts most. Taylor recalls a colleague winning a teaching award early in his career. Mentors urged him not to put it on his résumé. When the best young teachers focus their energies on writing rather than teaching, students pay the price.

This is one piece of fallacious reasoning after another.

First of all, as a factual matter, it is far from true that tenure committees at all schools weigh publishing and teaching equally; at many schools, teaching is weighted more heavily than publishing.

Second of all, even at those schools at which "publishing counts most," it does not follow from this that teaching is not valued.

I'll ignore Taylor's use of a single anecdote to prove a case as beneath contempt; for Beam to editorialize from this single case that "the best young teachers focus their energies on writing rather than teaching" is simply shoddiest journalism of the worst sort.

Finally, one ought to note that, again, this is NOT an argument against the tenure system. Even if it were the case that all schools did weight publishing inordinately (which -- again -- is not the case), this would at best be an argument for tenure reform, rather than abolition.

Since, as a matter of fact, there is a wide variation in the extent to which publishing plays a role in the tenure process, this would seem to be a situation in which prospective students can "vote with their feet" in choosing the extent to which they wish their school to value professors who publish.

The fact that many of those students are choosing schools like UC Berkeley, Wash U in St. Louis, Oberlin, and Yale, among many others, would suggest that many students at least don't object to professors who devote time to research.

3. Tenure promotes intellectual inflexibility.

Beam, again channeling Taylor:

Just as tenure creates economic inflexibility, it also creates intellectual inflexibility. By hiring someone for life, a school gambles that his or her ideas are going to be just as relevant in 35 years. Tenure can also discourage interdisciplinary studies, since professors are rewarded for plumbing deep into an established subject area rather than connecting two different ones.

The first criticism here incorrectly assumes that one's ideas are static. This is seldom the case, however. Few academics maintain their reputations merely because their early work remained relevant over the span of decades. (Note the "merely"! Many academics had big ideas whose early work remained relevant. For three examples off the top of my head: E. O. Wilson, Thomas Kuhn, Noam Chomsky.) However, many academics themselves remain relevant because they are founts of ideas over the span of decades -- many ideas, changing over time.

The second criticism here seems wrong on its face. The examples of academics who, post-tenure, use the increased security that tenure provides to stray outside of their more narrow disciplinary comfort zones are too numerous to mention, but would seem to include such public intellectuals as Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, Stephen J. Gould ... and, yes, Mark C. Taylor, certainly no disciplinary expert on higher education policy.

4. Tenure makes professors lazy.

Critics say that tenure hurts students by making professors lazy. Course loads vary widely from school to school: At some public universities, professors teach nine or 10 courses. At smaller schools, they teach as few as one or two, totaling as few as 140 classroom hours a year. If you can't be fired, what's to stop you from refusing to teach an extra course? "I honestly don't know what a lot of academics do a lot of the time," says Taylor.

Again, course loads are separate from tenure -- as is evident from the fact that such loads, as stated in the quote, vary widely from school to school.

Thus, the only issue relating to tenure is that tenure protects professors from being forced to work unpaid overtime. Note that it does not protect them from teaching whatever course load is normal at their institution -- be it 5 courses per semester or less (or more).

In other words, this argument against tenure also reveals itself to be utterly specious.

5. Tenure is bad for academics themselves.

But the clincher for the anti-tenure argument may come from the very people it is supposed to benefit: academics. Specifically, young academics. Consider the career path of an aspiring full-time tenured professor: Four years of college, six years getting a doctorate, four to six years as a post-doc, and then six years on the tenure track. By the time you come up for tenure, you're 40. For men, the timeline is inconvenient. But for women who want to have children, it's just about unworkable.

That's one reason the number of full-time tenured professors has dropped so much in the past few decades: Women have joined the academic work force, but some have opted to take a part-time role.

I don't even understand the argument in the first quoted paragraph. Since tenure takes a significant time investment in order to achieve, we ought to abolish it altogether? I can't begin to address this one, because I can't imbue it with even the semblance of rationality.

The second quoted paragraph is stunning because of the evidence it provides of Beam's complete lack of knowledge of the facts in the higher education landscape. The reason the number of full-time tenured professors has dropped so much is because the tenure system is being dismantled in favor of the hiring of poorly paid adjuncts and graduate teaching assistants -- often to the detriment of undergraduate education. (On this point, see, for example this 2008 article in Inside Higher Ed.)

To imply, to the contrary, that the shrinking numbers of tenure-line positions in higher education is due, to any significant degree, to a choice on the part of academic job-seekers would be like implying that the large number of child laborers in Victorian England was because unemployed adults preferred to let the little tykes have something to do with their time.