Academic Tenure and The Contrarian
My previous entry, a catalog of excerpts from Christopher Hitchens’ Letters to a Young Contrarian (2005), has provoked some interesting discussion - some from within the walls of the Kirk (although, I particularly enjoyed the discussion with James Leroy Wilson). The discussion was largely spawned from the fact that I published these excerpts. Moving forward, then, I will focus on the content of just one excerpt in what follows:
. . . One is sometimes asked “by what right” one presumes to offer judgment. Quo warranto? is a very old and very justified question. But the right and warrant of an individual critic does not need to be demonstrated in the same way as that of a holder of power. It is in most ways its own justification. That is why so many irritating dissidents have been described by their enemies as “self-appointed” . . . I am happy in the ranks of the self-employed. If I am stupid or on poor form, nobody suffers but me. To the question, Who do you think you are? I can return the calm response: Who wants to know?
This is one pregnant paragraph. The Quo warranto? question is the launching pad for the Moral Argument, and the “self-appointed” description reminds me of one of the more defining moments of the Wood’s early development. But my reason for focusing on this paragraph is Hitchens’ use of the word ‘self-employed’. I will get to this, as well as the topic of academic tenure. But for the moment, I feel compelled to wander a bit off my chosen path. My imagination is now at the mercy of the phrase “self-appointed” – still priming my episodic memory as I write.
Oh, yes, the early days. Sweet reminiscence. The creepy, nasty, bitter self-appointed pooh bear. What it was like to be me back then. I recall in particular that time when, still a member in good standing in Wilson’s church, I decided to start a blog, and before long, provide a link to some primary documents posted to the internet by a man Wilson was then publicly attacking. Needless to say, these primary, historical documents did not make Wilson look all that spirit filled. I will refer to the man Wilson was attacking as the ‘X-elder’, since he used to be an elder in the Kirk (replaced by Jones in the early 90s) and his picture now hangs in Wilson’s War Room, marked with a big fat X.
After providing a link to the evidence, I went further and dared to ask a question about the evidence. In response to this, Doug Jones and Douglas Wilson crawled into the comment section of my blog and began pelting me with questions of a slightly different kind. Just now counting, it looks like they had thrown at least 41 of these questions at me by the time I had a chance to begin answering the very first one (yes, forty one, as in four sets of ten and then add one). Here is a pertinent sampling:
What are your qualifications to be making the assertions you are making? Are you a witness? Are you an investigator? Are you an investigator who has assembled all the facts? If you answer our questions, giving the basis for your affirmation of the truthfulness of the answers, this should establish your competence or lack of it in this matter. In short, on what basis have you been making your claims? And if you investigated these allegations [sic], could you tell us how many statements you received from anonymous sources? . . .we are asking about your qualifications to put yourself forward the way you have. . . we are asking you to demonstrate that you have the capacity and standing to prove them. . . . Michael . . . Our questions concern your standing and competence . . . And why should we believe that you are credentialed to be among the special three?
Wilson had failed to link to the evidence himself (until forced) and he never honestly described the nature of the evidence this X-elder had presented. And so, my curiosity, which had already been building for months, finally expressed itself by a preliminary inquiry into the evidence Wilson himself had been indirectly referencing. This alone was enough for my pastor and another elder (both friends and past formal instructors) to begin a campaign of harassment. Seven of the forty-one questions they blasted my humble little layman’s blog with pertained to my qualifications, my investigative license, competence, capacity, standing, and credentials. In sum, they were claiming – with a commendable weight of vocabulary – that I was wrongly self-appointed. Who did I think I was? I do not deny it. I was self-appointed – self-appointed as a free-thinking free-born American citizen presuming the right to ask a question.
As it turned out, Pooh’s Think provided credible adjudication of the issue in the months to follow, whereas Wilson was revealed as nothing short of a spin-scum cleric, bullying the primary historical documents off the face of both the internet and the physical planet. Jones – speaking for Wilson’s club of mute elder-dupes – demanded the X-elders’ new church to join the Kirk in “holy disgust” over the public revelation of evidence against the region’s most cherished prophet. After the Kirk’s judicial committee offered their own just and rigorous – and no doubt, painfully honest – investigation of all the relevant evidence to be had on the matter, Jones managed to offer a final verdict by throwing up what is equivalent to a forged document on the Kirk’s web site. The Kirk is given by God as a light to all the nations, and so it was Wilson’s humble duty before Jesus to begin a long Justice Primer series to educate others on how to do the same.
This is all interesting stuff (further elaborated in my book of course), but, again, my reason for focusing on this paragraph was Hitchens’ use of a different ‘self’ word: self-employed. I am interested in the question as to whether a contrarian is by essence self-employed. What of the middle-aged contrarian who is willing to labor just below the rhetorical line of angry, radical protest? Can the contrarian be institutionalized and remain a contrarian?
I would like to broadly construe the contrarian’s life as the seeking out of justice and truth. Humans are typically such stupid and/or deceitful mammals, it is natural that a determined, unrelenting search for justice and truth – regardless of how successfully it is combined with ironic self-criticism – be identified on occasion as the ravings of an arrogant and angry radical. But consider the idea of an institutionalized contrarianism, where contrariness becomes a respected, community-endorsed career. On first thought, this seemed to me an impossible paradox. To our ancestors thousands of years ago this would certainly have seemed an impossibility. But perhaps civilization just is this impossible paradox become possible, like God becoming man or a woman gaining control over her vagina; perhaps this is a kind of emergent cultural property, causally explained yet unpredictable by what preceded it. As from nowhere, a fact trumps a wish and justice appeases a vendetta.
What I have in mind is the career of the academic. Can the academic and the contrarian be the same? If so, ‘self-employed’ is not an essential feature of contrariness.
Consider the evolution of the sophiadendrite: this species arose from the primordial cultural soup of a brief period of peace and order that allowed for a useful mutation in the internal working of the human mind. Safely coddled by the walls of Athens, the mind could at times operate freely, independent of the labor for subsistence, child rearing, war, and religion (I chuckle as I read this, thinking of the Kirker’s reply: “but what more could one want!?”). Over time, this new cultural animal formed bands of roaming sophiadendrites. The sophiadendrites survived as parasites on the lives of politicians, poets, and priests, gradually developing the art of inquiry, that questioning of the community’s self-confirming narratives. The roaming sophiadendrites later took up agriculture and eventually established schools. With each school competing against the other, the sophiadendrites turned from their parasitical attachment to spin-scums and began the empirical investigation of the physical world. The subsequent flourishing of the sciences could therefore be considered a form of contrarianism institutionalized, depending as it does on the peaceful labors of an ecumenical, global community bound by the empirical practices (in contrast to the less than peaceful communities bound by deep and self-confirming narratives – those bloody bastards).
The convergence of religion, science, and the inquiry of the sophiadendrite gave rise to an independent infrastructure; originally known as the University, it is what I call here academia. Today’s academia is not the prototypical dwelling of full-throttle calls for justice – although there is some of that – but it is certainly where one goes to find truth. Naturally enough, the primary predator of the sophiadendrite, the fundamentalist, has always enjoyed challenging this claim (after all, a great conspiracy has determined that most tenured professors are ‘liberals’).
However, word on the street has it that academia would not be a place for the adventurous free intellect. It is, for example, known for its ‘politics.’ Academia is also well known for the long haul – fully controlled by a small oligarchy of proud, bearded, and predominately male mammals – that concludes with the academic system dumping you who knows where and into who knows what institution – and this only if you are lucky (a community college in Kansas or a university in Maine? UCSD would not be a likely prospect). All this calls doubt on the thought that academia provides an institution for a genuine contrarian.
Yet, there remains something particular to academia that may attract, at times, a genuine free intellect, and I finally get to my topic: tenure. The non-academic Wikipedia, of all sources, has a delightful summary of the case:
Academic tenure is primarily intended to guarantee the right to academic freedom: it protects teachers and researchers when they dissent from prevailing opinion, openly disagree with authorities of any sort, or spend time on unfashionable topics. Thus academic tenure is similar to the lifetime tenure that protects some judges from external pressure. Without job security, the scholarly community as a whole might favor “safe” lines of inquiry. The intent of tenure is to allow original ideas to be more likely to arise, by giving scholars the intellectual autonomy to investigate the problems and solutions about which they are most passionate, and to report their honest conclusions. In economies where higher education is provided by the private sector, tenure also has the effect of helping to ensure the integrity of the grading system. Absent tenure, professors could be pressured by administrators to issue higher grades for the attracting and keeping of a greater number of students.
Universities also have economic rationales for adopting tenure systems. First, job security and the accompanying autonomy are significant employee benefits; without them, universities might have to pay higher salaries or take other measures to attract and retain talented or well-known scholars. Second, junior faculty are driven to establish themselves by the high stakes of the tenure decision (i.e., lifetime tenure vs. job loss), arguably helping to create a culture of excellence within the university. Finally, tenured faculty may be more likely to invest time in improving the universities where they expect to remain for life; they may also be more willing to hire, mentor and promote talented junior colleagues who could otherwise threaten their positions. Many of these rationales resemble those for senior partner positions in law and accounting firms.
But there are doubts:
Although it is claimed that tenure is granted to secure academic freedom for faculty, relatively few tenured professors dissent from prevailing opinion, openly disagree with authorities of any sort, or spend time researching unfashionable topics. Those who do dissent may find they are denied tenure in the first place.[13] It has been informally suggested by university students that the currently prevailing reason for tenure is merely to provide job security to professors at the expense of taxpayers (at state universities) and students.[citation needed] The granting of tenure may not reflect the quality of an educator’s teaching abilities.[citation needed]
Today, ‘academic’ is almost synonymous with ‘irrelevant.’ With all this freedom to protest, where is the protest? With jobs secured, why are tenured professors not taking up the habits of the public intellectual? There is no use pretending there is not a problem to address here. However, to me there are, on the face of it, five mitigating considerations:
1) To borrow a term from H.L. Menken, although natural language used to reference the academic disciplines might be influenced by the large population of ‘boobies,’ this does not mean that the opinion of said boobies says anything at all accurate about academic disciplines. Who cares what the common man thinks of when he thinks of the ‘academic’? If he fails to bring to the imagination scruffy, beer drinking, flip-flopped old men that allow young punks to argue with them all day long, then let the ignorant be ignorant. (I use the masculine here, since, as all women know and most men would not think to know, women are almost never common. Rarely have I seen an easily classified human female belching and scratching her tummy while in complete amusement by a football game and the crass jokes during commercials – to give just one example).
2) It just might be that rigorous intellectual discipline is apt to achieve a certain level of skepticism about the relevance of popular political rhetoric when it comes to the business of truth-seeking. A more natural emphasis might rather be placed on training the next generation how to critically think through – to use what is now a technical term – all the bullshit that is to come.
3) The academic is a radical in that he or she challenges academic peers on a monthly or weekly basis, both formally and informally. The craft of argument and disputation is cradled primarily within academia, and only secondarily in the practice of law, which seems to me a more rhetorical, popular, and political exercise.
4) The academic might be led to believe that there is more value in the long run in challenging one’s academic field, or broader tradition, rather than local, political or rhetorical skirmishes. The “few” referenced by this article might almost be enough in this respect.
5) The academic has a very specific audience, really: class-enrolled students. Almost universally, those in the most influential positions in society have been challenged and trained by tenured professors during what is a crucially formative time in their young adulthood. And when addressing this audience, the professor can challenge authority and received points of view on a weekly basis. The professor can be a radical in the classroom. Given the nature of the audience, how could this not be relevant?
Yes? No? Maybe? Go to hell?
Posted by metzler on Wednesday, April 22, 2009, at 8:10 pm.
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A bizarre comment thread has developed after Wilson attempted an objective historical analysis of the history of American journalism (Wilson argues for bar brawling after dismissing the possibility of empirical, rational knowledge of the world).
A Kirker layman explained that prophet Wilson is a better source of information than all the free American journalists and academics combined:
And then another gentlemen admitted – date stamped and in writing mind you – that religion is a form of brain washing:
None of Wilson’s readers are protesting. That is perhaps an understatement. This is a nice sampling of Wilson’s readership.
Comment by Michael Metzler — April 23, 2009 @ 8:52 am
My own take is that academics are largely people who enjoyed school, found success in school, and saw the chance to continue that success. One should predict no more radicalism or public involvement from them than from any other group of similar social background — perhaps a bit less, given the extent to which rule-abiding is necessary for success in school, or perhaps a bit more, given the extent to which the university environment (in some ways) encourages it.
Comment by Eric Schwitzgebel — April 24, 2009 @ 7:43 am
Eric,
Good point about social situation. I was thinking of the academic here more from my own point of view; but it is true, most academics are those who in a sense never left school. But what then, is the role of tenure, if not to protect the freedom of radical ideas?
Comment by metzler — April 24, 2009 @ 4:15 pm
To protect the freedom of any old ideas! (Whether it’s necessary for this in the current cultural milieu is debatable. Also debatable is whether the benefit is worth the cost.)
Comment by Eric Schwitzgebel — April 24, 2009 @ 4:26 pm
Hmmmm. Darwinianism is an old idea, yet was too radical for teachers to espouse in Tennessee as late as the 1920s. But something tells me that the old ideas in analytic philosophy do not deserve this kind of preservation.
Comment by metzler — April 24, 2009 @ 4:38 pm
Wow. I just read Molly Worthen’s New York Times Magazine investigation of Mark Driscoll. This made me think of my self-appointed question about X-elder:
Mark Driscoll is one of the few pastors Wilson provides a link to on his blog. The infamous Bayly Brothers is another.
Comment by metzler — April 24, 2009 @ 8:01 pm