Everybody is talking about the teaching track, and I want to contribute some ideas to the discussion.
I believe that the teaching track is a great idea. At my university, for instance, we have many people who got hired and tenured when we were still a 100% teaching institution. Things have changed, and now everybody is required to do research.
Obviously, you can’t become a research scholar overnight. Being a research scholar is a way of life. You need to accumulate intellectual capital and construct a scholarly base over the course of many years. So people who are asked to start producing scholarship at the age of 50 feel completely lost. They experience shame, fear, and stress as they try to come up with something to put in the research column of their yearly evaluation.
By the way, I met people like these both at Yale and Cornell, and now their careers are ruined because you can only fake being a research scholar for a while. So this happens everywhere, and it happens a lot.
Wouldn’t it be great to let such people off the research hook and simply give them a 4/4 or a 5/5 teaching load? And give people like me a 2/2 teaching load? That would make every sense.
However, there are three major issues that will make the introduction of a teaching track impossible:
1. There is absolutely no way of justifying the need to have people with PhDs teach Spanish 101 , Composition 101 or French 102. And people who do no research can’t teach anything else.
2. There is absolutely no way of justifying the need for tenure for people who only teach Geography 101 and Co.
3. There is absolutely no way of introducing the teaching track without making people angry and wounding their pride. People will freak out and start plotting like their lives depend on it.
And thus, this great idea will die an untimely death.
Unless students magically start coming to college more prepared, somebody will need to be doing all the remediation. That’s just reality. And all of the endless complaining about the horrible unfairness of the unkind universe will not change it. Some sort of an arrangement will have to be made to accommodate this reality. The discussion of the teaching track is at least an attempt to consider a solution. So it’s a step in a good direction.
Clarissa's Blog 
As somebody who spent 7+ years doing a Masters and PhD in Composition and Rhetoric, and who teaches primarily gen-ed writing courses in my 4/4 tenure-track job (even as a tenured full professor), I really have to respond to the assertion that people who teach gen-ed have no claim to being tenure-eligible.
Academic freedom applies to teaching too, and no matter what level you’re teaching, that should protected.
Debasing gen-ed teaching by claiming that anybody can do it actually makes it easier for management to justify hiring low-paid, disposable contingent faculty. If those courses are so easy and don’t warrant any security or protection, why bother giving it to anybody who teaches them?
Probably more, but those are the most important ones.
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The point of tenure is to ensure that scholars create and express new ideas freely. But if all a person does is teach German 101, there are obviously no ideas created or disseminated. It doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with German 101. It just means that it is about something different than production of ideas.
So what would be the justification for tenure in this case?
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Academic freedom for research is only one of several justifications for tenure. As I said, academic freedom protections should also apply to teaching no matter what level. Also, tenure grants due process protections that are almost impossible to get without it. Why deny those protections to anybody?
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“Academic freedom for research is only one of several justifications for tenure.”
“Also, tenure grants due process protections that are almost impossible to get without it. Why deny those protections to anybody?”
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AAUP is very clear that academic freedom provisions, which are the guts of tenure protection, apply to teaching as well as research: “Academic freedom is essential to these purposes and applies to both teaching and research. Freedom in research is fundamental to the advancement of truth. Academic freedom in its teaching aspect is fundamental for the protection of the rights of the teacher in teaching and of the student to freedom in learning. It carries with it duties correlative with rights.”
We have good union protection for our NTT faculty too, but they can still be fired at will because that’s the definition of non-tenure-track.
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“We have good union protection for our NTT faculty too, but they can still be fired at will”
“Academic freedom in its teaching aspect is fundamental for the protection of the rights of the teacher in teaching and of the student to freedom in learning.”
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The document I cited is the AAUP’s 1940 statement on academic freedom and tenure; it’s the most authoritative definition of the concept we have. It’s been cited literally millions of times.
And yes, that one sentence you pulled out is a little clunky. I don’t think it’s incomprehensible. Maybe there’s a grey area there we can agree on.
As for at-will employment, I think we’re talking about different things. All I’m saying is, tenure protects faculty from being fired without cause and without due process. I’ve never heard of any academic union CBA that protects due process against arbitrary and capricious firing outside of tenure. Would be happy to see what that language looks like if you know of any.
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There has got to be an argument that justifies why at-will firing is less acceptable for teaching than it is for, say, the fields of statistics, computer programming, sales, etc. If such an argument exists, I’m very open to hearing it and modifying my position.
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Sorry, WordPress won’t let me reply to the thread we had–you said there has to be an argument against at-will hiring in order to justify it.
That’s what every union contract does. It provides protections against arbitrary and capricious firing. It also does other things, but that’s it’s first and most important order of business. The economic arguments against protections are always circular–the very same economic interests that claim to be damaged also get to provide the books (that they can pretty much cook however they want) to show how damaged they’ve been. That aside, not-for-profit academic institutions are already governed by different economics, as well they should be.
Are you saying that only “knowledge producers” can make the case that they deserve such protection? Why? Why is that work any more important than building bridges? Or teaching first-year writing? I teach a lot; I do some research; I do a lot of service. And for you to tell me that my work is less worthy of due process protection than yours because I don’t publish very much is, well, really troubling.
Would love to continue to conversation but the pace will have to slow down. Ironically, I have to write a plenary address about academic labor equity. 🙂
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The University of Chicago had a solution for the teaching track four decades ago, an example that no one followed. A faculty member could get tenure through a department or through “The College”, as the undergrad program was known. Those receiving tenure in The College were just that — exceptional teachers. There weren’t many, but there were awesome.
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typo: in the last sentence, there = they. Head cold today. Example, Ira Kipnis taught a Constitutional Law course that I took. He had a PhD in history and had a highly successful commercial law practice. Teaching for him was a retirement gig, and he was amazing. Forty years later, I can still recall his lectures.
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I hope you get well soon, Vic!
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” However, there are three major issues that will make the introduction of a teaching track impossible …”
There are other issues at play here that provide partial counterpoints.
One very useful reason for tenured professors to teach first-year courses or field survey courses is that it gives these professors the ability to identify the incoming influentials in each class. I know of one tenured professor who would teach an introductory/survey course in his field for precisely that reason, and eventually this professor wound up teaching for at least one semester each course in the college.
At that point, choosing a new dean led to an obvious choice — who’s better to become the new dean than the professor who had actually taught nearly the entire curriculum?
Similarly, some of these tenured professors may choose to move into structural or political roles, becoming chancellors and provosts. Again, who’s better to move into these roles than people who have institutional support?
It seems that many of your problems involving a disconnect between the “staff” or “administration” and the “professors” may be the result of the university’s leadership simply not understanding how to promote the right people from within, inevitably leading to the result that the administration is atypical of what you would prefer to see in an academic setting. (My earlier comments about weak leaders preferring weak managers apply here with considerable emphasis.)
So to this, I suggest that your first point overlooks the fact that the teaching track can and should be an introduction to structural or political roles within the university, and that your second point overlooks the fact that specific assignments within the teaching track are far from permanent. Naturally, as far as your third point goes, you’ll make people considerably less angry with the teaching track if it were viewed as a way to senior structural and political roles, and that the university will make every attempt to promote people from within.
On a more survival-orientated point, I think it would be useful for some people who share some common experiences with you to be responsible for watching your back, and in this way the “pure research” positions would be guarded by the “pure teaching” people who are expected to grow into leadership positions.
When this arrangement doesn’t exist, the situation you have described comes about, and the belief that it will remain that way most likely comes from the observation that the leadership is wholly incapable of making “mid-course corrections” …
In that case, the university will deserve its inevitable fate of becoming an Institute of Instructors, producing little in the way of research, being nearly completely unaware of the state-of-the-art or the state-of-the-field. (It will in fact turn into a for-pay version of an advanced sixth form school, in a sense, where advanced degrees replace A-levels and O-levels.)
I’ll leave you with this final bit about that professor who turned into his university’s version of Balliol College’s Jowett: upon retirement, he left his field entirely, having completed the work he set out to do, and he became a touring musician for what is at least a moderately notorious symphony.
In this sense, I suspect he chose to give up tending the field, choosing to produce some bits of culture in its place …
In another sense, I suspect he had grown a new set of allies when nobody else was watching.
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“One very useful reason for tenured professors to teach first-year courses or field survey courses is that it gives these professors the ability to identify the incoming influentials in each class.”
The problem is that there are only 30 students who are capable of taking an advanced seminar in a discipline in a semester, and there are 300+ students who need to take an introductory course in it. We have students who come in after 6 years of Spanish before college but who can’t string two words together in the language. So we do remediation. And so there are crowds of people needed to do that remediation. Ideally, those would be people with MAs, not PhDs, who’d be unionized. This is how we do it at my university. But we seem to be quite exceptional in this.
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And so the university attempts to make these students whole again, having been savaged by their previous instruction?
I’m fairly sure I don’t like the very specific implications this has when you have to consider the university as a form of intellectual health care service …
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“I’m fairly sure I don’t like the very specific implications this has when you have to consider the university as a form of intellectual health care service”
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“Bristol … in England … you’re at the motor speedway?”
No, I assure you, Americans often can’t find things within their own country.
[now refers to Bristol as “Brizzle”, as the locals do, in order to avoid confusion …]
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Well, I want to preface this comment by saying that I think anything is preferable to farming out teaching to adjuncts. That being said, I have a couple of issues with the “teaching track.”
1) It is becoming increasingly rare to find “just teaching” and/or “just research” academics. Most people my generation and younger go in to academia to participate in both capacities. This is a good thing. I think all professors should teach (even fancy ones like Judith Butler) and all professors should participate in research of some type (even professors teaching lower division courses.)
The above being said, I can see why it would make sense to have “teaching only” faculty in certain limited capacities: freshman composition, the 101 level of a language etc. But I think that– more than likely– that these positions would likely be comprised of faculty who wanted more research oriented jobs but took what they could get and feel perhaps a bit bitter that their high teaching loads are hurting their career.
2) I believe that all full time faculty (even those who are on the “teaching track” should have the ability to be tenured.) To me, this far weightier than the issue I mentioned above. You seem to indicate that tenure is only needed for research. In my personal experience, that’s not true. I’ve used my tenure for fighting the administration on teaching decisions far more than for research decisions.
To explain a bit further. My administration isn’t threatened by my publications at all. They want me to publish. If I’m doing that, they are happy. And I think that my experience is typical here. Of course, tenure is important in this sense “just in case” but on a daily, practical level, I haven’t had to worry about administrative “reach” in to my research.
But I’ve had to worry about “administrative reach” in regards to teaching: I’ve had to argue with administration to stop them from raising courses minimums in my classes; I’ve had to argue with the admins that certain courses in our department will not work online; I’ve had to argue with the administration that the large lecture format doesn’t work with certain classes. Tenure also gives me the freedom to have students experience discomfort in my classes. I can have a disgruntled student and not have to worry about job security. Ultimately, tenure is incredibly important to teachers. And many many universities don’t have unions– mine doesn’t– but tenure is (for now at least) a universal. So I think it’s incredibly important that full time teachers have tenure and the pedagogical freedom tenure grants.
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“It is becoming increasingly rare to find “just teaching” and/or “just research” academics. Most people my generation and younger go in to academia to participate in both capacities.”
“Tenure also gives me the freedom to have students experience discomfort in my classes. I can have a disgruntled student and not have to worry about job security. ”
I participate in a lot of discussions with people outside of academia who need it explained to them why tenure is crucial for the creation of new knowledge. And I’m usually very good at explaining this. But I can’t come to my plumber and tell him that teachers need tenure because students complain. There is no chance he will get behind that. Which is why I’m boring everybody with these questions about how they justify tenure for 100% teaching positions. How do I tell a handyman, a pedicurist, a receptionist (i.e. people who will or won’t vote for some tenure-bashing creep as president) that they don’t get tenure-like protection but teachers should?
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Perhaps I didn’t express it very well but I think the single most important thing that I said above was the issue about administrative reach in to teaching. (The student thing is quite minor.) Very few of us are publishing anything that is remotely threatening. But I think tenured faculty is the only faction in the country preventing the virtual destruction of higher education (MOOCS, scantron tests for all; classes of 300+, textbooks in every classroom). This may sound overblown but it’s not.
At basis, my research gives me more pleasure and pride than my teaching (certainly more pride.) But in some ways I think my role as a university educator is more important civically. I think the university is absolutely critical to a functioning society; for the university to function as it should, professors need to be able to teach freely and to make pedagogical decisions based on their own expertise and not based on the greedy fantasies of some fly by night, overpaid administrator.
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“I think the university is absolutely critical to a functioning society; for the university to function as it should, professors need to be able to teach freely and to make pedagogical decisions based on their own expertise and not based on the greedy fantasies of some fly by night, overpaid administrator.”
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I think the most obvious answers are the least helpful here, so I will try answering this another way …
I believe what may be at the root of the problem is that the public expects there to be Institutes of Instruction in which the rudimentary tasks of performing intellectual health care must be performed, and that within these institutes (or universities), they simply don’t understand why research is necessary.
Instead, they believe that instruction can be performed by armies of Rancière’s “ignorant schoolmasters”, and that is why you have politicians supporting these armies of glorified instructors.
Ignorant schoolmasters tend to produce ignorant disciples who are unaware of changes afoot that make a steady-state intellectual existence impossible.
It is important to note here that most people don’t have an intellectual existence at all, and in fact harbour no actual opinions, in the mould of Gasset’s person of the masses. Presenting arguments from an intellectual point of view becomes a mostly pointless effort.
Instead, you have to present the arguments in another form, and I think talking about “possible worlds” in the sense of Searle can be of help.
You want tenured professors because the world they represent is a world in which free inquiry leads to a state of existence in which people can better themselves, and that it is necessary to divert a portion of state and societal power to ensure that this remains possible.
Without what is essentially a conservative “rear-guard action” to ensure that what they may think of as a “marketplace of ideas” remains tenable, the ability of the society to adapt to the emergence of new “possible worlds” becomes an ongoing gamble. At some point, “gambler’s ruin” sets in and a collapse as an inevitability enters into public discourse.
“We work to protect and to expand the things that maintain a free society” may be a bit glib and perhaps a bit simplistic, but for people who have no intellectual existence, this may be as much as you can manage.
[if you were in doubt about my elitism before, well … BOOYAH] 🙂
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In science and engineering, professors make much less money than industry professionals (including industry researchers). In my field, the starting salary of an industrial researcher is twice the starting salary of an assistant professor. In these fields, tenure is thought of as a way of exchanging job security for money and without tenure there will be very few academics.
My impression is that the same is true for school teachers. Teachers get paid very little but have job security. If there was no tenure, then school districts would have to pay teachers much better.
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I think elementary language is a bad example for why someone teaching at lower levels might need some additional layer of protection. Some subjects can be quite controversial at the beginning level, e.g. teaching Intro to Biology to conservative Christians, an Intro to Religion that examines many religions on an equal basis, an intro to Political Science that challenges students preconceived ideas about political issues, an intro to Art History that includes nudes or controversial art works.
I think people also get too hung up on the word tenure. People, even people who teach nothing but Spanish 101, need some basic protections from retaliation and some stability in their jobs. One idea that has been discussed at my university is the idea of adding a presumptive renewal clause to contracts after someone has taught successfully for a certain number of years (5-6 years has been discussed). As I understand it, this means that the person could expect their contract to be renewed indefinitely after however many years and the university would have to document a concrete reason (e.g. poor teaching, violation of policies, etc.) and in most circumstances give the person some time to correct their performance before their position would not be renewed. This wouldn’t be full tenure, but it would protect people from being canned suddenly because a new department chair doesn’t like them or because too many students ran to the dean’s office to complain one semester. I think it’s a good idea and I hope it will get implemented as these discussions continue.
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“People, even people who teach nothing but Spanish 101, need some basic protections from retaliation and some stability in their jobs.”
If, on the other hand, we are only discussing tenure for teaching jobs, then there needs to be some sort of a philosophy behind this. Research scholars get tenure because creating new knowledge always goes against established interests, be they intellectual, economic, political, hierarchical, etc. Creation of knowledge is a revolutionary act that demolishes hierarchies. This is the reason why it has to be safeguarded, at least a bit, from those hierarchies. And this, to me, is absolutely the only reason why tenure should exist.
Protection of people from chairs and students who don’t like them is not a justification of tenure that I can ever support. Because every single person in every other profession deals with these realities. Everybody has to work out ways of adapting to other, very annoying humans in the workplace. And that’s what everybody does. There needs to be a principle at work that justifies taking teachers out of this reality.
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“Research scholars get tenure because creating new knowledge always goes against established interests, be they intellectual, economic, political, hierarchical, etc. Creation of knowledge is a revolutionary act that demolishes hierarchies”
I think this is wishful thinking. I’ve never known of a tenured professor to make the slightest dent in demolishin hierarchies or actually challenging established interests. They talk a good game but have approximately zero effect in the real world off campus.
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“I think this is wishful thinking. I’ve never known of a tenured professor to make the slightest dent in demolishin hierarchies or actually challenging established interests. They talk a good game but have approximately zero effect in the real world off campus.”
For instance, the professor whose work first informed me of the collapse of the nation-state advised several American presidents. His analysis was based on the ideas of literally hundreds of other scholars. Later on, his ideas found their way into the discussions among business leaders around the world. And then, they started cropping up in the work of popular authors of fiction who read the work of the business leaders who, in turn, read the work of this scholar. And then these ideas started making their way into public discourse and we are now all better prepared for the enormous transformations we are experiencing.
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This, by the way, is the reason why societies that invest into the seemingly useless scholarship of ideas and safeguard its freedom prosper and countries that don’t are mired in their secondary roles. Ideas are so much more important than natural resources. And the history of humanity proves that once and again.
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I couldn’t agree more about the importance of investing in supposedly arcane scholarship (you never know when one of the 2984 “useless” things you know will turn out to be absolutely crucial or which one it will be).
But in terms of the real challenging of authority, that’s not done by tenured faculty, it’s done as the knowledge seaps down and out into the real world by people with no protection. Arguing for tenure for research faculty and no protection for those who will eventually make the knowledge more widely known is kind of… elitist and defeatist.
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“But in terms of the real challenging of authority, that’s not done by tenured faculty, it’s done as the knowledge seaps down and out into the real world by people with no protection. ”
“Arguing for tenure for research faculty and no protection for those who will eventually make the knowledge more widely known is kind of… elitist and defeatist.”
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There’s quite a bit of room between at-will firing and traditional tenure as it exists in the US. The presumptive renewal clause, if my university goes with that sustem, would not be nearly as strong a protection as the tenure that is given to research faculty. It would actually be very easy to get rid of people if demand in a subject were falling and it would be easier than getting rid of tenure track faculty if there were other issues.
I think teaching is different than many other professions in that the job often involves making people do things they don’t really want to do (e.g. take tests, write papers) and it also involves giving grades that students aren’t necessarily going to like. I don’t think the person teaching Spanish 101 needs tenure, but they shouldn’t get non-renewed for teaching a challenging course and not giving everyone an A.
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“I think teaching is different than many other professions in that the job often involves making people do things they don’t really want to do (e.g. take tests, write papers) and it also involves giving grades that students aren’t necessarily going to like.”
“I don’t think the person teaching Spanish 101 needs tenure, but they shouldn’t get non-renewed for teaching a challenging course and not giving everyone an A.”
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“If a teacher can’t get the students to value her irrespective of the grades she assigns, I seriously doubt the professional qualifications of this teacher, to be honest. Establishing rapport with students is what the job is all about.”
This is a good point and I agree that good teachers usually establish rapport and get students to respect their grades. It’s rare, but I have encountered a couple of very aggressive complainers who were constantly going to course coordinators and department chairs to complain about their instructor. One did four semesters in our department and had at least a dozen meetings with the department chair to complain about the classes. (I later found out he did this in almost every class he took at the university.) In another case, the student had angry outbursts in class and tons of complaints to the chair, the other students were also complaining because they were all terrified of the aggressive complainer and wanted to have him removed from the course. I work with reasonable people for the most part and these aggressive complainers haven’t been taken very seriously and their complaints haven’t been held against the instructors, but what would protect an contingent instructor if a dean decided to take these kinds of students seriously.
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I second what Evelina Anville and TomW said about other 101 courses where tenure for teaching makes sense and protections from shitty crops of students. I also just wanted to remind you that in the US, grade school and high school teachers have a tenure system as well, but I think it’s somewhere in between a union negotiation thing and tenure in higher ed… (but I am no expert on that). So there is some precedent too. And why they get tenure is being debated ad nauseam these days.
I also think a teaching track makes sense.
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People who teach need tenure if they’re thinking of giving any of the following grades:
1) D or F for a star athlete.
2) D or F for the child of a major donor.
3) A- or below for a pre-med
4) B or below for a special snowflake who knows how to work “the system” with filing complaints, and is convinced that you graded down their essay because you disagree with their opinion rather than because it was incoherently argued and riddle with grammatical errors and informal language.
I’m only sort of joking.
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