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<\/a><\/span>The tenure system was developed a century ago during the Progressive Era to avoid the narrow-mindedness, heavy-handedness, and unoriginality that students increasingly endure today. Abolishing tenure will foster the robust academic freedom and quality educational experience that the institution was supposed to protect, and bring American academia in line with the way university appointments work in many other parts of the world.<\/p>\n
President Garber and his colleagues can learn from three successful 20th-century revolutions that reshaped American higher education\u2014including the revolution that turned Harvard into the United States\u2019 most prestigious university. It was Garber\u2019s distinguished predecessor as Harvard\u2019s president, from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant, who created the Harvard most fans and critics know today, by helping to transform his university and the Ivy League from a stodgy playground for America\u2019s old-line aristocracy into a breeding ground for its meritocracy. Key to Conant\u2019s reforms was his endorsement of both standardized testing as the basis of merit-based admissions and investment in financial aid to recruit academic superstars from all over the world. He, too, violated tradition by including lower-class \u201cmeatballs\u201d in the student body, and then by welcoming GI Bill veterans after World War II (while keeping quotas on Jews intact until 1951).<\/p>\n
Still, Conant understood that the key to reforming the institution was changing the faculty. He imposed a mandatory retirement age for most at 66. Whenever the faculty resisted his proposals, Conant sighed, \u201cBehold the turtle. It makes progress only when it sticks its neck out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Clearly, leadership counts. Courageous presidents can trigger system-wide change by using their universities as laboratories. Conant, in large part, built on the new model of the American university inspired by Robert Maynard Hutchins, who at 29 began transforming what was then a relatively undistinguished school\u2014the University of Chicago\u2014into one of the country\u2019s most productive and prestigious institutions of higher learning.<\/p>\n
Universities were unpopular in those days, too. When he began his reform effort in the early 1930s, Hutchins acknowledged that the \u201cpopular misconceptions of the nature and purpose of universities originate in the fantastic misconduct of the universities.\u201d Defining the \u201cpurpose of the university\u201d as procuring \u201ca moral, intellectual, and spiritual revolution throughout the world,\u201d Hutchins assailed the status quo. Seeking to welcome students into \u201cthe great conversation,\u201d he replaced specialized training for undergraduates with general education based on the great books. After all, the educational system was not developed \u201cto produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n
Defying alumni, Hutchins also eliminated varsity football, deeming it a distraction from the university\u2019s mission.<\/p>\n
During the 22 years following his 1929 appointment, Hutchins used his University of Chicago platform as a bully pulpit. He delivered 64 public addresses in his first year alone, supplemented by radio appearances and popular Saturday Evening Post articles. Transforming the University of Chicago from a regional school into an international force, Hutchins inspired imitators throughout North America.<\/p>\n
Our current crisis, however, is more the product of a faculty-driven ideological revolution with roots in the 1960s. \u201cWhile the Right has been busy taking the White House,\u201d Todd Gitlin lamented in The Twilight of Common Dreams in 1995, \u201cthe Left has been marching on the English department.\u201d The former \u201860s protester and radical sociologist thought his comrades failed. But they revolutionized the university, then Blue America\u2014creating a parallel society with its own set of values, which have become largely synonymous with higher social class and wealth, while exacerbating social divisions and fracturing mainstream political consensus.<\/p>\n
Over the past 50 years, waves of scholar-activists, whose approach is guided by Brazilian educational guru Paulo Freire, have changed the university far beyond what Hutchins and Conant would recognize. Although written in 1968, Freire\u2019s popular Pedagogy of the Oppressed describes too many classrooms today. \u201cProblem-posing education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, posits as fundamental that the people subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation,\u201d Freire wrote. Foreshadowing the jargon of today\u2019s \u201crevolutionary\u201d academics in American universities, he added, \u201cProblem-posing education does not and cannot serve the interests of the oppressor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Traditionally, universities have always conned parents, convincing them that they were paying for their children to be taught by the best teachers, as universities in fact promoted the best researchers. Today, parents risk bankruptcy thinking they\u2019re buying knowledge and credentials that will help their kids master the very system many of their kids\u2019 professors actively seek to destroy.<\/p>\n
In an article on \u201cThe roles of the scholar\/activist in education,\u201d Michael Apple, a leading education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, defines the critical educator\u2019s \u201ctask\u201d as \u201ckeeping traditions of radical and progressive work alive.\u201d This commitment to \u201csee the world through the eyes of the dispossessed and act against the ideological and institutional processes and forms that reproduce oppressive conditions,\u201d Apple explains elsewhere, restructures the teacher\u2019s \u201crole.\u201d Ultimately, education, from kindergarten through graduate school, became \u201ca site of resistance \u2026 an arena of ideological conflict\u201d essential to the \u201clong-term struggles to build a more just society.\u201d<\/p>\n
As the hundreds of scholars who signed the \u201cPalestine and Praxis\u201d petition in May 2021 postulated, \u201cWe believe that the critical theory we generate in our literature and in our classrooms must be backed in deed.\u201d Treating anti-Zionism as a foundation of their activism, they insisted, \u201cScholarship without action normalizes the status quo and reinforces Israel\u2019s impunity.\u201d<\/p>\n
The best of the older scholars, now in their seventies and eighties, who grew up in the world of scholarly excellence that Hutchins and Conant helped to make, may eschew shallow and politically motivated platitudes as having nothing to do with knowing more about the Renaissance or the Middle Ages or exploring the contradictions of string theory. However, younger scholars, seeking tenure\u2014or simply an extra semester of being a vagabond adjunct\u2014have little choice but to join their professional societies and unions dominated by tenured radical elders and sign whatever petitions they are expected to sign, proving their adherence to \u201ccritical theory\u201d and \u201cthe struggle for justice.\u201d Calling this kind of forced intellectual conformity \u201cfree speech\u201d is the kind of perverted wordplay these self-styled \u201ccritical theorists\u201d so often employ. But they are honest, at least, in proclaiming their belief that traditional notions of scholarship are a sham and announcing that their goal is social revolution.<\/p>\n
These differing models illustrate why the path away from the academic intifada toward academic salvation begins with tenure reform from above\u2014meaning, driven by university presidents and boards of trustees, who retain the power to shape their institutions along different lines than those imagined by Freire and Judith Butler.<\/p>\n