Tenure and Wisconsin

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A news report on the website of the (Minneapolis-based?) Star Tribune reveals that the Wisconsin state budget committee has recommended that the tenure system of Wisconsin colleges and universities be abandoned, and that the University of Wisconsin budget should be cut by $250 million.  (More details are on Huffpost here.)  I may have got the whole thing wrong, but it doesn't matter; in my opinion, this move is not unexpected.

That the sum is so enormous hints that the entire University of Wisconsin budget must be far more enormous.  The questions arise: why is tenure necessary?  Why must public colleges and universities have such enormous budgets?

I can imagine, perhaps several decades in the past, a world in which the ordinary expenses of a private citizen are lower than they are today, but where the government takes a proportionally greater responsibility for supplying the needs of the typical citizen than is common in the US today.  Public education is paid for by the government out of taxes, but in addition to their role of providing education for the citizens, (whatever that basic education may consist of,) it is understood that the public university professors also take on the right to disagree strongly with public policy.  This means that university administrators must not be given absolute carte blanche to hire and fire professors, because disagreement with official policy must be tolerated, and not be punishable by termination.  To put it in a cartoon-like way, the university is essentially a community of potential whistle-blowers, who are nurtured in the bosom of the government.  So tenure is a form of giving independence to faculty, once they have proven themselves as fit.

This only makes sense in that sort of world, where the expenses of the university are moderate, where salaries are small, and where the public does not feel the need to supervise the universities so closely because they are proportionately such a minor burden on the tax base.  In addition, the freedom of today's highly-paid university professors is much more odious psychologically, because the very nature of the political system is coming into question.  One sector of the population wants freedom from the shackles of a controlled economy, and views those academics --among others-- who disagree with them, as misleading their youth, and wants them silenced.  But they can't be silenced; tenure is all about resisting the forces of censorship.  The other sector of the population want a more controlled economy, where the level of government responsibility for the needs of the population (and the nature of those needs that are met by the state) is higher (and different), and this sector wants its ideas championed by those faculty who agree with them (and very likely wants the other faculty silenced!).

Why do Universities have such enormous budgets?  It is because in America today, only one thing is understood thoroughly: business.  Everything must be run as a business, from churches, to schools, to universities, to the postal service, and the Supreme Court, and the government itself.  Everything must pay its own way.  And everything must advertise, and the media has ensured that an enormous fraction of the budget of every business has to be devoted to: what?  Advertising.  So the razor edge on which the fate of universities and colleges are balanced is made even horribly sharper by the inflated budgets of these places, which must pay not only for the professors, but what are, from the point of view of academic curmudgeons such as myself, inessentials.

The discussion of tenure often takes the form as to what sort of disagreements should be tolerated; philosophical and academic disagreements are okay, but other disagreements must not be allowed, and so on.  Universities today are so large that faculty who want to bring their particular views to a wider public often need to indulge in a certain amount of theatre, which enrages a sector of the public, which precipitates more calls for the abolition of tenure.  In today's society, flag-burning and book-burning and occupying assemblies, and so on, are deemed necessary by some, while others take to public media, and highly orchestrated tissues of lies and misrepresentation and inflammatory remarks on television and the Internet (the entertainment of choice of the most feeble-minded among us) to persuade the most easily persuaded among us.

Our fellow citizens, unfortunately, have very little resistance to propaganda.  Resistance to propaganda comes from a certain sort of education.  But it is clear that our ability to spread this sort of education is weak; because the ability to benefit from education comes from, among other things, the environment of the home; and society, which is under the control of business, makes demands on its workers which preclude the sort of home environment that is conducive to growing engaged and thoughtful citizens, who are able to benefit from education.

So the questions of how education must be conducted, and whether and how academics should be given the freedom to disagree with government policy and social conditions, and even university structures, cannot be discussed comfortably, because they are so tightly entangled in the very ability of citizens to understand and to unravel the very questions themselves.

In addition, just as society is indignant at the abuse of social welfare by certain recipients of it, we are just as indignant about the abuse of tenure by certain faculty.  But in both cases, the abuse must be tolerated, and moderated by other means than withdrawing the service, or the right of tenure.  In the case of tenure, it is a much harder decision, as the Wisconsin legislature has learned.  In viewing university faculty as mere educational technicians, state employees as vulnerable as all other state employees, are they endangering the education of their future citizens?  Perhaps the mare has already escaped the barn; across the country it is becoming clear that, while a small minority of our youth are able to absorb a wonderful education from the schools they attend, the vast majority of high school students and college and university undergraduates merely acquire the tiniest fragment of knowledge from their experience.  Tragically, our future professors must be drawn from these pathetic academic remnants, so our future is truly dark.  Our kids will not be taught by the scumbags, if scumbags they are, who populate the halls of academia presently.  They will be taught by future scumbags, who are drinking and smoking their grey cells to death even as I write this.

I know that's dangerous rhetoric, but it certainly expresses my own dismay at the inexorable march of the entropy of education.  There is no doubt that some of the graduates who will burst upon the employment lines this summer can get their lives together, and will make admirable mentors for the kids currently in grade school.  But will they choose academia, which is so much the target of a hostile society, or will they choose instead to set themselves up as crooked Wall Street brokers, or used car salesmen, or lobbyists for Congress, or media spin doctors, where the money is better?

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