Following up on my last post, Which side are you on?, here is another reason to be
concerned about the evaporation of tenure-track jobs and the increasing
dependence on contingent faculty. One of the major purposes of tenure is to
guarantee academic freedom. In the
words of the AAUP:
Institutions of higher education are conducted for the
common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or
the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the
free search for truth and its free exposition.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.Tenure is a means to certain ends; specifically: (1) freedom
of teaching and research and of extramural activities, and (2) a sufficient
degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women
of ability. Freedom and economic security, hence, tenure, are indispensable
to the success of an institution in fulfilling its obligations to its students
and to society.
Clearly, without tenure, contingent faculty’s ability to
engage in “the free search for truth and its free expression” is severely
limited. For example, consider the case of Norman Finkelstein. Finkelstein
was denied
tenure at DePaul University for reasons that were clearly related to his
controversial research on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now, I cannot help
but wonder: how many more Finkelsteins are out there? How many contingent faculty
have looked at the Finkelstein case and said “If I want to get tenure, I better
not try to publish this work; it’s too controversial”? That cannot be conducive
to “the free search for truth,” right?
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