THE ARIZONA BOARD of Regents appears poised to pounce on tenure.
The regents, appointed by the governor to rule the state university system, last week agreed to listen to a series of "experts" before they decide to take any action to revise or eliminate tenure for professors. Pointedly, they rejected a suggestion by the system's three university presidents to entertain the recommendations of professors themselves. Instead, they'll hear from outside "authorities" selected by their staff.
It will surprise no one if these hand-picked authorities advise the board to cut out tenure altogether. Tenure is a generations-old mechanism that gives professors job security while protecting their scholarly inquiries from outside surveillance. In the case of a state system like Arizona's, it protects their academic freedom not only from punitive administrators, but also from meddling legislators and political appointees like the regents.
It's no secret that political conservatives on the board, such as Gov. J. Fife Symington III appointee John Munger, would like to see tenure eliminated altogether. Munger, a Tucson attorney, declared in a recent telephone interview that, "Faculty will work harder without tenure....Faculty needs to be motivated continuously to do a good job. The rest of us work hard every day. The rest of us have no guarantees." Academic freedom, he insists, is irrelevant to the debate, arguing that it's protected by the courts.
UA Provost Paul Sypherd has made a spirited public defense of
tenure, on grounds that it's absolutely essential to academic
freedom, courts or no courts, that it offers job security to professors
in exchange for wages that are low relative to those of comparable
professions, and that it ensures continuity of the institution.
John Schwarz, a political science professor who heads the UA Faculty
Senate, says Munger's indolent prof is a straw man.
"... The best evidence I have available is that the typical faculty member at the UA puts in over 50 hours a week," Schwarz says. "The community gets an enormous amount in return." The UA's own statistics, in fact, report a typical work week of 57 hours, with half that time devoted to teaching, advising and classroom prep. And professors brought in some $231 million in research dollars in fiscal '95.
But UA President Manuel Pacheco, already viewed widely on campus as a feeble advocate for the university, will be hard pressed to defend tenure: after all, his protégé, Celestino Fernández, is deep into plans for a brand-new college for Pima County--New Campus--that would never offer tenure at all.
Fernández has shepherded the development of a new undergraduate college, for now a branch of the UA, where professors would be treated more like exalted high school teachers than independent scholars. They would have a teaching load double that of UA professors, they would be required to put in long hours "mentoring" and advising students, and they would still be expected to keep up with their fields by reading widely. They wouldn't have the time to do original research or publishing, so their job opportunities beyond New Campus would be negligible. And, though they would give up a lot professionally, they would not be rewarded by the job security of tenure in exchange. The college would offer them only long-term contracts, subject to periodic review.
Ironically, education professor Gary Fenstermacher, who wrote the draft of the New Campus academic plan, says he would never want to work under those labor conditions himself: "I would not like to work in an environment without tenure."
If the UA faculty themselves hope to preserve tenure, they'll have to do a better job than they've done so far in persuading the public of its importance. They've held no public debates on the proposed conditions at New Campus. Even more extraordinary, it was a group of mostly UA profs, the majority either tenured or tenure-eligible, who drew up New Campus' tenure-free academic plan. Though they acknowledged they were divided over the issue, they took no position. "Knowing that this issue would ultimately be resolved at the level of the Board of Regents," they wrote, "and that key administrators had already expressed their positions on the matter, the Academic Planning Advisory Committee chose not to address this issue by taking sides."
The key administrator in question is Fernández, who himself holds tenure in the UA's department of sociology. Fernández has made his own opposition to tenure in the new school clear all along. He handpicked the 18 people who served on the New Campus planning committee, so it comes as no surprise that they did not repudiate his vision.
Fernández argued in an interview last summer that in an institution without tenure, academic freedom could be protected by "due process." And, he said, the new tenure-free system would give administrators more "flexibility."
Well, yes. That's exactly the issue. A brave new world without tenure dramatically changes the balance of power between administrators and faculty, giving administrators far more "flexibility" to fire dissident professors or to intimidate them into silence. It virtually ends the traditional system of faculty self-governance. It gives regents the "flexibility" to get rid of programs at will, without having to worry about jumping legal roadblocks in the form of tenured professors. It gives riled-up legislators--like those in Oklahoma who have repeatedly called for the firing of tenured law professor Anita Hill from the state university--the "flexibility" to put pressure on their political opponents. Professors unprotected by tenure would be subject to demands to pull the plug on controversial courses and programs, or to rewrite reading lists to suit the prevailing political winds. In short, free speech on campus would be endangered.
A university system without tenure, as one observer puts it, changes professors from independent agents who go out and find and create new knowledge, into docile employees, eager to protect their jobs, who only teach old knowledge.
The specter of a well-heeled regent like Munger using the image of the pampered university professor to make common cause with the state's low-paid workingman and woman would be farcical if it weren't so effective, as millionaire Republicans bandying about the image of the "welfare queen" have learned. The attack on tenure aims not to improve the education of Arizona's sons and daughters, but to create a disposable labor force of weakened professors, subject to the whims of a changing roster of politicos.
