What is the Point of Tenure?

This is part of a roundtable at Quillette. I see it’s behind a paywall there, so I’ve pasted my essay in below.

---

It’s a question of culture

Academic tenure was a product of an academic ethic, a shared culture among the members of the professoriate. The 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure by the AAUP expressed the core value of that culture and its contribution to human welfare with vigorous clarity: “The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.”

“The free search for truth and its free exposition.” To seek to discover what the case is and then share the knowledge with others. To find, discuss, and expound the truth. That was the cultural baseline of the academic ethic.

Tenure was the attempt to ensure that professors who, in pursuit of that scholarly value of truth, ran afoul of powerful interested parties whose central value was something other than truth—administrators or political officials, for example, interested in bottom lines or bullied by moralizing publics--would not be at risk of being punished or terminated.

I use the past tense to describe this academic ethic and the justification of tenure that emerged from within it because I am describing a world that is no more, or that at the very least is now in the process of dying in nearly every institution of higher education in the country, with little convincing evidence to suggest it can be revived.

The shared culture that made tenure a sensible, even necessary academic norm is gone. A new ethic has emerged in academia, and it is now regnant. It centers on new values: Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity, or DIE.

DIE has nothing in common with the old ethic. In fact, it is explicitly hostile to it, since it contends that the ostensible pursuit of objective truth is fundamentally and perhaps inextricably associated with racism and misogyny; therefore, we need to update our values in the interest of more diverse, inclusive, and equitable ways of understanding and changing (the emphasis everywhere now is firmly on the latter) the world.

What does this mean for tenure? It means that tenure, if it continues to exist, will now become a mechanism for protecting the positions of the new professoriate, many of whom are ideologists masquerading as scholars and who have replaced the dispassionate pursuit of truth with the passionate pursuit of social justice. If pressure comes from outside to challenge them in their ideological claims, tenure will secure for them their continued professional ability to castigate the social system that produced the universities from which they speak.

And it also means that tenure will no longer matter for those who most need it in this environment: the remaining small numbers of faculty who still adhere to the old, traditional, dying academic ethic.

I just finished a book that I am reviewing for another publication that has helped to put more clarity to my thoughts on this last bit of the question. The book is It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom. Its authors, Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth, articulate with clarity what will almost certainly be the direction of the evolution of tenure and protection for faculty speech in the future. The book fully embraces the DIE transformation of higher education, while yet claiming to retain the core of the traditional academic ethic by emphasizing the expertise guiding the re-envisioned university. It turns out, however, that this is only a rhetorical ploy, as the knowledge of the new experts is wholly alien to the traditional ethic.

It’s Not Free Speech makes clear that a central administrative and institutional goal of the advocates of the new ethic is to police the speech of their colleagues, and especially those who adhere to the old ethic and have not fully embraced the new one. Will tenure protect them? Tenured professors clearly cannot say just anything with impunity. They are not protected if what they say is inaccurate in such a way as to demonstrate their professional incompetence. Here is the method, then, for removing those insufficiently aligned with the moral agenda of the new academic ethic: There will be committees of social justice-dedicated faculty with power to remove offenders from their professorial positions put in place to evaluate the teaching, writing, and public statements of other professors. And if those professors make claims that violate the sacred values of the new ethic, then they will be punished, and possibly terminated.

And who are the experts who will be deciding—purportedly, on the grounds of professional competence--what arguments on heatedly contested topics can and cannot be made in classrooms, published, or expressed in the public sphere by scholars? Who will determine, for one example, whether the argument that ethnic diversity lowers social trust is so immoral and unreasonable that it evinces professional incompetence? Or whether the argument that men cannot get pregnant is so bigoted, so vile, that it is worthy of termination?

It is the new “experts” who embrace the new academic ethic. These are of course the same people—produced in the overwhelmingly progressive graduate programs and new radicalized fields that have emerged in the past generation—who are currently railing against the supposed corruption of all existing institutions, including the university modeled on the old academic ethic, and who claim that they need to be radically restructured according to the principles of DIE.

Over the past few years, I have noticed on my teaching evaluations accusations of “sexism” (I teach on the biology of the sex difference) and “racism” (I critically evaluate the scientific soundness of structural concepts, including structural racism, that ignore other potential causal hypotheses). These remain rare, but they were entirely absent in the first fifteen years of my career, and the content I teach has not changed over that time. As a young scholar my goal was to discover the truth; and that remains my only goal today. Like the content in my classes, that has not changed.

What has changed is the ethic dominant at the school at which I teach and the students who are being acculturated in that new ethic. Professors who receive such comments from radicalized students will almost certainly attract the attention of these committees and therefore are at risk of serious punishment. Many will recognize this risk and change their materials and teaching style.

If the DIE regime is not prevented from securing still more power, tenure will become irrelevant, a relic of the former academic ethic that remains in name only. It will no longer matter for those who are its intended beneficiaries, and it will instead serve to protect the ideologues of the new academic ethic. The result will be that the universities will become still more ideologically and intellectually homogenous than they already are.