From the General Secretary: New Pathways and the New American Scholar
By Mary A. Burgan
In my last column, I began a three-part analysis of the New Pathways Project undertaken by the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) in 1995. Since papers from the project have been widely distributed, and form the basis for views about the faculty that are now widely accepted by members of boards and administrations, it is important to understand the rationale given for New Pathways at the start. The philosophical justification for this project was set up in Making a Place for the New American Scholar, a "working paper" by Eugene Rice, director of the AAHE's Forum on Faculty Roles and Rewards.
Rice's meditation embodies anxieties about trends in faculty careers that have predominated in higher education circles for the past half decade. Tenure has been at the center of such anxieties because it mandates long-term commitments to faculty independence and thus seems unresponsive to change in the academy. The resistance of some faculty to administrative deployment of their energies not only offends the entrepreneurial spirit of the age but also stereotypes professors as locked away in their privileged towers from the challenges of our times.
Attuned to the situation of the general public—beset by downsizing, forced career changes, and layoffs—Rice tends to sympathize with its objections to the faculty culture. He is also alert to anxieties about tenure inside the academy. The demanding process of achieving tenure may demoralize new faculty members-transform them into embittered enemies of their institutions, their colleagues, and their students by the time it's all over. Rice is rightly worried about what the narrow standards of tenure do to new faculty, and his efforts to derive more flexible standards in his faculty roles and rewards program have been admirable.
In envisioning a place for the "new American scholar," however, Rice puts a gloss on a project that would limit professional independence for many of the new scholars he seeks to help. His position paper echoes Emersonian idealism to advocate new modes of communal learning that would be strategically guided by institutional goals freed from the complexities of faculty choices in pedagogy, specialization, and disciplinary ambition. While new structures of faculty appointments would embody a vivid concern for teaching and service, they would also enable institutions to shift and change professorial careers.
I've reread Emerson in search of the origin of Rice's enthusiasm for this new order, and I must conclude that the Sage of Concord's call for a peculiarly "American" reliance on the radical individuality of intellect is at odds with Rice. Emerson calls upon the intellectual to break free from society, whereas Rice imagines happy colleagues coming together to facilitate the insights of eager students in classes where no one claims superior knowledge. Actually, I like Rice's emphasis on collaboration in the academy better than I like Emerson's heroic individualism, but the discrepancy between the two views suggests that the liberatory rhetoric of Rice's New Pathways argument conflicts with the constraints on individual freedom embedded in its "reforms" of tenure.
In point of fact, it is the energy of Emerson's craggy individualism that Rice seeks to tap in his discourse. But it is also Emerson's call to intellectual freedom that inspired the AAUP's philosopher-founders when they insisted that the only sure protection for academic freedom must be the security of tenure. These founders went beyond Emerson's generalities about the independent spirit, however, to envision such freedom as available not only for those mainly New England scholars who gathered at the Phi Beta Kappa meeting at Cambridge in 1837 to hear Emerson deliver his "American Scholar" oration, but for all those future scholars drawn to serve American higher education everywhere. I would argue, in fact, that the spread of tenure in American higher education has helped to correct an elitist trend in Emerson's vision. Some critics of tenure have complained that the proliferation of modern claimants to academic freedom has somehow lowered the intellectual level in our schools—as if the independence that tenure defends should be reserved for only the Emersonian heroes of learning. I don't think Rice believes that, of course. But neither do I think that his "new American scholar" acknowledges the vital role of academic freedom in fostering the faculty commitment to independence and collaboration that we must preserve in the twenty-first century. The call that Emerson issued for genuine intellectual liberty must continue as the bedrock of American higher education.
Note: The From the General Secretary column in the March-April issue contained a mistake in a quotation from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach." The lines quoted from the poem should have read: "darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight."
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