|
« AAUP Homepage
|
Changes to Tenure
James McCormick
To The Editor:
I wish that I could be as sanguine as Ruth Flower is in the January-February issue about the potential changes to tenure that the new Western Michigan contract may herald. On the face of it, WMU has the right idea: as Flower notes, the contract provides for tenure for "faculty specialists" a group that includes lecturers, clinical instructors, and certain academic professionals. Nevertheless, both tenured and non-tenured faculty everywhere may have reason to be worried.
Will tenure for faculty specialists be different, in terms of duties and privileges, from tenure for professors? Will it mean that, faculty specialists will be able to achieve the rank-and pay-of professors, or that they will be forever frozen at their current (and considerably lower) wage scale? Will faculty specialists be forever doomed to teach (without health benefits) lower-level, work-intensive "grunt" courses, to work in temporary and crowded offices, and to be denied funding for research and conferences?
Or will tenure for faculty specialists be the same as it is for any professor? Will faculty specialists be considered to teach upper-level and summer courses, and urged to develop courses of their own? Will they be expected to attend departmental meetings, sit on committees, and become members of the faculty senate-in other words, will they shape and direct policy, both departmental and university?
Neither scenario is desirable. In the first instance, tenure will mean simply that members of this increasingly large and thoroughly disenfranchised segment of the university will be assured of nothing except that they can't be fired from their low-paying, powerless positions. In the second, departmental need, hiring committee input, and university interest will be subverted. I have a hard time seeing either case as "a good start."
James McCormick
(English)
Rochester Community and Technical College
|