Beyond the Siege Mentality

We’re witnessing the merging of the research university with the knowledge corporation.

By Andrew Ross

Speaking recently on a New York University panel about academic labor, I took a question from a respected, tenured colleague who suggested it might be time to reconsider tenure. We shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge the stultifying impact it can have on intellectual and institutional life, she observed, and we should debate whether, on balance, it is worth preserving. A surge of AAUP fundamentalism coursed through my body, and I had to fight to stem it. I’d be happy to have that conversation, I replied politely, just as long as there were no senior administrators in the room. Later that day, during a different NYU conference about academic freedom, former AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen observed, with regret, that tenure probably had no future in this country, and he suggested that the best way of preserving academic freedom in the long run might be to “decouple” it from tenure and make it a legal, or constitutional, right. Three days before, Inside Higher Ed had run a story about how some “tenured radicals” (among them Brown University’s Claire Potter, another respected colleague) were publicly calling for the reassessment of tenure as gold standard. The article quoted AAUP president Cary Nelson’s retort that this position was “insane.”

One might be forgiven for concluding that someone had put something in the academic watercooler that week. In reality, however, it is not rare these days to hear this kind of open, semipublic questioning of tenure coming from progressive quarters. Nor is it uncommon to hear incredulous rearguard responses. With the tenured ranks shrinking daily, there is no ducking this kind of dialogue. Nor, if truth be told, should we be afraid of administrators listening in; they probably do need to hear the whole discussion. In that respect, this issue of Academe is especially timely.

The Precarious Generation

For those who still see tenure primarily as a form of job security, the larger economic context should be plain. On the landscape of work, there is less and less terra firma. No one, not even in the traditional professions, can any longer expect a fixed pattern of employment in the course of his or her lifetime. The rise in the percentage of contingent workers, both in low-end service sectors and in high-wage occupations, has been steady and shows no sign of leveling off. For youth who are entering the labor market today, stories about the postwar decades of stable Fordist employment are tall tales indulged by the elderly, not unlike the lore of Great Depression hardship that baby boomers endured when they were young. In retrospect, the Keynesian era of state-backed securities for core workers in the primary employment sector, including higher education, was a brief interregnum or, more likely, an armed truce.

In this regard, tenure is a tough sell to a general public for whom job security is more and more a fading memory. The case is even more complicated in the academic public sphere, where, for the contingent majority of permatemps, the privileges that accompany tenure are little more than a mirage in the desert.  The rise of precarious employment—and in no other profession has casualization proceeded more rapidly than in academe—demands an up-to-date, if not entirely innovative, response. In Europe, where “the precarious generation” has become a common slogan, the phenomenon of precarity has begun to spawn cross-class coalitions built around experiential conditions shared by workers in quite different sectors. These conditions include the radical uncertainty of their futures, the temporary or intermittent nature of their work contracts, and their isolation from any protective framework of social insurance. Whether this loose coalition of migrant groups, creative workers, and temporary workers in the knowledge sector can have any practical impact or whether it exists more plausibly as a theoretical construct remains to be seen, but the moral gauntlet thrown at the feet of the more secure should be familiar to tenured readers of this publication.

As the moral center of the academic labor movement in this country, contingent faculty have also been its most active practitioners. On some campuses, they have been able to extract support and commitment from full-time faculty on the basis of their predicament, principles, and ideas for organizing, but many contingent faculty members have preferred to form their own unions rather than join mixed bargaining units in which their interests are rarely given priority. The American Federation of Teachers’ current legislative campaign, in some states, for “reconversion” of contingent jobs into tenure-track positions is a case in point. As Marc Bousquet, cultural critic and member of the AAUP national Council, observed in a May 8, 2008, article in Inside Higher Ed, this campaign may undermine solidarity in the academic labor movement if it does not build in protections for those serving contingently who are likely to be displaced in the process or who will remain employed in the minority portion of the 75 to 25 percent balance of tenured to untenured faculty targeted by the legislation. No contradiction exists between demands for conversion, on the one hand, and for greater protections for the contingent, on the other, especially if we acknowledge that many teachers have reasons for preferring part-time employment. Ideally, we should have a system—a form of “flexisecurity”—in which teaching employees can choose their own level of flexibility and the consequences of such choices are fully protected against unwanted risk and professional degradation. In that kind of environment, tenure would lose some of its significance as the coin of the realm. It would still occupy an important function in the division of academic labor, but only as one of several kinds of protective contract.

Coevolution

The primary reason for the existence of tenure, however, is to guarantee the right to academic freedom, not the right to lifetime employment. In principle, either tenure or academic freedom could subsist on its own, though in practice, job security is usually a precondition of the right to speak one’s mind freely. Academic freedom has suffered in the United Kingdom as a result of the Education Reform Act of 1988, which abolished tenure but legally enshrined academic freedom. An environment like that which now exists in the United Kingdom, where administrators can order redundancies with impunity, can never be conducive to the questioning of received wisdom or the promulgation of new or unpopular ideas. Notwithstanding its capacity to be abused by the most selfcentered of our colleagues, tenure remains a serviceable safeguard of these rights. Indeed, proposals to rethink the AAUP’s foundational declarations of principles, the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure and the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, often meet with the kind of skepticism reserved for proposals to mount a new constitutional convention—seriously, whom would you trust to sit down and renegotiate?

Certainly, we could be more forceful in our efforts to explain to querulous legislators or trustees how and why the institution of tenure is a guarantor of academic freedom—the signature mark of a free society—as opposed to an anachronistic, or excessively privileged, entitlement. But we need an understanding of how employee expression is handled in the for-profit world if we are to make our case effectively. Most academics, however, have little practical knowledge of this aspect of corporate America, and what we do know is wished away lest it sully our hallways.

Consequently, much of the current talk around the academic water cooler about the “corporate university” is lazy stuff. The term is inadequate shorthand for the increasingly central role played by higher education in a knowledge economy. We are so fond of our own siege mentality that we can only see our own workplaces being invaded by corporate management strategies and the logic of market optimization. We fail to see that the traffic goes in both directions: the mentality and customs of academic life are being transplanted into knowledge-industry firms, whose research is increasingly conducted along lines familiar to us, and whose work tempo is also strikingly similar. At these firms, ideas are the industrial stock-in-trade, research is often collaborative in nature (or is tied to the fluid circulation of knowledge workers throughout the sector), and employees are so self-directed in their methods and schedules that they no longer know when they are on or off the job. And in many high-tech firms, an open-speech environment is actively encouraged, along with institutional self-criticism that is far removed from the work discipline of traditional corporate organizations. Such values are not the exact corporate equivalents of what we traditionally regard as academic freedom, but they are part of an effort, however driven by the hunger for profit, to emulate the mentality and customs of academic work. Conceived in the free-form culture of the high-tech corporation and weaned in the start-ups of the dot-com era, this no-collar workplace mentality now pervades the knowledge industries and adjacent sectors.

Moreover, as these efforts are advancing in industry, what we regard as traditional academic freedom is declining in higher education. In truth, we are living through the formative stages of a mode of production marked by a quasi-convergence of the research university and the knowledge corporation. Both sectors display similar capitalization through intellectual property ownership, work mentality, and doughnut-style workforce stratification around a small core of secure, indispensable workers and a large circle of casual labor. Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein has cited Wal-Mart as the “template of twenty-first-century capitalism” in the realm of low-wage production, distribution, and consumption of goods. The model high-wage employee of the future already haunts our workplace: a creative entrepreneur who feels as much at home on the high-tech corporate campus as on the academic campus.

The Future Workplace

How will tenure hold up in this milieu of institutional coevolution? Probably rather well, at least for that indispensable core of employees, and for reasons that have as much to do with the fiscal underpinnings of knowledge innovation as anything else. But we cannot abstract academic freedom—the fruit of tenure— from the social conditions under which it is exercised and which make it possible. That would be the thinnest kind of laissez-faire thinking—what, in other circumstances, we might be tempted to describe as rights without responsibilities. In saying this, I am not suggesting that we attach conditions to the exercise of academic freedom— I am, as much as anyone, a fundamentalist when it comes to upholding these rights. But such beliefs should impel us to reflect on the cost, to others, by which these rights are maintained. A workplace in which the rights of a shrinking minority are secured by the precarious labor of disenfranchised parttimers, deprofessionalized graduate teachers, and a panoply of subcontracted service workers—blue collar, pink collar, white collar, and no collar—is not a morally sustainable environment.

For the situation to improve, more of us who have tenure-enabled freedoms must be willing to use them to make common cause with those who do not. Or—and this is a more likely prospect, given the apathy of many full-timers—we should accept contingency as a workplace norm for which to build the most robust protections possible, rather than continue to regard it as a temporary state of misfortune for part-timers or for the profession as a whole. In either equation, tenure survives, but the way in which we think about, and exercise, academic freedom is likely to be transformed by the shift in standpoint.

Andrew Ross is chair of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and chair of the AAUP chapter at New York University. His e-mail address is andrew.ross@nyu.edu.

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