Tenure Bad, Academic Freedom Good. Huh?
Today's
editorial in the Boston Herald takes a predictable line: The problem at Harvard is that Summers "
keeps treating his faculty as if they were, well, mere mortals - and not the spoiled and ever-so-tenured brats they have long been diagnosed as."
I'm struck by the hostility to tenure that often shows up in the remarks of those who support Summers. There's a kind of resentful implication that academics have the world's cushiest life in part because they can never be fired. Anti-intellectual critics of tenure and academia in general want Summers to take all these "spoiled" academics down a few pegs.
This line of attack has certain ironies.
Such as:
1) Larry Summers received tenure at age 28, so he was pretty happy about the system of tenure at the time.
2) Imagine what life would be like at Harvard now if there weren't tenure...you'd have a miserable campus and professors job-hunting as fast as they could.
3) Larry Summers, under normal circumstances, has a kind of virtual tenure in his job. Harvard presidents almost invariably serve as long as they want to. The last Harvard president who left before he wanted to served before the Civil War.
4) Members of the Harvard Corporation serve as long as they want to...and choose their own successors.
And, most important...
5) The Herald approvingly quotes history professor Stephan Thernstrom saying, "[The faculty vote] is very menacing. . .It is a very bad blow to the conception of academic freedom."
There is, of course, a glaring contradiction between attacking tenure on the one hand and defending academic freedom on the other. Simply put, you can't do both.
Well, I take that back. As the Herald shows, you can. You just don't have to worry about making sense.
