That's a Nice Little Tenure You Got There

It would be a shame to lose it

I recently saw that my alma mater, Hamline University, made the headlines in New York Times as well as features on CNN and Fox News. The controversy was over adjunct art professor displaying 14th century depiction of Mohammed. Upon hearing the story, I merely shrugged my shoulders and muttered, "it was only a matter of time." My little Midwestern University is simply following the path of just about every institution of higher learning by supplanting critical thinking with woke ideology. There is really no need for nor desire from me to jump on the “Hamline University made a stupid and costly decision” bandwagon. A quick Internet search will reveal a treasure trove of those analyses. The curious reader could do no better than to check out Andrew McCarthy's National Review article, A University Violates American Principles to Appease Muslim Student Activists. I believe he encapsulates what is really going on at my old school as well as thousands of other educational institutions across America.

My indifference towards Hamline University has been present for many years. The alumni Association and I play a little game. About every four years they send me an email soliciting funds for the school's foundation. And I always respond with an email stating that I will start supporting Hamline University when the school starts supporting the liberal arts instead of liberal studies. That little retort usually gets my name removed from alumni solicitations for about four years or until a new alumni director comes along and goes back to the same old database well for their fundraising campaign. From my perspective, my transactional relationship with Hamline University ended over 30 years ago. As a result of my apathy towards wokeness, I will not get into the minutia of the collusion between the Muslim Brotherhood and their willing Marxist academic elites at my school or any others.

What I do think is important to point out in this PR fiasco playing out at my old school is that we are dealing with an entirely new and docile academic scholarship. I get where associate and adjunct  professors must watch their "P's and Q's" as they trudged towards gaining tenure. For any missteps like overtly or covertly denying department ideology will be is welcomed from the powers that be as a fart in church. Nothing causes greater "pearl clutching" reactions from department chairs and administrators holding coveted tenured position hostage than to have uppity young teachers espouse universal truths.

For what the Hamline University controversy really brings forward is the dismal position our colleges and universities’ professors have put themselves. Although I have oft been critical of tenure because I believe it breeds laziness and complacency of academic thought, I never proposed eliminating it because I believed academic freedom was the highest purpose of that program. A free nation needs our academic leaders to be able to express, without penalty or loss of position, their ideas. Freedom of thought, in the case of academics, is its highest order. But what is happening on college campuses with regard to tenured professors is not freedom of thought, quite the opposite, tenure is creating near universal academic conformity.

When I was in university in the 80, the tenured college professor made a decent living. They drew an above average salary and had excellent medical benefits and retirement programs. Best yet, if they were tenured, they were  near-impossible to fire. In my day, the professors far outnumbered the administrative wing of the University in both physical numbers and mental capacity. Whenever any BA or MA  wielding bureaucrat came up with some idiotic policy, the overwhelming and intellectually superior PhD's tended to put that lowly individual duly in their place. And the beauty of tenure was, even though Mr. BA holding University administrator had some control over the purse strings, he could not fire the professor for making him feel the sting of intellectual inferiority. And thanks to tenure, that balance between intellectual and administrative departments of college and universities kept those institutions by and large teaching tried-and-true academic principles versus regurgitating relative ideological indoctrinations.

But something has changed over the last 30 years. Institutions of higher learning, realizing they could not win an intellectual battle with their tenured professors, decided the tilt the scale in their favor by another means. Universities across this vast land have greatly increased the number of administrators as a percent to instructors. They now have a slew of administrators in the areas of student life, social services and the granddaddy of them all, the departments of diversity, equity, and inclusion. At the same time the administrators were increasing their ranks to combat their intellectual inferiority, they also took a page out the Godfather, whereby they use tenure to extract compliant behavior, from their academic leaders.

Instead of University administrators administering to the health and academic maturation of their students by means of their faculty laureates, they have turned their grip on tenure into more of a mafioso style management. As it turns out, when the universities make tenured positions so financially beneficial, it becomes quite easy to keep these intellectually advanced individuals quiet. University administrators are now the bagman for woke ideologies and when an issue pops up, like the devastating national news headlines ravaging Hamline University, these administrators go to the agitated faculty and simply state, "that's a nice little tenure you have there, it would be a shame to lose it." Tenured professors know that their academic positions are a sweet gig. They know they could never compete for that level of status, income and security outside ivy covered walls.

The worst part about this obvious change in academic dynamics is that we all lose. The students lose because they don't learn how to think, the professors lose because freedom of thought is suppressed and they become low-T versions of their former selves, and society loses because freedom, even the freedom to be utterly wrong, is the highest order of all societies wishing wholehearted liberty over soul crushing tyranny. The time may have come to rethink academic tenure. As tenure was once the badge of a freethinking academic it is now merely the stamp of a "made" lieutenant in an all-out war for the minds of our youth. And in this endeavor, Lord Nefarious has his fingers intertwined with nearly all university administrative systems.

My hope is, like pointing out that Davosians are just cheap communists in expensive suits, that pulling the curtain back on the Marxist ideology permeating the administrations our colleges and universities will goad some professors into using their intellect, protected by tenure, to fight this society crushing madness. The mob underlings, running our universities are cowards, and will always back down at the first hint that their ignorance may be exposed. It is time for their superiors wield mighty pens in defense of academic freedom. If not, their tenure serves only to gain them nicer houses and better working conditions as obedient members of the politburo. It is time, especially for the professors my age or older, to dust off their 60’s activism by “turning on, tuning in, dropping out” and not trusting anyone under 40!