By Professor Doom
The only reason
for there being even some legitimacy, at some schools, is the old tenured
faculty, a few of them, anyway. Admin knows full well these guys are getting in
the way of their plundering, and has been steadily pushing them off campus,
either through trumped up
charges, expensive
buyouts, or getting out of the tenure contract just by changing
the name of the school.
These methods are
a bit slow, however, and now we are starting to see statewide efforts to remove
tenured professors (and their ability to keep integrity in education)
wholesale:
“Collegial,” like
most words, means whatever admin wants it to mean. For the most part, they use
it as a synonym for “nice,” though even in this they are being deceptive, and
only want sycophancy here.
The actual meaning
of collegial is acting as though you were among colleagues, equals…how can
professors do this, when they are not equal to administrators, who wield all
the power on campus? It’s a dead issue on the face of it, or should be, but
let’s go with the administrative definition of being nice.
Letting admin
define the words that can end tenure, destroying the lives and families of
dedicated scholars, is a terrible idea. It could only be remotely tolerable if
there was some reason to think admin would act in good faith here, but there’s
no reason for that.
See, at Penn
State, a number of eyewitnesses reported to admin that there were foul, foul,
things going on in the showers. Admin dismissed these reports out of hand.
Why? Because admin
felt that the witnesses were not being
collegial. Now, I see admin’s point, as there probably is no way to say “I
saw with my own eyeballs the coach sodomizing a child in the showers” in a
sufficiently nice way, but I want to point out very clearly: if admin will
twist the definition of “collegial” in a way to protect ghastly pedophilia, why
would we trust them not to abuse it in other ways?
I’m hardly alone
in understanding how this will be used:
"That provision would allow the
termination of a faculty member who ignores instruction to teach the
politically correct or anti-intellectual version of a subject in the
classroom," Peltz-Steele wrote.
Already, Karl
Marx’s books are the most read books on campus. If this new rule went into
effect, admin could order me to force my calculus students to read The
Communist Manifesto. If I refused? Then absolutely, my tenure (if I had it)
could be canceled and I’d be fired.
This may sound
ridiculous, but on some campuses the Communist Manifesto is read as a piece of
English Literature…the Manifesto is as much a work of English Literature as it
is a calculus textbook.
Please
understand, I’ve seen many faculty with integrity threatened with charges of
“non collegiality” when they tried to speak out against the debasement of
higher education, and I’m hardly alone to have seen it:
"Collegiality-related charges are
easily and frequently thrown in as a laundry-list item in faculty
investigations, and often it is the only charge universities can make
stick," Peter Bonilla, a writer for FIRE, explains.
"It's a difficult charge for faculty to fight — just about any behavior
could be subjectively cast as un-collegial, after all—and therefore an easy
charge with which to gain leverage."
Indeed, the whole
subjectivity here is the problem. Counting on good faith from admin is as
reasonable as asking for integrity, or for them to take a pay cut so tuition
can be lowered. Pure idiocy, in other words.
Faculty are helpless here. So, the rules will
be changed. They’re justifying the changes due to “best practices,” i.e.,
because some other places are doing it. “Best Practices” is another phrase that
admin doesn’t understand but nevertheless gets away with defining it however
they please. Instead of carefully considering the implications of a rule that
exists elsewhere, and deciding if it’s a rule
that really is the best thing they can do for education, the only
decision is “will this give us more power,” and if the answer is “yes,” it will
be done.
Mr.
Peltz-Steele urged professors to push back. "What is happening at
Arkansas, just one instance amid an alarming national trend, needs wider attention,"
he wrote. "Simply put, an attack on academic freedom anywhere is an attack
on academic freedom everywhere."
Once Arkansas puts
in stone that you can get rid of a tenured professor because he’s not nice in your opinion, other states will follow
along soon. It’s best practices, after all. Seeing as we’re at the stage where
simply being white is considered “not nice” on many campuses I…really don’t
think this is a good idea at all.
Too bad what
faculty think has long since ceased to matter on our campuses.
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