Should tenure be abolished? Naomi Schaefer Riley argues that it should. Her new book, The Faculty Lounges and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For, is a Navy Seal Team Six-style assault on Fortress Tenure: quick, precise, and conducted with air of finality.
That is not to say that she overcomes all my ambivalence on the topic. The tenure system in American colleges and universities does have overwhelming faults. It forces tenure-track faculty members to concentrate disproportionate attention on publishing; it conduces to an attitude of indifference towards both teaching and research among a substantial number of those who achieve it; and it is part of an academic caste system that treats adjuncts (“contingent faculty”) very poorly. Even its faults have faults: The pressure for more and more scholarly publication leads to an ever-growing flood of trivial research, much of it gussied up in obscurantist jargon intended to limit access to like-minded “experts.”
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Author:Peter Wood
