The tenure system is a hot topic right now (or at least a few days ago, but I’m slow) in the academic blogosphere, specifically due to Andrea Smith’s tenure denial at the University of Michigan. The banter on the one hand reassures me that I am not the only person who finds this system perplexing, and on the other hand confuses me because I don’t know what would be a viable alternate system. To sum up some of the best posts on the Smith decision and personal experience with the tenure process:

• Tenured Radical’s post highlights the emotional impact of the tenure process;
• Tim Burke’s post notes that the process is necessarily confidential and mystical to protect professional identity;
• Oso Raro problematizes the aspect of “fit” in the tenure process and how fit might operate as a code word for sexism, racism, or just not liking someone else professionally.

And then the proposed solutions:

• The Constructivist suggests movement towards strong faculty unions; and
• Community College Dean (Dean Dad) suggests multi-year renewable contracts.

I want to believe that Dean Dad’s multi-year contract idea would work. I worked at an institution that had converted to that model (and was, as I understand it censured by the AAUP for doing so). Though there were some of the same issues that I see in tenure environments, I felt like my opinion as junior faculty mattered. A lot. On the other hand, I’m sure the 50% of the faculty body that were adjuncts might not have felt quite the same way.

A key issue is also portability. Tenure is the collateral of higher education. If some institutions move the cheese, while others do not, I suspect faculty will become even more invested in their “type” of institution than they already are. At the same time, at the community college level, for example, where the only requirement is effective and intensive teaching, and where tenure operates similarly to the public school system as in automatically after x years of service (and I’m sure I’ll get flak for this but seriously, why do public school teachers need tenure?!?!?!?), what is the point? (Please correct me if publications are required at some community colleges, but my experience was that the teaching load was so high that it was not realistic to expect.)

But the key elements Dean Dad calls for are transparency and reciprocity. I would call the review practice in my tenure track job pretty transparent. All department faculty and all students evaluate tenure-track people every year. Anonymously. Tenured professors get evaluated once every five years or something. That feels pretty transparent actually, though I might have enjoyed it more the first time around if I’d been informed of these processes before they happened. (YES, I realized I was going to be evaluated by students). But the stakes are high for the institution, because if they agree to tenure me, they (feel they are) stuck with me for the next thirty years of my career. It’s the all-or-nothing aspect of tenure that is the most inhumane, the rest-of-your-life or FIRED mentality, but I can also see how the abuse of a contract system or creating different tracks of faculty (tenured research versus untenured renewable contracts teaching) and other variations of unfairness might be just as inhumane.

And then reciprocity. What *is* the issue between administrative and faculty power? I’m not literally asking for an explanation, I just don’t understand why many in higher education feel that higher education is somehow exempt from planning and standardizing curriculum, identifying key objectives across courses, assessing outcomes–both student and institutional, supporting students in other areas besides their coursework, and so on. Higher education might not be corporate, but it is still an industry.

Ultimately though, I think this has been such a hot topic because the tenure system is already broken beyond repair. The only people who truly benefit are those who are tenured or on the tenure track. A recent study at least supports The Constructivist’s suggestion for unions in the sense that more faculty at institutions with unions are tenured or tenure track as opposed to adjunct. The army of adjuncts that do the majority of teaching speak to the true injustice in the attention given to one tenure decision of a top researcher.

The one theme I haven’t heard in any of these posts is what tenure means for students? I don’t know of any institution of higher education that exists without students. For the majority of institutions of higher education, teaching and working with students is still essential. Does the tenure system with jobs for life, painful rejection, and army of adjuncts help or hurt students? Thoughts?

Although the post-teaching rush is widely documented, I find myself amazed at how exhausting teaching is. No wonder teaching colleagues at my former job thought I was insane to leave the desk behind. And yes, there is a certain reprieve in knowing that when you get up in the morning, you can sit at a desk for a few hours before having to do anything taxing, like, for example, convince 16 groggy undergrads to discuss Hofstede’s theory. But I digress from my intended topic, which is the sudden renewed interest in the topic of education in general, which was pushed to the back of my agenda when I was sitting behind said desk.

I have heard the allegations that today’s kids are digital natives, which I recently remarked was not what my new experience is. I might be being a little bit harsh. While they did not immediately seem to register understanding when they created accounts on the class blog, no one claimed to not know what a computer is or what the internets are. Actually, the whole process of getting people oriented to what they needed to post and where went fairly smoothly.

I am newly aware, acutely aware, of the tension between (1) the importance of critical thinking/higher order thinking and the rootedness of these skills in a liberal arts education and a general sense that an ability to manipulate emerging technologies is fickle, and with excellent critical thinking and problem-solving skills, today’s learners will be able to adapt to changing technical skills and (2) a fairly certain understanding that though critical thinking and problem-solving can be generally learned, there are specific skills inherent in adapting to digital technologies that many do not just “pick up” and that many find intimidating, and one must gain problem-solving experience specific to the domain of digital technologies and message design and communication using these tools to become competent in those areas. And here’s a shocker, the rest of the liberal arts world doesn’t seem to be too keen on this idea. I’m not saying there’s outright hostility, but there are definitely traditional feelings even among others who teach in digital media circles.

This brings to life, really for the first time for me, a real interest in the questions being posed out there by others about the tension between education (credentialing) and education (learning). I loved Downes’ post this week about responding to criticism about Web 2.0. He comments, in regards to, I assume K-12 institutions:

Schools were designed for a particular purpose, one that is almost diametrically at odds with what ought to be the practices and objectives of a contemporary education, an education suited not only to the information age but also to the objectives of personal freedom and empowerment.

I can’t help but wonder whether this applies to higher education too. I want my teaching to be different. I want to teach undergraduates as I would adult learners, but I’ve been told that undergraduates are different, and this might be a fair assessment. (Might be–or the advice about how to relate to students is rooted in a particular hidden curriculum which may or may not be necessary). In fact, probably too many adult learners are not self-directed, a general weakness within the assumptions of adult learning theory. I want to guide students in understanding how to find information for themselves, to navigate the digital world that is everywhere and rapidly shifting, whereas I am not confident that these are goals of most higher education instructors. And if that’s the case, talk about being irrelevant. And this attitude makes this entire post paradoxical, because I do believe that there is value in the liberal arts curriculum, but the old way of understanding what information is and how we construct it just doesn’t add up in the digital world.

The Attack of the Pod People addresses student enthusiasm for downloadable lectures in lieu of, it would appear from the context, attending class. I neither fully agree or disagree with the author, but he is getting a fundamental point in terms of the student in question’s reaction to being able to podcast class materials–just because students like it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good for them. That being said, in the context of this opinion piece, there is a fundamental blurring of distinction between lecturing and instruction that would be nice for a lot of faculty to pay attention to. In fact, I would say if your argument for not providing podcasts is that students would have no need to go to your class anymore (a concern I have heard more than once), then you are doing something wrong. Why? Because if all your students do when they come to class is sit and listen to you, then WHY NOT just let them download your comments and listen to them through osmosis while they sleep off last night’s hang over.

Schneider asks: “At 8 in the morning I may not be beautiful — hell, I may not even be fully awake — but I’m there, and I’m dressed. Any questions?”

Yes, I have a question. What else –besides being there and wearing clothes– are you requiring of your students during this class time that makes the class relevant for them, which allows them to build on their knowledge of the content and receive feedback, and which allows them to interact with their peers in developing their expertise? I’m not picking on Scheider. I’m just suggesting that going even deeper into what is offensive about the lecture-podcast besides a sense that because he, as the professor has to be there to show s/he cares, students should too. That’s not enough of an argument because it leaves the opposite argument open–if a professor feels that creating podcasts is how they show commitment to their students, isn’t that caring enough? Production, after all, can be very time consuming. In fact, it’s the treatment of content as something that only need be transmitted to the student for learning to occur that is offensive.
In this debate, I’m struck by the contrast between research on learning which lauds the importance of social interaction in learning and the importance of understanding how to communicate with others in a target community of practice versus the advancement of the technological machine, which many seem to interpret as permission to distance themselves (students and faculty alike) from (other) learners. It is a curious contradiction.