Tenure's Many Ends

Academic freedom is stranger than we thought. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. In practical terms, tenure is merely an extremely robust form of job protection. It distinguishes itself from other, less savory sorts of permanent hire — say, the mayoral gift of an eternal parks department sinecure in exchange for votes in the old Democratic machine cities — not only because its bestowal is presumably untainted by the more obvious kinds of corruption, but also because it secures a powerful, if nebulous, high ideal: academic freedom. But the suspicion that tenure is a racket persists, and not just among the benighted public. Allaying that suspicion to themselves is one reason some professors complain so bitterly about “dead wood,” “one-book wonders,” and so on — these are apotropaic spells meant to contain the threat of grifting. They also shore up the notion that tenure is a reward for excellence — that it is like other meritocratic employment structures, only more so. And everything about the tenure process would seem to confirm this. You submit a portfolio outlining your achievements, emphasizing prestigious or high-impact publications. Peers from outside assess your value to the field. Because your own department might overestimate you out of personal affection, their say-so is not adequate; you must also be approved by a centralized tenure committee. Tenure is, or at least is made to look like, the reward for good work. But that has never been the whole story. It can’t be, because the protections tenure confers in the name of academic freedom exceed by design the protections necessary simply to do good work in one’s profession. That’s why no other profession enjoys similar guarantees. A partner in a law firm might have a relatively high degree of job security, but the other partners can eject him if they decide that his extramural speech — like, say, “I do not fear or regret the impending Vietcong victory in Vietnam. I welcome it.” — is interfering with their firm’s success. But when the Rutgers historian Eugene Genovese said that in 1965, the university’s president [resisted]( fierce public and political pressure and refused to fire him. SPONSOR CONTENT | TCS Education System [Three Ways to Advance President Biden’s Mental Health Initiative]( For the last couple of years, the Amherst scholar of law Adam Sitze has been offering a revisionist account of tenure in a series of [essays]( most recently in [our own pages](. Sitze finds academic freedom’s roots not in the American importation toward the end of the 19th century of German Lernfreiheit and Lehrfreiheit — freedom to learn and to teach what one wants — but rather in a specific notion of “office” associated especially with the judiciary (and before that, the clergy). In the journal Law, Culture and the Humanities, Sitze lays out some of the historical evidence. Language of “conscience” and “calling,” he says, was prominent in the American Association of University Professors’s 1915 Declaration on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure. “In that text, the phrases ‘calling’ and ‘conscience’ appeared alongside metonyms like ‘profession’ and ‘vocation’ to define academia in terms that competed against, and thus remained commensurable with, the religious meaning of Beruf (the idea that a vocation or calling is ‘a task set by God’).” But all such language dropped out of the 1940 revision, which, with revisions, remains in force today. The new document, Sitze writes, “makes no mention whatsoever of academic calling, much less vocation or conscience ... Far from implying a set of quasi-religious obligations, the academic profession is here simply one among many occupations by which a person earns a living. Between 1915 and 1940, it would seem, the AAUP dispensed with conscience as one of its justifications for academic freedom, thus seeming to complete the secularization process the tensions of which already were emergent in the Declaration itself.” The awkward elision between academic freedom and free speech can be traced, Sitze suggests, to the institutional forgetting of “conscience” and the withering of a thick idea of “office,” in which the professor is rendered not a professional among professionals, but rather a member of what the medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz thought of, esoterically, as a sort of mystical, transhistorical community. Kantorowicz’s 1950 resignation from the University of California over anti-Communist loyalty oaths made him one of academic freedom’s great heroes, although he was less invested in academic freedom in its modern sense than in the more exalted kind of autonomy he associated with the calling of the scholar. For him, as Sitze summarizes, “Scholars, like judges and priests, [would] dedicate their lives to a set of professional duties (or officia) that, in principle and by definition, both precede and exceed their lifetimes.” Scholarship, like God or the law, demands duties and confers privileges that have no equivalent in other professions. The comparison to judges is important. In his recent Review essay, Sitze recovers another, related, instance of historical forgetting: the disappearance from conversations about academic freedom of the central analogy between academic tenure and judicial tenure in the 1915 Declaration. “To justify academic tenure, and to work through the tensions and ambiguities of extramural utterances, the founders of the AAUP ... looked to the norms of judicial tenure in the American judiciary.” Sitze’s careful and learned essay will not resolve those tensions, which revolve around whether and to what extent professors consider themselves, and are considered by the wider public, to be just like everybody else. But by rejoining academic freedom to “the perplexities of office,” he might at least point us in the right direction. Read “The Loss in Academic Freedom” in Law, Culture and the Humanities [here]( and “The Strange, Secret History of Tenure” [here](. And for more on Kantorowicz, see Simon During [here](. ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest THE REVIEW | ESSAY [The Strange, Secret History of Tenure]( By Adam Sitze [STORY IMAGE]( Academic job security is again the object of public criticism — but this time feels different. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Higher Ed’s Cult of Growth]( By James Rushing Daniel [STORY IMAGE]( An expansionist mind-set could lead to a disastrous future. Recommended - “At twenty-one, he found himself working not merely to help support the family but to save Mary from Bethlem (also known as Bedlam), the public madhouse. 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