The Review: The Texas tenure massacre?

Plus: A Massachusetts university bans jokes and idle gossip. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. You can now read The Chronicle on [Apple News]( [Flipboard]( and [Google News](. Tenure in Texas is weakened but alive. The [final version]( of SB 18 [avoids]( the deathblow proposed by an earlier draft, which would have eliminated the tenure track for all public-college faculty members who begin their jobs in 2024 or after. Instead, as the AAUP [puts]( it, it “codifies a weak faculty tenure system that lacks due process provisions commonly afforded tenured faculty nationally.” It’s tenure-lite. Some things aren’t bigger in Texas. The [bill]( isn’t quite the catastrophe that might have been expected. Its most onerous provision is the requirement that tenured faculty members undergo a “performance evaluation process” every six years; “a faculty member may be subject to revocation of tenure if, during the comprehensive performance evaluation, incompetency, neglect of duty, or other good cause is determined to be present.” Unless weaponized by bad political and administrative actors (always, of course, a possibility), this sounds less like the end of tenure than like the introduction of reams of annoying and ultimately pointless red tape — an inconvenience, not an existential threat. There’s at least one exception, as far as I can tell. SB 18 includes “unprofessional conduct that adversely affects the institution” as a reason to revoke tenure. Every word except “that” and “the” is vague, abusable, and at odds with the basic mission of tenure, which must protect faculty members’ right to offend the public and therefore potentially to sully the reputation of their institutions. (“Conduct” presumably includes “speech” — or at least, nothing in the bill says otherwise.) At first glance, this threatening provision might not seem all that novel. The AAUP’s 1940 statement on academic freedom offered the following: “As scholars and educational officers,” faculty members “should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.” But those sentences would become controversial — who decides what counts as “appropriate restraint,” for instance? — and the AAUP attempted to resolve the ambiguity in a 1970 addendum explaining that they should be interpreted in keeping with the 1964 “Committee A Statement on Extramural Utterances,” ... which states inter alia: “The controlling principle is that a faculty member’s expression of opinion as a citizen cannot constitute grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member’s unfitness for his or her position. Extramural utterances rarely bear upon the faculty member’s fitness for the position. Moreover, a final decision should take into account the faculty member’s entire record as a teacher and scholar.” To the extent that they can, Texas faculty should pressure their institutions into defining with as much specificity as possible what “unprofessional conduct” and “adversely affects the university” mean. And for now, breathe a sigh of qualified relief. SB 18 isn’t so much the evisceration of tenure as it is a statement of general disrespect. It says, “We don’t like you very much, and we’re watching you.” NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. No gossip for you! When I was growing up, it was common in my largely Haredi Jewish neighborhood outside of Baltimore to see bumper stickers proclaiming in both Hebrew and English the slogan SAY NO TO LASHON HARA. (A medium-specific variation: PUT THE BRAKES ON LASHON HARA.) As I did not know then but have learned since, “lashon hara” refers to injurious gossip, felt by Orthodox Jews to be a particularly evil temptation. (The Biblical source is Leviticus 19:16: “Thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people,” in the King James version.) I thought of those bumper stickers recently when I learned, via FIRE, that Westfield State University, in Massachusetts, had [prohibited]( both “jokes” and “idle gossip” on all university email accounts. As FIRE points out, the ban, which applies to students and faculty alike, is probably unconstitutional (Westfield is public), and it is certainly silly. But in its trivial way, it might be read as a symptom of the mania for rule-making among some of the people running universities now. Having exhausted new ways of forbidding potentially harmful speech — the policy also proscribes “derogatory and/or inflammatory statements” — Westfield’s administrators, like the Puritan ministers who shaped their state, have committed themselves to purging their flock of the wrong kinds of worldliness. As the 17th-century English puritan divine Richard Baxter preached in his [writings]( against “Back-biting, Slandering, and Evil Speaking": “It is at the least, but idle talk, and a misspending of your time.” Westfield State’s student body surely appreciates their university’s concern. ADVERTISEMENT UPCOMING PROGRAM [The Chronicle's Strategic-Leadership Program for Department Chairs] [Join us in June]( for a virtual professional development program which will provide the space, time, and tools to help department chairs take on the challenges and opportunities of the role. Through workshops, high-level seminars, and individual development plans, chairs will think strategically about their departmental and institutional impact. [Register today!]( The Latest THE REVIEW | OPINION [When Social Scientists Ask the Wrong Questions]( By Nina Strohminger and Olúfémi Táíwò [STORY IMAGE]( Too many researchers have become the unwitting victims of corporate capture. ADVERTISEMENT INVESTIGATION [The Newest Way to Buy an Advantage in College Admissions]( By Daniel Golden and Kunal Purohit [STORY IMAGE]( Why some parents are paying to make their teen a “peer reviewed” author. THE REVIEW | OPINION [ChatGPT Is a Plagiarism Machine]( By Joseph M. Keegin [STORY IMAGE]( So why do administrators have their heads in the sand? THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Max Weber’s Ethical Pedagogy for a Nihilistic Age]( By Wendy Brown [STORY IMAGE]( On the enduring relevance of a great social theorist. THE REVIEW | FORUM [How Will Artificial Intelligence Change Higher Ed?]( [STORY IMAGE]( ChatGPT is just the beginning. Twelve scholars and administrators explain. Recommended - “If expansive and sophisticated states like Sokoto, or others of the age, like Asante or Kongo, had not been laid low by empire-building Europeans, would present-day Africa be composed of bigger states that resulted from gradual absorption of neighboring societies by indigenous empires, much as happened in Europe in the early modern period?” In the New York Review of Books, Howard French [writes about the history of Nigeria]( by way of two new books, Max Siollun’s What Britain Did to Nigeria and Fola Fagbule and Feyi Fawehinmi’s Formation. - “Thin rules brook no quarter, they offer no sense of a variable world. Many bureaucratic rules, especially bureaucratic rules in their Kafkaesque exaggeration, also fit this description.” That’s [Lorraine Daston talking with Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz]( about her recent book Rules: A Short History of What We Live By in Public Books. - “You don’t have to be Nietzsche to see in Parfit’s adult life a particularly stark version of an ascetic ideal that has its historical roots in the religious framework his family inhabited, but which has mutated into a variety of avowedly secular cultural forms, in science, art and philosophy.” In the London Review of Books, Stephen Mulhall [reviews David Edmonds’s biography]( of Derek Parfit. - “Roger Kimball, Allan Bloom, Willian Bennett, Hilton Kramer — those figures really did straddle the journalistic and academic domain in a way that made them very familiar figures to us. They actually were reading our work. The culture war that’s taking place now seems to me something really very different.” That’s John Guillory talking with Nicholas Dames in a [conversation moderated]( by Alan Thomas. - Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener, which completes the loose trilogy he began with First Reformed (2017) and continued with The Card Counter (2021), got its American release last week. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times [liked it]( “There’s much to admire about the movie’s tense dreaminess, its pulpy undertow and severe elegance, as well as the astonishing, awkward sincerity with which Schrader hurtles headlong at questions of love, hate, race and redemption in an unforgiving world.” Armond White, in the National Review, [was less impressed]( “Schrader’s sexual-racial fantasy is both naïve and shameless.” (White’s review contains spoilers.) Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [Restructuring a University - The Chronicle Store]( [Restructuring a University]( In 2022, Henderson State University declared financial exigency after realizing it could no longer avoid hard choices. This case study of the university’s path to near-ruin highlights lessons for any college leader contemplating a restructuring to keep an institution viable. [Order your copy]( to learn about key factors to consider in a restructuring process. NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK [Please let us know what you thought of today's newsletter in this three-question survey](. This newsletter was sent to {EMAIL}. [Read this newsletter on the web](. [Manage]( your newsletter preferences, [stop receiving]( this email, or [view]( our privacy policy. © 2023 [The Chronicle of Higher Education]( 1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037