[Mb-civic] Free Harvard! (Or Not) By JOHN TIERNEY

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 4, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Free Harvard! (Or Not)
By JOHN TIERNEY

After the faculty's coup d'etat at Harvard, I asked some contrarian
academics if there was any way to wrest control of universities from the
faculty. I started off with one possible reform: how about eliminating
tenure for professors?

Forget it, most of the academics said, and not entirely because they liked
that perk of their jobs. One of them pointed to a practical problem: "As
long as the classics department has the right to choose the next generation
of professors, you'd better give them tenure, because otherwise they'll
never choose someone better than they are."

He wasn't arguing that professors are particularly petty, just that they
work in a world with peculiar incentives. Authority is so diffuse that no
one's accountable. Lawrence Summers was ostensibly in charge of Harvard, but
he had little power to fire or hire anyone. The candidates are picked after
a vote in each department. Summers could veto new hires and try to push
departments in new directions ‹ but once the faculty got annoyed, he was out
of a job.

If newspapers were run like this, by committees of tenured journalists
unconcerned with circulation and ad revenue, we wouldn't spend much time
trying to improve the weather map or the news summaries or movie listings.
We'd all be too busy writing 27-part series to be submitted for peer review
by the Pulitzer board.

After a while, as we hired more reporters like ourselves, we'd be surprised
when outsiders complained. We'd be as genuinely puzzled as the Harvard
professors who wrote to me after I mentioned an issue that arose under
Summers: the complaint that the history department didn't offer a
traditional survey course on the American Revolution and the writing of the
Constitution.

The letter writers defended the history department as being more
student-friendly than other departments, which may well be true. They noted,
correctly, that there are courses in various departments and programs
dealing with the American Revolution and the Constitution. But those are not
the nuts-and-bolts survey courses traditionalists want.

Humanities survey courses are out of favor now, partly because they're too
concerned with dead white males, and partly because professors can save time
by teaching their own specialized work. The system rewards professors for
not focusing on teaching. The incentive is to devote yourself to research ‹
at least until you get tenure, at which point even the research becomes
optional.

One way to fix this would be to give university presidents the hiring and
firing authority that most executives have. That way, they could insist on
more attention to teaching. They could require tenured professors to keep
doing productive research. They could hire a more intellectually and
politically diverse faculty.

They could do all those things ‹ but would they? University presidents don't
face the same market pressures as C.E.O.'s. If it's a school with a good
reputation, the president can count on income from tuition, alumni gifts and
the endowment. If it's a state school, the president can also count on
public money.

Without outside pressure, the president's chief concern would be the same as
it today: to avoid any unpleasant public battles with the faculty. As the
incumbents with the most direct stake in the institution, they'd still be a
power. Roger Meiners, the co-author of "Faulty Towers," a critique of
academia, doesn't think that eliminating tenure would make much difference
in how university administrators behaved.

"Any dean who would fire anyone would have a reputation as a nasty person
and could never advance in academic administration," said Meiners, an
economist at the University of Texas. "You get ahead by massaging the system
as it is, not attempting so-called radical reform by dumping academic
dolts."

In some cases, a brave board might stand by a reformer like Summers. But
most academics I talked to ‹ the contrarians who supported Summers ‹ figure
that giving university presidents more power would only make things worse.

"Abolishing tenure could just turn the decision making over to deans who
come out of today's orthodox academic world," said Fred Siegel, a historian
at Cooper Union. "That would mean that the few remaining non-leftists would
get pushed out."

So is there any way to change academia? "The Achilles heel of academics is
their status anxiety," Siegel said. "The only way to attack them is with
mockery."

Maureen Dowd is on a book leave.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top