More Bulletts
- Some of you are already on Thanksgiving break. I'm jealous. I'm teaching tomorrow. Easy stuff. I know better than to plan anything difficult for the day before Thanksgiving as I will just have to repeat it all next Monday, but I still have to be there.
- I did not write for my prospectus today. I need to have a draft ready on Monday. I think that's doable as that's all I'm doing Friday through Sunday. I'm going to work hard. But I feel guilty. I need someone to tell me to stop that.
- Stop that.
- I'm looking forward to Spring classes, when I'm not teaching first-semester students. One semester really makes a big difference.
- Buying sympathy cards is sad. My great-uncle died, and I didn't know him well and haven't seen him in ages, so it's not a big deal for me. But I bought cards to send to my aunt and cousins. She's my favorite of the great-aunts, and the only one still around (well, if there are others alive, I don't ever see them). But every time I picked up a card I started thinking about my dad.
- I saw an octopus when I went snorkeling this weekend.
- Here's something I haven't seen brought up in the cursory reading I've been doing on the internet tenure debate (which seems more like end-of-semester-stress displacement than anything else)--how often does tenure protect incompetence? It's a really complex issue, which is why I don't have a very strong opinion (tenure seems like a good thing), and I'm not interested in reading about it now, but my personal experience as a student has been seeing how tenure protects bad profs (and I don't just mean bad teachers). That is what I've learned from academia: Tenure means you don't have to do your job anymore if you don't want to. Clearly this isn't true for most people, but the only time I, in my limited experience, have ever heard tenure invoked in a protective sense has been "what can we do, he has tenure." I wonder how often it actually protects academic freedom. It seems like that is only a very small part of what tenure is for, only I'm not sure what the rest of it is about, well, other than job security. Clearly I need to know more about this whole academia thing.
2 comments:
Re: tenure, I totally get that it protects faculty so they can express opinions unpopular with administration and other fac in governance situations. That seems like the most productive use of tenure--giving faculty a way to be active in uni governance that doesn't get them fired when they fight for pedagogically sound but not profitable stuff.
We have no tenure at our little working class university -- just three year contracts, something like Dean Dad is arguing so sunnily in favor of. These were put in place by the previous administration, which ran this place, as I like to mutter when I can be sure I will not be overhead, like a taco stand.
Because I do not have tenure, I will not get into what that administration did, or what the current one is doing -- see, that's the problem. No freedom to speak.
But, for instance, we have no faculty handbook, no grievance policy, no actual faculty senate. (We have a sort of rump senate.) When faculty members get fired, we have no way to object, or even to find out why it happened.
Further, we have no way to find out who is making what amount of money -- am I getting paid a fair amount of money compared to the male professors in my department? How would I know? This administration not only doesn't publish that data, it makes us afraid to ask about that data. Our position is always tenuous. We have absolutely no security, ever.
Forget any control over the curriculum. We're trying to redesign the English curriculum right now (this is part of what I wasn't going to get into) and we hold meetings for nine weeks; report to the dean; he takes that report to the Provost, who glances at the report, and says no. Well, that's that. We don't get to argue, and we don't have the power to argue either. We have no power at all.
Lack of tenure = lack of any power. It takes the administration about eleven seconds to realized this, too. After that, they write themselves a blank check. I suppose there might be some administrators somewhere who wouldn't be corrupted by that, but they haven't ended up at our university.
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