Cleaning Up America Includes Ending Tenure

On 10 June 2005, we published an article on this blog, If you are not "getting" postmodernism and its fifth column role with the jihadists, try this:. In that article, we highlighted a thoroughgoing illustration of postmodernism at a major American university.

We also emphasized how various funding sources--parents, alumni, and other donors--actually keep in business all of these people who are virulently anti-American, anti-academic, and utterly Nazi-like/Soviet-like/Islamic-like in their hatred of and suppression of dissent. We pointed out that these are postmodernism-influenced professors, wall-to-wall in the liberal arts (i.e., "humanities"--a term that is truly a cruel joke). These professors pour poison copiously into our culture through incessant pollution of America's (impressionable) youth herded into their clutches.

We also addressed that the continued existence of nonsense courses and nonsense professors at our colleges and universities keeps costs artificially high. In short: Get rid of the nonsense and its purveyors, and watch costs begin to fall (obviously this is not the sole source of exorbitant college and university costs). And, yes, "nonsense" can be OBJECTIVELY determined--said to forestall the objection of 'who is to say what is free speech?'

It is now time to take up another important element, namely tenure.

Ending tenure puts the freeloader professors and their courses on the same level as the productive teachers and objectively worthwhile courses. Ending tenure cuts costs while improving college and university educational quality. The benefits to our culture cannot be overstated.

In a recent article in Jewish World Review, revered historian and contemporary cultural analyst, Victor Davis Hanson, takes on tenure, a policy which enables professors, who, having met pitifully minimal standards, get lifetime appointments to their institutions, rather like judges to federal benches. No matter how corrupt and worthless these professors become after receiving tenure, they become just like civil servants--impossible to get rid of.

Dr. Hanson says: "Professors, ... after an initial probationary period of six years, win the equivalent of lifelong employment from their peers. Why does this strange practice linger on? The standard rationale is that the stuff of higher education is unfettered inquiry. Only by enjoying shelter from the storm of politics can professors be bold enough to take up the tough task of challenging young minds to question orthodoxy."

What tenure has entrenched is the complete opposite of "unfettered inquiry." "Tenure became part of protecting this strange culture in which the ends justified the means: Bias in the classroom was passed off as "balance" to an inherently prejudiced society. Academia came to resemble the medieval church that likewise believed its archaic protocols were free from review, given its vaunted mission of saving souls."

Aside from causing the shutdown of all viewpoints differing from professors' and administrators' own postmodernistic, pro-socialist, anti-capitalist, and above all, anti-American ideas, tenure COSTS big money. To put it another way, it wastes big bucks. "Perennial part-time lecturers, many with the requisite Ph.D.s, often teach the same classes as their tenured counterparts. Yet they receive about 25 percent of the compensation per course and without benefits." And, these teachers, particularly those who teach objectively, must move on. They become academically homeless itinerants, who have been denied tenure by a crowd entrenched by law, not by morality. The good teachers are denied any voice whatsoever, because they lack tenure. They have been shut out fully. Guild socialism in the middle ages and labor unions can only look on with envy.

What are some of the practical results of tenure? "The cost of university tuition continues to creep higher than the rate of inflation. The percentage of cheaper classes taught by adjunct instructors is increasing as well. Yet the competence of recently graduated students is ever more in question. What is not scrutinized in this disturbing calculus is a mandarin class that says it is radically egalitarian, but in fact insists on an unusual privilege that most other Americans do not enjoy. In recompense, the university has not delivered a better-educated student, or a more intellectually diverse and independent-thinking faculty. Instead it has accomplished precisely the opposite."

The arguments in favor of tenure are too pitiful to deal with. There is no "up" side. Dr. Hanson sums up a rational, tenure-free future this way: "Reasonable people can debate what would be lost with the abolition of tenure. But the warning that, in our litigious society, professors would lack fair job protection is implausible. Renewable five-year agreements — outlining in detail teaching and scholarly expectations — would still protect free speech, without creating lifelong sinecures for those who fail their contractual obligations."

Something else we stated in our previous article is that we cannot win the war against Islam unless we win the war against postmodernism on our campuses as well. The reason is because both groups have formed a mutually beneficial "unholy alliance." This unholy alliance dedicates itself to destroying America and all of its values.

Just as co-dependents of alcoholics must stop providing support to their loved one's drinking, so we must stop our co-dependency with our universities. The infamous but far too well-known Ward Churchill is just one of many thousands just like him; only the others are much, much worse. Their continuation depends on our support directly and through our legislatures. (All emphases mine)

We must take back our universities and colleges!