It seems to be that the focus on fixed points in an academic career, whether it is getting tenure or making senior lecturer, doesn’t really address the problems of supporting the development of an academic career, and neither do bean counter formulae about so much teaching, so many publications and so much admin time. People are productive in different ways at different times in their careers – it would be normal to have a burst of research output after completing a Phd, perhaps a few years of emphasis on teaching, a period when you get stuck with lots of admin, then perhaps a mid-career burst of new ideas for publications. Really great, paradigm challenging research does not come at a production line pace, particularly in the humanities. I think a big problem with tenure is that it requires taking a gamble on someone quite early in their career, when you have no idea how productive they will be 20 or 30 years later. If universities had a better understanding of how academic careers ebb and flow between research, teaching and admin, and better mechanisms for supporting that over 5 and 10 year windows rather than just this year’s research output report, then there would be much less agony and stress over the granting of tenure.

To paraphrase Churchill, tenure is the worst system we’ve got, except for all the other ones…

Second, tenure is a communal action — one receives tenure from a community, the community is responsible for defending the values of tenure. A large part of this is that an individual with tenure is granted ‘academic freedom,’ (a contested term, yes), but also that each individual within the community is responsible for ensuring the academic freedom of their peers withing in the community. ‘Academic freedom’ and ‘tenure’ are possessions of local communities. Coming into a tenure decision we are/were all subject the to opinions/standards/whims of those already on the inside of the community. Once tenure is obtained it is a responsibility to contribute to the maintenance of those values. If a generation abdicates this responsibility the system ends up looking out of date, old fashioned and sacred cow-ish.

Depending on the institution, sure.

Would work published on Twitter be acceptable for tenure?

No chance.

hile David purposes that you make a name for yourself by subverting the common paradigm, pointing out what is wrong. This strikes me as a rather predictable, conservative pattern, a dialectic of academic discourse.

You know, if you’re just going to point out any radical scholarship and say “no, that’s really conservative,” then you’re not really interested in conversation so much as marking your polemical territory.

If I can be a bit flip here, it seems to me the argument is:
1) Tenured professors enjoy working conditions that other ‘knowledge-workers’ do not. That’s a reasonable observation, but how is that condition produced by tenure itself? How is that condition not a function of the production of new exploitable labor positions (adjunct, teaching associate, visiting lecturer, etc)? In other words, the same situation exists in countless working environments that don’t have tenure systems in place.

As far as your anecdotal example of the tenured prof who coasts along with as little work as possible, that’s fine as an anecdote, but what of the equally anecdotal tenured prof whose lighter teaching load and increased research funds allow her to do serious sustained intellectually rigorous work, and to include graduate students in the process?

2) The academic-book format that is the prerequisite of most tenure decisions; and the academic-book format is governed by principles that don’t align with academic ‘merit’ (whatever we may decide that may be). Again, a perfectly fine assessment of the problem of publishing scholarship, particularly in the humanities, particularly with the state of publishing today. But once again, how is this a fault of the institution of *tenure* and not the process of *tenure-granting*? Plenty of institutions are beginning to factor in things like ‘public scholarship’ in their tenure review, plenty of others value teaching over research. Some, as you say, value a nice quiet golf buddy. But these are not indictments of tenure, but how it is assigned, be it by publishing houses or by college deans. It is also a question of publishing practice, which has less than nothing to do with tenure–or, if it does, you never make the case for it.

You think Karl Marx would have ever got tenure by writing Capital?
Yeah, probably. It was an extremely influential text that was an immediate game-changer across several intellectual fields, not to mention pretty widely-read. There would probably be a bidding war over the publishing rights. Besides that, though, I think the rhetorical point you’re trying to make falls flat–if it were the case that work that “questions the entirety of the intellectual discourse, that which is truly radical and new, does not count,” would Judith Butler have tenure by the time Gender Trouble came out?

If you’re going to make a case against tenure, then you need to talk about tenure. I just don’t see it here.

@ Matt: publishing work on Twitter would not necessarily ‘tear down the dominant paradigm of the discipline.’ You’re talking about challenging academic fields. You’re talking about challenging publishing practices.

Mainly I agree with M. Kirschenbaum, which is to say that I don’t think the dividing line on truly radical thinking versus conservative thinking is a matter of medium of presentation. In this instance I am actually talking about the content independent of medium of presentation (to the degree we could separate the two), so I was not purposing like M. Gold suggests that radical scholarship in the form of twitter or non-book presentation is what it is at stake. I am not arguing that there are hip cool digital projects which don’t count towards tenure and that ought to (although I would argue this in a different context.) What I am suggesting here is that (and just for the sake of argumentation lets limit it to book based scholarship) the content of most of what is used as the tenure book, is rather conservative, mostly predictable, mostly operating within the paradigm. While David purposes that you make a name for yourself by subverting the common paradigm, pointing out what is wrong. This strikes me as a rather predictable, conservative pattern, a dialectic of academic discourse. This sort of subversion of the dominant paradigm strikes me as a rather predictable evolution in argument. It is true that I have read some “radical arguments” in recent scholarship, but most of it does little to question the main paradigms of thought within any discipline. How many of us know someone who had something truly interesting to publish, and which was rejected because it didn’t fit neatly into any field or current disciplinary structure.

-Kathy
Point taken. I should have specified early on that I was talking about the Research University model, it is where the discussion started but I should have made that context clear. I don’t think though that makes this discourse “elitist” just critical within a specific context. And what is more I think more and more schools are moving to replicate the research University model, requiring that new faculty pass a newer more strict tenure policy which often includes a book. And again while I see many jr. faculty pushing the edge of form in scholarship (digital) I still see many conversations (participated in many) where jr. faculty say that a particular argument just won’t fly, is not acceptable, needs to be modified in order to be considered. And the fact that scholarship is consistently measured by a ruler of “will it get me tenure” versus “is this though provoking” only serves to prove my point.

I guess I probably misled the readership here with that last line (alas miscommunication always happens) I am not going to purpose that digital scholarship, publishing online is the answer, but something else . . .but I will say that the way tenure operates at Research Universities, by getting the tenure book published, means that said scholarship is made to conform to a very specific model of what counts, that is being decided by conservative market/publishing forces. If it doesn’t sell in a very real sense of the word sell it probably can’t get published, and you probably can’t get tenure.

While I found some of the concepts in your post (and on Twitter) very provocative, it really pushes a point of view from a research institute. Doesn’t that smack of elitism or at the very least replicating the class divide of our higher education system?

As for Jrs forcing their scholarship to fit into standard paradigms, I have to disagree with you there. Many are pushing that bleeding edge and realize some resistance in the departments. I’m finding that those who are teaching the heavier loads are given MUCH more leeway in their scholarship. Perhaps its the research institutes that should take a look at their tenure system?

Sorry to be so prolific. I’m fighting the good fight for digital scholarship in a large public institute that struggles just to make the budget let alone fund any groovy, cool, interesting projects for their Jrs.