Faculty politics easy target

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Faculty politics easy target				March 11, 2006

I just got a cyber beam from my “bud,” as he calls himself, Jimmy Hammer. I have no idea who Jimmy is, but he’s offering me a fantastic opportunity to “get a college diploma in two weeks.”

What Jimmy has tapped into is the dream of most Americans: Go to college, get a diploma and live on Easy Street.

Unfortunately, most parents and prospective college students wander into the esoteric world of academe blindfolded and on a catastrophic collision course with their check books. What lies behind the veil that shields the covenantal ark of secrecy in the great tabernacles of learning they have no idea. Nor are they sure just what product they’re purchasing when they unhesitatingly surrender checks for massive amounts to the university bursar.

Well, thanks to New York Times columnist John Tierney, all that is about to change. Fired up by the resignation of Harvard University president Lawrence Summers, Tierney wants you to know that Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty are the entrenched slugs who forced Summers to resign. Bloated with power, these do-nothing leftist twits refuse to teach, or teach only to their narrow research interests. They despise undergraduates, wallow in tenured sloth and have the gall to demand that they and their departments hire and fire their own professors.

According to Tierney, Summers, like some wild-eyed existentialist, butted up against his own Dostoyevskian wall when he suggested that tenured professors alter their narrow teaching regimens and engage in what Summers considered meaningful research. As a result of the president’s curricular machinations, his dean of arts and sciences resigned, and Cornel West, one of the most prominent names in African-American studies, flew the coop and landed at Princeton.

Summers’ biggest supporters, says Tierney, are found in, among other places, the business school, and perhaps therein lies the answer to this educational dilemma. What would happen if we ran universities like businesses?

Give the president of the university the same powers as are granted to the president of any corporation. Do away with tenure and let the president hire and fire faculty members. Newspaper columnists, argues Tierney, don’t hire fellow columnists, so why should professors hire their own kind? Let the president also tell professors what courses they should teach and what research is valuable enough to pursue.

In case you haven’t guessed by now, Tierney’s nuts and bolts are no longer holding his wagon together. To compare newspaper publishers and their few columnists with university presidents and their hundreds of faculty members is about as bogus as it gets in the land of analogy.

I know of no university president who is so polymathic as to be able to claim expertise in all the fields embraced by his college or university. Imagine a president who comes from the field of mathematics trying to recruit a suitable Greek professor. Or a psychology professor. The recruiting process demands not only intense involvement in a particular field, but a knowledge of the academic background of each candidate. No president could or should involve himself in such pursuits. Only departments in consultation with the appropriate dean can get the job done.

As for the relationship between teaching and research, it should be a strong one. Whether it be at Harvard or the College of William & Mary, all professors naturally teach to their expertise. A biologist who specializes in botany will probably not feel at home teaching ornithology. Yet all biologists or psychologists or classicists are quite capable of, and do teach elementary courses.

In fact, all departments at W&M are required to offer freshman seminars taught by full-time professors. Once you get beyond the freshman or sophomore level, expertise based on training and research is essential for those teaching more specific advanced courses. This is true at Harvard, W&M or any other major institution of higher learning.

But what especially rankles Tierney is the concept of tenure and the idea that, after a six year trial period, professors are given what he considers a free ride. And there is some justification for his concern. Undoubtedly the tenure process allows for the collection of deadwood, of professors who take advantage of the protection offered by tenure and cease doing research or teach from notes that crumble at the touch.

In most universities, however, including Harvard and W&M, such delinquents have a hard time of it. Not only are there merit evaluations of all professors each year, but post-tenure reviews of tenured professors are undertaken periodically. In most departments, teaching is weighed more heavily than or on a par with research. Proven incompetence can lead to dismissal, while laxity may result in paycheck distress and an unpleasant trip to the dean’s office.

Undoubtedly caveat emptor should be the operative guide for parents and students checking out any college or university. On the other hand, institutions like Harvard or W&M have not achieved their prominence by hiring and retaining arts and sciences faculties who revel in brain-dead inertia and despise students.

To suggest, as Tierney has, that intrusive presidential insinuations are going to shake things up for the better is preposterous. As most W&M presidents have realized, the primary function of any university president is to provide the economic, physical and intellectual framework in which his or her faculty can productively teach and conduct research. In the end, it was his failure to understand that, and not his faculty, that did in Lawrence Summers.