Keep us posted! Now that the academic year is under way, I’m sure I’ll be writing more about academic workplace bullying and the dark underbelly of the tenure system in the near future.

But the key point is that much of what academics do simply doesn’t map onto the collective bargaining framework. We have a 14-campus system, one union, one contract. From the beginning of time until last fall, thirteen campuses used the industry-standard fifty minute teaching hour. We used the sixty minute hour. The accumulated time deficit over semesters and years fried student and faculty brains. New “managers” in the state system, in pursuit of uniformity in all things, proposed to cut our classes to the fifty minute model. Part of the local here dug in its heels: “Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Shorter Hours Has Got to Go…” (I’m facetiously paraphrasing, but that actually was the burden of one position). Newer hires were aghast. The fallback position became: “Well, if we’re going to let them cut our hours in the classroom” (for the same contractually mandated pay scales) “we should at least see what we can get them to give us in return…” (Again, facetious, but only in form). Finally there was a rebellion and a plebiscite in which most (but nowhere NEAR all) of the siblinghood voted for shorter hours for the same pay. My own department’s “reps” split their votes to reflect an internal straw poll in which they said the sentiment was divided. Management forced through the change–shorter time on the line for the same money in the pay envelope–and some of the old tuskers huffed and puffed and, we don’t know quite what happened to them then.

We have no Faculty Senate, only a “University Senate,” with representation for all sorts of “stakeholders,” and this is the nominal institutional governance mechanism. The Union claims to be the constitutive body for curriculum and to have merely “delegated” this function conditionally to said Senate. Every contract year it threatens to “take back” the curricular role, uses this as a bargaining chip, then relents when the contract is signed. The Senate denies that its power is based on any such free gift, but nobody knows. Curricular discourse here, meanwhile, is basically out of the Twilight Zone.

The ultimate point is that unions can do worthy work, mostly on hard core economic issues, but in deep ways the things that faculties are charged with in the realms of academic governance are not properly matters of collective bargaining. If I were in any other workplace I can conceive, long after the building has gone silent, doing what we like to call “my own work” and posting to Historiann as the occasion offers, who would hasten to clear me out of the shop, the managerial class, or the union? These points only partly intersect with those about tenure made above and elsewhere on this blog, but I think they are not entirely irrelevant either.

But I do agree with the Lumpenprofessoriat post according to which abolition of tenure is not revolution, but surrender.

Yes, tenure is definintely preferable to the University of Phoenixification of us all!

Correct, which is why I, who am quite severe, find them irresponsible, morally reprehensible, and unfit to be in any position of power.

But a lot of these professors I met before they started their assistant professorships, and they were jerks and egoists *then*.

Given that, and given the continued deterioration of the general situation and the move toward corporatization, I can see how people younger than I would be for abolishing tenure.

But I’ve always had a hard time organizing - professors and even graduate students by and large don’t want unions in the states I’ve worked in, feel unreasonably that even the AAUP is too radical. So I have a hard time seeing how abolishing tenure would do anything except turn us all into the University of Phoenix.

I also agree with you that people damaged by the tenure process “have a responsibility, to life and people in general, to resist the damage and resist replicating it,” but I don’t think that’s what most people do with their experience. In an ideal world, they would work for change, but from what I’ve seen, they don’t. I don’t like admitting defeat, but so far I haven’t seen the kinds of changes to the system I had hoped I would see 10+ years into the profession. In fact, the changes I’ve seen–with corporate values replacing academic values in many universities–have only made tenure more fraught, and tenure candidates more scrutinized. And, as usual these pressures are not distributed randomly across genders and ethnicities on the faculty–they’re being increasingly borne by women faculty who are disproportionately stuck in temporary or adjunct positions, and by women and faculty of color who are in departments under political attack or targeted for elimination, as in the case of Africana Studies and Women’s Studies at the University of South Florida.

On the “patrolling” function described by Rad Readr. All too true, even after you have tenure. I just went through my first “five year post-tenure review.” No problems, except for some reported back-channel sniping from a few colleagues, some junior to me and far less active on the scholarly front, about too little “departmental service.” I was like, dude/(ette)s, giving papers on four continents and sitting on multiple advisory councils and editorial boards, publishing regularly, etc., IS “departmental service.” It offers camouflage, and allows our T/P Review committees to describe *you* to the institution as having “growing international reputation(s)” when you haven’t published so much as a book review in fifteen years. So patrolling does happen. Re unions, again, though, sometimes its thrust is to suppress too much academic output, rather than to increase it. Alas.