Unionized academics: The tenure swindle
Education is big business and looks it.
On the college campus, its organization and administration would put General Motors to shame.
THE BULK OF MACHINERY it uses—from computers to test tubes—is the most modern and efficient.
The budget that it requires would make Charles de Gaulle shudder with greed and envy.
And yet for all its stainless steel splendor, the American university—including this one—maintains a system of employing its faculty that is as old as Galileo's telescope and as dangerous as Socrates' hemlock.
THE SYSTEM IS CALLED tenure. In its simplest form, the tenure system means that after a professor or instructor has been employed for several years, he is granted the privilege to keep his job until age 65, or until senility rots the brain.
The logic behind tenure involves one of education's sacraments, academic freedom. After all, argues the professorial union, the American Association of University Professors, if a teacher has the tenure system behind him, he need not fear dismissal just because an administrator or even a regent does not like what he teaches.
Such an argument at first seems more than credible—teachers certainly should be free from such shady reprisal.
BUT IN THIS DAY and in this state, where academic freedom is just about as radical as
social security, such an argument has become a facade hiding another age-old practice, featherbedding.
The tenure system, as it now exists, serves no less a purpose than to protect the inept, to shield the stupid and to offer legal sanctuary for those who mistakenly choose teaching as an escape from reality.
It is all too painfully obvious that at this University, for example, there are a number of professors who should be selling used cars, and another number of deans who would like to see these incompetents doing just that.
AND WHY NOT. If a university were to fire a teacher for unfair reasons, the reputation that university could acquire among all teachers would be harmful. A university, if it acted wrongly in its hiring and firing policy, could forget the possibility of attracting the highly competent—whose services are always in great demand elsewhere.
Furthermore, the university could still offer protection for its faculty through the establishment of non-partisan appeal boards designed for the use of the mistreated professor.
Nevertheless, the university owes some allegiance to its supporters, students and ideals. It must shoulder the responsibility of striking down all attempts to swindle any of these three.
It must, in other words, abolish the swindle called tenure.
Around The Cam-pi by will hardesty
INTRODUCTION DEPARTMENT. TOOT MY OWN HORN DIVISION. Hiya, kids, hiya, hiya. This will be the first of what may turn out to be a series of editorial comment columns. And it may turn out to be the last.
This column won't pretend to have all the answers. In fact, it doesn't even have all the questions.
This column will be written weatherly—that is, intermittent light tripe. Whenever I can get psyched up enough to crank it out.
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ARCHEOLOGY DEPARTMENT. ANCIENT TRIBES DIVISION. What ever happened to the Partruants? It showed some real guts to get out in the 10-degree weather to stick up a sign saying, "Be Partruant." We thought it might be a synonym for a four-letter word.
Will they strike again?
We await another pearl of wisdom, o ancient and secret tribe.
FLASH IN THE PAN DEPARTMENT.
LAWRENCE, KANSAS, DIVISION.
In a real fit of enthusiasm and industriousness, they, through some of their flunkies, finally got around to getting started on the installation of the light at 15th and Iowa.
That infinitely knowledgeable group of Solomon-like wise-men (colloquially known as the Lawrence City Council) has finally acted.
Note the word "started." One day worth of started. And no more.
That one day netting nothing more than a couple of holes in the ground, one trench which seems to resemble a sewer ditch (ineffectively filled-in at that) across the street, and a horrendous traffic jam about four in the afternoon of that day.
Are those wise old men who rule Lawrence going to wait as long to complete the job as they did to start it? Do they want a written invitation to get on the stick?
We realize that we at KU are nothing more than students who mean nothing to the City Council—nothing more than life to this town which would be a grease spot in the road if it weren't for the University.
We realize that if anyone is killed at that intersection it might very well be a student due to the location of the corner in relation to the campus, but like we said before, we're just students.
PEOPLE WED LIKE TO SEE IN OUR CLASS DEPARTMENT. THEYD BE SINGING A DIFFERENT TUNE DIVISION. How about Mick Jagger and his musical aggregation, The Rolling Stones in Psychology 131—"Psychology of Satisfaction."
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CONSIDERATE PUB KEEPER
CAMBERLEY, England—(UPI)
—Terence Lyon is an understanding and friendly pub keeper. He has opened a "bar" for non-drinkers in his establishment. "I don't drink or smoke myself," he explained. "but often go into a pub just for the atmosphere. ov non-drinkers can find their atmosphere in my place."
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Daily Kansan Wednesday, February 15, 1937
"Seems To Have Been Shot From Two Directions'
@1964 HERBLOCK
THE WASHINGTON PBS
The untender trap: our grade system
(Note: Grades are always a topic of concern to the university student. Presently, there are those that suggest the university move away from the A, B, C, D, F, grading system to a more elementary "pass-fail" system. The "Brown and White," student newspaper at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., offers a compromise.)
The application of such a system at Lehigh would remove from the faculty much of the current pressure over the assigning of grades and would assure the student of a grade commensurate with the quality of his work.
The current inequities of Lehigh's grading system are blatant. They create a constrictive straight-jacket ensnaring teacher and student alike.
A system under which only five possible grades may be given means that a wide range of performance must exist within each grade with no means of differentiation available.
AVALON, by Anya Seton (Crest, 75 cents)—Lush, romantic stuff by one of the most unembarrassed of modern romanticists. In 10th century England, yet—a French prince and a Cornish peasant girl. Or is that word "corny?" In any case, some hours lie ahead that will be unimpeded by reflection.
For example, C plus would (on a 4.0 scale) 2.3,C minus 1.7, while an unsuffixed C would remain at 2 points per unit.
TWO STUDENTS receiving an "A" in a course might be assumed to have produced work of equal quality, whereas one may have a 98 average compared to another student who barely squeezed into the "A" range with a 90.
"A MORE REFINED system used optionally would not be incompatible with the continuance of the present system elsewhere. . . . The most compatible variation might be to use 'plus' and 'minus' grades that carry 0.3 grade point above or below the unmarked value. This compatibility makes it possible for each instructor to choose either the existing scale or the one now proposed, according to what is most appropriate for the particular course."
For the student who is balancing perilously on the thin line between two grades, a slight movement in either direction registers as a grade either much higher or much lower than he rightly deserves.
This problem was recently investigated at the University of California at Berkeley. Five faculty members of the Select Committee on Education in a report to the Academic Senate stated:
New books
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ASSORTED PROSE, by John Updike (Crest, 60 cents)—More short writings by one of the hottest literary names of today, though mainly reflections—on boyhood, the old movie theater, poetry, faith and love, Max Beerbohm, and dogwood tree. An eloquent writer, certainly, and he offers some diverting and maybe inspired evenings.