Towards a Theory of the Tenured Class
We don’t know who discovered water but are pretty sure it wasn’t a fish.
— Marshall McLuhan
The great insight of that academic discipline called sociology is that much of a person’s sensibility and activity is determined by his and her social situation, no matter how much they might imagine otherwise. Rich people look at the world differently from poor people, those with power differently from those lacking it (even if they have wealth or prestige), city dwellers differently from, say, farmers. However, even though most sociologists are academics and then most prominent sociologists are tenured, few are able to examine their immediate world. Tenure I should note is the procedure by which permanent (for-life) employment is bestowed upon an employee, theoretically to grant him or her “free speech” in the classroom, which is intellectually desirable to be sure. Socially, however, tenure creates two things less desirable-not only a privileged class within academic institutions but teachers lacking privilege. The political analogue is the British House of Lords, where appointments are made for life, in contrast to the House of Commons, its name signifying lesser class, whose members must be (re)elected.
One reason why tenured academics are reluctant to move from one university to another is that tenure might need to be awarded again–reconfirmation is not automatic. Indeed, it could be said that for the past few decades American university teachers are divided into two classes-those that have tenure and can’t move, and those who don’t have tenure and thus can only move from one employer to another until they leave academia entirely. I’ve always wondered why academic Marxists haven’t envisioned how the dialectic between these classes with radically disparate privileges will be resolved.
Writers before me have written about the deleterious costs of tenuring upon those who are denied tenure; but I’m not aware of any critique of the its effect upon those who benefit, the naîve assumption being that, like most good fortune, it is an unmixed blessing, enabling them to produce scholarship that would not otherwise happen. As an independent Manhattan writer keeping some social distance from academia, I find myself less able to write a definitive essay on the effects of tenure than miscellaneous observations. I couldn’t find any previous exposés on this subject; nor did colleagues reading drafts of this text recommend any to me. Some of these remarks are more applicable to some tenured academics than to others, though I doubt if any of these generalizations are completely askew.
Whereas untenured academics tend to be cautious to a fault, out of a fear of offending anyone who might be involved in awarding them tenure, the tenured have no fear-none at all. Indeed, they are fundamentally unaccountable. Unless the process of getting tenure destroys them intellectually, leaving them hopelessly dulled, the survivors of university tenuring believe they can say and write anything they want, no matter how fantastic, nonsensical, or simply stupid. What missing from their heads and mouths is the self-filter that Ernest Hemingway called a “shit-detector,” because they won’t be penalized with anything more dismissive than negative words or, at worse, an editorial rejection slip. One of the great tragedies of tenured cultural life is that fools are rarely fired for being fashionably stupid?
To tenured ideologues is thus granted a platform for disseminating all kinds of preposterous agendas at no financial cost to themselves-Ward Churchill, Sammy al-Arian, Leonard Jeffries, Angela Davis, Holocaust deniers, gender fanatics, religious millennialists, professors convicting the Duke lacrosse team on insufficient evidence, what have you. To professors with a taste not just for jargon incomprehensible to common people but also for otherwise unacceptable contradictions, tenure offers authoritarian leverage in mind-fucking. (I’d name more names were not their notoriety mostly local until someone else publicizes them, as happened with Churchill and al-Arian. David Horowitz identifies a few of these among his “101 Most Dangerous Academics in America,” most of whom are tenured, in his recent book The Professors (Regnery, 2006).)
Predisposed to pontificate, if not to bluster and bluff, they develop a resistance to doing first-hand research as beneath them, something strictly for the lower academic classes, much as those who become bosses become incapable of doing menial work. Indeed, especially if trained in philosophy, literature, and sociology, rather than history or economics, tenured profs are in my observation prone to making stuff up, often outrageously. When George Orwell once quipped that only intellectuals with a taste for peculiar ideas could be so stupid it was obvious that he didn’t know tenured profs, some of whom can be yet stupider at no cost to themselves, who are, in effect, a licensed jerks. The inspiration for this critique was a sociologist who seems to take particular glee in demonstrating how sociologically dumb an academic sociologist can be. A Victim of Tenure I rank him to be. Outrageous Stupidity becomes for the tenured the analogue of Conspicuous Consumption-an inexpensive privilege that Thorstein Veblen attributed to the “leisure class.”
Because of limitations on their university income, academics compete not for money but power within an institutional hierarchy. Power includes the disbursement of supplementary funds, say for professional travel or personal publishing and a greater role in hiring (and sometimes firing of the untenured), as well as awarding tenure. Those with greater academic power become a more privileged class within a larger group who often blame the former for depriving them not of basic income, which is secure, but from supplementary rewards they think due them. Not unlike others upon whom wealth and security is bestowed, they sometimes have difficulty accepting success that is earned mostly through individual effort, devoid of institutional security and support. The small-entrepreneur mentality lies beyond their imaginations. Academic society resembles Communist countries where people competed not for money but for privileges, perhaps incidentally accounting for why academics around the world found Communism less objectionable than, say, entrepreneurs.
As members of a privileged class, tenured academics prefer the company of those comparably privileged, by contrast condescending toward everyone less privileged, beginning with non-tenured academics, but also including others. Indeed, even common socializing with the non-tenured can be problematic for them. As a single gent with a taste for women with advanced degrees, I can testify that I have never dated for long a tenured professor (and that I didn’t recognize this fact until drafting this essay). Since I’ve known intimately women in a several professions, not to mention graduate students and junior professors who weren’t yet tenured, shouldn’t I assume that tenured royalty wouldn’t accept untenured me, elite literary recognitions notwithstanding? They sleep only with their kind, I’m told. Does this restrictive preference reflect a certain insecurity about their status not unusual in privileged people who recognize that others similarly competent could do as well were they not unfortunate because of disadvantages (of timing, gender, integrity, a lack of sponsors) and closed doors?
Few classes of people are more gratuitously mischievous, creating unnecessary problems for those around them. Yet even more dangerous are retired tenured profs, mostly because nothing else is as self-enhancing to them as gratuitous mischief. Whenever I’ve asked tenured profs whether job security had any negative effects upon themselves, as I have, none of them could think of a single thing, though some complained, often vehemently, about negative effects it had on certain other professors. Not even academic Marxists could deal seriously with the question of how differences in material conditions might affect consciousness. Likewise rare is the rich person who understands the negative effects, sometimes visible to outsiders, of having too much money. Indeed, when a Marxist told me that without university tenure he could not have written his books, I thought him implicitly self-deflating, measuring himself as inferior to those who write books without his secure advantages. (Many do it, including myself.) A Libertarian told that he doubted if academic colleagues of his political persuasion would survive without tenure, while another editor told me that, “there are no antiwar conservatives employed outside of academia, as the think tanks are pretty much run by neocons.” Thus does a similar anxiety in defense of certain privileges make uncomfortable bedfellows.
Another suggested that I wouldn’t have written this critique if I had tenure, implicitly criticizing politically inastute powerhouses for failing to buy me off. I advised him that, if he were serious, to tell them, not me, that they were fools. Academic operators don’t enjoy being told they are politically inastute, even if they know they might have been; but no one can’t beat people who are self-consciously stupid. Indeed, it is reasonable to ask whether Orwell, John Cage, or other independents (including myself) would have had their distinguished careers had they spent most of their lives as tenured professors? Indeed, though I’ve posed this question about my own career to a tenured academic more than once, never have I gotten an answer. Next question should be: And if not, why not?
In my observation, tenured profs indulge in self-defeating moves unavailable to those who are self-employed, precisely because stupidity costs them little-indeed, those similarly tenured regard such self-defeating moves by others as a privilege available exclusively to their aristocratic kind. Rare is the insulated human being who can be so smugly stupid. As tenure is granted for life, these people aren’t politicians with a justified fear of being voted out. What do you think of the House of Lords, I would ask defenders of tenure? Of monarchism? If it is objectionable to you, what else might also be? The more I think about the tenured class, the more dangerous I regard any process that institutionalizes elitism for life.
>Art: Zhang Xiaogang, Bloodline: Big Family No. 3, 1995.