There’s a line you tend to hear in Canadian universities: that tenure “is essential to the defence of academic freedom”. There’s no question that historically, in North America, the two concepts grew up together, and have been intertwined here for about a century. But it’s demonstrably false that tenure is the only way to defend academic freedom.
In Europe, tenure has an entirely different historical origin. Civil servants in many countries have tenure, and since university professors in many places were (and in some cases still are) civil servants, they simply picked it up as well. The link with academic freedom is non-existent; it’s simply an employment benefit. That doesn’t mean there’s no academic freedom in Europe. In France, academic freedom is protected by statute. In Germany, academic freedom is actually inscribed in the federal constitution (though with the anti-Nazi rider that academic freedom does not absolve teachers of loyalty to the constitution).
Then there’s the United Kingdom. The UK had tenure until the early 1980s, when it was abolished under the Thatcher government and replaced with a system of long-term contracts. But the same government also passed a statute which ensured that academic staff have the right to, “question and test received wisdom and to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their jobs or the privileges they may have”. To my knowledge, no serious observer thinks the state of academic freedom is any worse in the UK than it is, say, here. Certainly, it hasn’t prevented UK universities from being held in great esteem by academics around the world, as endless rounds of THE and QS surveys of academic reputation keep telling us.
Heck, let’s even look here within North America. Over the past couple of decades, the proportion of teaching staff with tenure has declined. And while this is widely held to have a number of drawbacks (as well as financial benefits), a reduction in academic freedom at these institutions isn’t usually one of them.
The point here isn’t that tenure fails to protect academic freedom – there are certainly lots of cases one could point to where it has been useful. Rather, the point is that it is not the only way to protect academic freedom. This is important because if academic freedom could be protected outside the institution of tenure, then tenure would simply become – as it is in Europe – a form of job security universities might wish to retain as an employment benefit, but which is not seen as a “right”. More to the point, it would actually be negotiable.
So, how about it: academic freedom legislation, anyone?
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Approaching this from the other side–that tenure doesn’t ensure academic freedom–full-time faculty in Ontario’s Community Colleges (e.g., Humber, Algonquin, Boréal, etc.), are tenured, but there have been numerous complaints about loss of academic freedom. In this case, the issue isn’t so much being able to research and publish uncomfortable topics, but rather having managers dictate curriculum faculty and specify the particular assessments that will be used.
Hi Brett. Thanks for writing. A good point, I think.
Academic freedom is one of those nice sounding, yet nebulous, concepts. Tenured faculty still have accountability that does not permit them to do just anything they want. Plus, some of the freedoms are actually protected under the Charter. I see it as simply enhanced job security and a right to – let’s be blunt – criticize the employer without fear of being pink-slipped – and that’s not something necessarily found in the private sector. It’s generally only when knowledge and hot-button politics collide that the academic freedom aspect seems to be a nice protection.
Technically, although a hollow freedom, plenty of sessionals have “academic freedom” in ways not enjoyed by tenured faculty. Sessionals can pursue any intellectual curiousity they want, publish what they want, without having to clear their research through a committee, chair, or dean. And, since so many sessionals are basically invisible, not many are going to notice what they do with their unpaid research time. They don’t have to bother with appeasing granting bodies since they most likely don’t have eligibility to apply, they most likely are not going to be told to publish more to earn some kind of evaluation score that makes the department look good, and it is doubtful that anyone is going to drop in on their classes to see if the course remains fully aligned with the program. But, again, a hollow freedom if you have a roving band of sessionals cobbling together a mountain of courses with no time left to spare to conduct research.
So, yes, despite the overlap between academic freedom and job security, they are also quite distinct entities. Is there another way? Definitely, and it may be time to have that sensitive discussion as tenure track hiring lines appear to be rarer than decorum in the House of Commons. Take a look just south of us: their present may be our future. Tenure has been whittled to a little nub in Texas, and other states might follow suit. About two-thirds of the US faculty complement are adjuncts, the kind who collect food stamps and medicaid. Not pretty.
All good points. Small quibble on the last bit, though – though it is true that the majority of people who have been assigned to teach a class in the US are sessionals, most of them are sessional by choice doing something part-time to supplement their quite good wages in whatever else it is they do. The average household wage of US “sessionals” is over 90K/year. The number of sessionals who are *exclusively* sessionals (and who collect food stamps) is quite small. see here: http://mattbruenig.com/2013/12/04/what-does-the-national-data-say-about-adjuncts/
Hi Alex,
Unfortunately, that is probably what admins want the public to swallow. Depends where you get the data, like the AAUP or what-not. I just found this: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/292-an-alarming-snapshot-of-adjunct-labor?cid=VTKT1
I think if you scroll to the bottom of my link, you can see a brief discussion of the two data sources. One is random, one is not.
Alex, it seems to me that statistics for the =average= sessional will over-weight graduate students and professionals who teach one class a term to suppliment their main income, and underweight the precarious people who teach many courses a semester and who everyone is concerned about. I am also suspicious of that high “all other fields” proportion of 30-40%, and wonder if the 40-70% of their sample who have full-time jobs are skewing the average income (and how many people could keep up a full-time job while also teaching courses in regular working hours). It is an interesting study but I don’t think it proves that there are not a lot of impoverished, precariously employed sessional instructors in the US.
Hi Sean. Thanks for writing. If these “precarious people” are underweighted, it;s precisely because they don;t constitute t a very large fraction of the adjunct population. In absolute numbers there are probably a lot of them because the US is so big and there are so many adjuncts. (And i don’t think they necessarily teach in regular hours – an awful lot of adjuncts teach night). But I would suggest that what those figures mean is that there is not an “adjunct crisis” per se: most adjunct do perfectly well and are happy with their status. What there is, undoubtedly, is a problem in the full-time academic career pipeline. But that’s a bit different.
Hi Alex,
I agree that this study is reasonably good evidence that most American sessional instructors are not too badly off, and that it shows that part-time faculty are more diverse than stereotype suggests, but I have three wider concerns. First, this study seems to rely on voluntary responses, so it probably under-represents the worst off for the kind of reasons that census officials are familiar with. Second, it might be that 20% of part-time faculty do as much teaching as the other 80%. Choosing whether to ask about the average sessional or the teacher of the average course will give different results, yet those both seem reasonable areas of analysis. Third, there are likely significant differences between fields- that large “other” category disturbs me, and I’m not sure that business schools pay sessionals the same rate that art history programs do.
I found the American Historical Asssociation “Many Careers of History PhDs” study more convincing because of its 97% response rate and reliance on publicly available data rather than voluntary responses.
Sean
I recall reading some years ago a comment attributed to the Supreme Court to the effect that in Canada ‘academic freedom’ was not guaranteed by the Charter but rather derived from tenure.
I found this quote online, attributed to the Court: ““Tenure provides the necessary academic freedom to allow free and fearless search for knowledge and the propagation of ideas.” I don’t know if this was a secondary comment or a finding of some sort, but it seems to link tenure and academic freedom quite directly.
Of course most Canadian academics are rather timid and rarely say anything controversial.