Let’s be clear up front: The Faculty Lounges and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Paid For by freelance writer Naomi Schaefer Riley isn’t the most cogent book you’ll ever read. In fact, many of the links she makes between tenure and the various problems within higher education are questionable to say the least. But if you look past the tenure stuff and get down to the actual issues which she (mostly wrongly) thinks are caused by tenure, what you’ve got is a reasonable summary of some of the key issues in North American higher education today.

Tenure, for instance, does not cause the problem of publish or perish – rather, both are products of academic norms. Institutional financial crises can be exacerbated by tenure (in the sense that it makes the academic workforce less flexible), but they aren’t caused by it. Nevertheless, Riley writes cogently on the importance of those issues, even if she misdiagnoses the cause.

Where she is most persuasive, however, is in her description of what she calls the “Academic Underclass” – part-time faculty who just miss out on the tenured good life, leading highly contingent lives for low-pay. Whether or not you agree that they are “victims” of tenure, their plight is among those in most urgent need of redress, and she writes about them vividly.

You might think this an unconvincing review, given that I’m dissing Riley’s basic thesis that tenure is the root of all academic evils, but I actually think this book is worth reading even if only in a “know-your-enemy” kind of way. As budgets get tighter, tenure is certainly going to become a political target and arguments like Riley’s are going to be made – all the more so because the problems she points to are real and serious even if their link to tenure isn’t as tight as she makes out. People who care about tenure should take the time to engage with her arguments rather than dismissing them outright.