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By Betty Jean Craige
bjcraige@uga.edu
It is not a coincidence that state legislators are beginning to question the tenure system in American colleges and universities at the same time that humanities scholars are attempting to effect social change and scientists are forming partnerships with private corporations and foundations. These departures from traditional academic ways are aspects of a transformation of higher education that in short hand might be described as the collapse of the ivory tower. And because the collapse of the ivory tower is itself an aspect of a larger cultural revolution, which in short hand might be described as a shift in power from producer to consumer, the new academic model is probably here to stay for a while.
At risk in the cultural revolution is academic freedom, underpinned by tenure.
Since the late 19th century, when American colleges and universities took their present form, scholarly research has theoretically been driven by intellectual curiosity. The spirit/matter dualism that characterized Western mentality for over 2,000 years supported an idealized separation of “ivory tower” from “real world,” a removal of intellectual work from the realms of business and politics. Tenure was created to ensure the academic freedom of intellectually curious professors to seek and disclose truth in their fields of expertise independently of political and economic forces. Intellectual inquiry was presumed to be disinterested.
At the turn of the 21st century the “curiosity-driven research paradigm” is being supplanted in universities by what Donald E. Stokes called a “user-inspired research paradigm” (Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation). In the sciences, the dualist distinction between basic science and applied science is disappearing under the pressure all scientists experience to find external funding for their research. The funding sources, whether government or industry, largely determine the directions of scientific inquiry. The funding sources represent “users.”
Critics of the emerging research paradigm point to a contradiction inherent in faculty’s demand for academic freedom and tenure and the acceptance of commercial sponsorship of research. Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn questioned the disinterestedness of commercially sponsored scientific investigation in their March 2000 article on “The Kept University” in The Atlantic Monthly.
Proponents of partnerships between universities and industry argue that corporations’ increased access to university-developed knowledge and technology benefits our society as a whole and that such partnerships enable universities to make a healthier world. Actually, universities have no choice now but to solicit funds from governmental, corporate and private sectors of our economy if they are to conduct the high-level, expensive research that a technological global society demands.
In the humanities the advent of the user-inspired research model may be discerned in a heightened sense of intellectuals’ responsibility to the world. Feminism, deconstruction, post-colonial theory, and the scholarship of minorities have discredited the dualism of knowledge and politics and rendered obsolete the assumption that scholarship can avoid the influence of societal forces. These lines of research are rooted in the conviction that what counts as truth in any given period is related to historical conditions and that the dispelling of illusions effects social change.
Opponents of the new model in the humanities denounce the scholarship of engagement as politically motivated and warn that such scholarship may justify legislators’ efforts to dismantle the tenure system.
Proponents of the new model applaud humanists’ attention to issues of social oppression--human rights, gender inequities and racism, for example. For them, humanists should join other forces of good in the world to rectify long-standing injustices.
Throughout the academy the dualism of intellectual work and practical work is breaking down. It will eventually be replaced by the holistic recognition of the interdependence of the parts of any system. In the alliances being formed between universities and entities in the non-academic community the ecological lesson of Aldo Leopold, that interdependence behooves cooperation, is already taking hold.
Because economic circumstances will hold the user-inspired research paradigm in place for the foreseeable future, faculty must develop a new rationale for academic freedom. No longer can we argue that our intellectual work occupies a realm above that of business and politics. It no longer does. The demand for “accountability” by legislators, governing boards, students and taxpayers makes evident the shift in power toward the consumers of higher education. We should acknowledge that a call for the dismantling of the tenure system is likely to accompany this shift.
The dismantling of the tenure system would irreparably damage American colleges and universities, for it would enable consumers to control the directions of scholarly inquiry, the publication of research, the content of courses, and hiring practices. It would thereby inhibit the formation of controversial ideas and the criticism of the status quo. It would harm the whole of American society by weakening one of its productive components, the academy. In an interdependent system the health of any one component affects the health of the whole. Finally, it would undermine our country’s intellectual authority in the world.
We can make a holistic argument for the preservation of tenure in the new environment: that our society must protect its academic scholars from control by consumers in order that the scholars--scientists and humanists--may engage fully both in the solution of the world’s problems and in the creation of new knowledge. In other words, it is because of the value of cooperative relationships between an intellectually vigorous professoriate and our society’s non-academic components that academic freedom must be ensured. Tenure guarantees--as much as is possible--the leadership of academic thinkers in our consumer culture.
In short, in the user-inspired paradigm, while academic researchers may be inspired by the uses to which our research may be put we must keep from falling under the control of the users.
As we make this argument, and others, on behalf of tenure, we faculty should explore fully the implications of the user-inspired paradigm for our various disciplines to determine whether we need to create institutional or discipline-specific protocols appropriate to the new paradigm. Whether or not as individual members of the academic community we like the paradigm, we will not be able to escape it.
Betty Jean Craige is University Professor of Comparative Literature and director of the Center for Humanities and Arts at UGA.
The Center for Humanities and Arts will sponsor a “Provocative Conversation” on the user-inspired research paradigm, moderated by Brahm Verma, at 4 p.m. on Oct. 19. The location will be announced later.
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