COLUMN: Too little weight for teaching

From Mike Pereira's, "Vox", Fall '98 From Mike Pereira's, "Vox", Fall '98In retrospect, man has not always sought truth through the most efficacious means. Confronted with novelty, method more often seeks to discover its own premises than to brave the disorder of revolutionary thought. The Spanish Inquisition, witch-dunkings in America, kangaroo courts, show trials and such all produced aberrant realities in the name of an abstract, perverted good. Today we have a different, homologous organ in society -- method institutionalized in the liberal form of bureaucracy. Fatalities are few, but lives are diffused into the bland, taupe space of a cubicle. Truth, too, is lost in context. Denying tenure to Political Science Professor Dan Deudney was an obvious and embarrassing mistake on the part of the University. Now Deudney has announced that he will leave at the close of this semester, and in his wake, questions remain concerning a process at once necessary and misguided. Who does tenure benefit? What are the emphases of learning and p_dagogy? And, more fundamentally, what is the purpose of a University? We should ask these questions both empirically and ideally, assessing ourselves in light of what we could and should be. Does the structure of tenure aim to benefit students? Administrators would say yes, based on the following sophism: published professors are necessarily good teachers (and hence the converse: professors yet to publish are "not good"); renowned professors are better educators; this is a research university and research reflects quality in a professor; etc., etc. Any honest professor, though, will tell you that research and teaching are two very distinct pursuits; research is necessary for teaching, but effective p_dagogy does not necessarily follow from massive publishing. Remember who collected Hegel's lectures on history -- his students. Deudney's courses have consistently been among the most popular in the Political Science Department, and students hold him in the highest regard. Yet student support, no matter how vocal, still plays a disproportionately small role in tenure decisions. The structure of determining tenure not only minimizes the student, it overlooks her completely. Process is a deaf inquisitor. It also effectively cancels any input from a professor's best-informed critics, his colleagues in the department and the college more generally. Support for Deudney is virtually unanimous in the Political Science Department. He is considered among the most incisive minds in the field, and in 1996 won the Lindback Award, the top School of Arts and Sciences award for teaching. Deudney's tenure road block thus comes not from those who understand his thinking or those enriched by his teaching -- but rather from a group far removed from the immediacy of his efforts. He was denied tenure by the Provost's Staff Conference -- the third and final stage of the process, including the deans of all the schools at the University. On what criteria, then, are tenure decisions based? The broad, ostensible answer is publishing. Publish or perish. And yes, Deudney has published, winning the Best Article Award from the American Political Science Review in 1995. But the will to publish is also a quantitative mandate, demanding reams of academicspeak, lavishly footnoted in obscure journals. Tenure wants quantity over and above quality in publishing. And Deudney has that too, a rumored arsenal of six or more thick manuscripts awaiting a fertile moment to appear on the world historical stage. Political Science cannot be sacrificed to political expediency, yet that rush is precisely what tenure demands. Faster, America, faster. Bureaucracy understands reified commodities, print capital as opposed to abstract ideas. Professors become their unread texts before the Law. Tonsured and beetle-browed in back rooms, the tenure committee deliberates personhood by proxy. In short, the technology of production replaces human qualities. When a professor refuses to disseminate himself in the normal medium, he divorces himself from industry standards. He has no brand name. Printlessness amounts to a departure from routine in the staid, sanitized space of Academe. Non-normalcy is a no-no. A professor without books is still becoming what he is. And the University wants completed subjects, malleable bodies. Anything without administrative jurisdiction might endanger their hegemony. Deudney stands outside that stern economy of production, for now. But he also has capital at his disposal, ready for transformation at any given time. He has been offered better positions at other schools, where he will be able to research and publish under the fertile aegis of almost-certain tenure. Yes, Deudney will have the last laugh, while Penn leaves itself in the lurch, less one great mind. He will be born posthumously on this campus, a distant name emerging into history, perhaps in the company of past casualties of tenure: George Boyajian (1995), Gregg Camfield (1996), Edward Bruer (1997). If the many complain, administrators may reform Penn's tenure practice. Or maybe not. Their ways our not our ways. Their practice moves slowly and ceaselessly and always inscrutably. As Hobbes said, every actual state is corrupt.