Tenure

I'm not sure how I feel about academic tenure anymore. Mark Taylor from Columbia, the guy who wrote that Op Ed in the Times, "End the University as we Know It," makes many good points about, among other things, the disconnect between the institution of tenure and what it's ostensibly supposed to do.

On the other hand, most critics of higher education, especially now, have a ridiculous and blinkered sense of what a university professor does. We're filthy rich layabouts who justify our existence by publishing worthless shit that no one will ever read. We're out-of-touch elites corrupting the country's youth, etc. On the less ideological side, I'm really tired of explaining what I actually do and why to my family and to strangers who, possibly out of recession stress, feel more and more inclined to disparage my profession to my face. Teaching is 40% of my job description, and more like 70% of my actual work. For every hour of class time I spend from six to eight support hours -- planning, reading, advising, supervising graduate students, etc. Another twenty percent of my job (the description is more accurate here) is helping the department, college and university run, in small, committee-based, and mostly democratic ways: at the moment, that's supervising paperwork for new courses, advising the faculty senate on salary and benefits issues in the wake of the bone-cutting state budgetary crisis, planning the course rotation for my department, recruiting visiting scholars, advising the department chair on scheduling issues, consider me some sort of parasite, working four hours a week, taking summers off, making obscene money while real workers can't get jobs.