The erosion of academic tenure in the U.S. and its ties to public neoliberal anti-intellectualism
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2977
This essay examines the erosion of tenure in the U.S. academy and its connections to the spread of neoliberal capitalist ideology in U.S. colleges and universities. It also explores how this affects anthropology departments since only a small part of anthropology is ever considered part of the STEM fields.
application/pdf
2239-625X
2977
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Virginia R. Dominguez
Anuac
The erosion of academic tenure in the U.S. and its ties to public neoliberal anti-intellectualism
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
6
Forum: Anthropologists Witnessing and Reshaping the Neoliberal Academy
2017-07-18
2017-06-27
2017-07-17
2017-07-18
29-34
1
Virginia R. Dominguez
2017/07/18
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2977
29
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, United States
2239-625X
1
en
34
The erosion of academic tenure in the U.S. and its ties to public neoliberal anti-intellectualism
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/2977/2595
6
                                                  2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 29-34




                                                                                              FORUM




Student demonstration against fees and cuts, Aberdeen. Credits: http://anticuts.com/wp-content/uploads /
2015/07/ Aberdeen-student-left-banner.jpg


Anthropologists witnessing and reshaping the neoliberal academy
Edited by
Tracey HEATHERINGTON & Filippo M. ZERILLI

Contributions of
Virginia R. DOMINGUEZ, Sam BECK, Carl A. MAIDA, Martin A. MILLS, Berardino
PALUMBO, Alan SMART, Ger DUIJZINGS, Alexis M. JORDAN & Shaheen M. CHRISTIE,
Boone W. SHEAR, Alex KOENSLER & Cristina PAPA, THE RECLAIMING OUR UNIVERSITY
MOVEMENT.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © VIRGINIA R. DOMINGUEZ
ANTHROPOLOGISTS WITNESSING AND RESHAPING THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY                            29




The erosion of academic tenure in the U.S.
And its ties to public neoliberal anti-intellectualism

Virginia R. DOMINGUEZ
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign




ABSTRACT: This essay examines the erosion of tenure in the U.S. academy and its connections
to the spread of neoliberal capitalist ideology in U.S. colleges and universities. It also
explores how this affects anthropology departments since only a small part of anthropology
is ever considered part of the STEM fields.




   I write as someone with experience at several U.S. universities but also as
past president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). And I
write as someone who has held visiting positions of different kinds at
universities in Israel, Hungary, England, France, Italy, South Africa, and
Japan. My concerns here are primarily, but not exclusively, about what is
happening to higher education in the U.S.
   Change is not necessarily bad, of course. There were only four tenured
women on the Yale faculty when I began there as an undergraduate, and
there are many more now (though still not parity with men). And witness
that Yale was for years a bastion of elite families who sent their children to
exclusive private schools before they went on to Yale. It was only in the mid-
sixties that starting Yale Freshmen classes consisted of more students from
public high schools than private high schools. Change can be good. It can be
fast or slow, but it can still be good.
   The question, of course, is what kind of change we want, what kind of
change we are seeing, and what kind of impact that change is having. For
years I was probably too focused on my own career to notice, even when I got
involved in university administration and politics, as I quickly did at Duke. I
worried then about whether I would ever get tenure and whether my whole
academic generation would. I envied earlier U.S. generations that had
seemingly gotten professorial jobs and promotions with less scholarly

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30                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


accomplishments than were apparently required of my academic generation.
I thought and said that tenure should be abolished, even though I knew why
it had been instituted in the first place (to avoid political appointments and
firings on political, rather than intellectual, grounds). But, as years have
passed and I have experienced tenured faculty positions at Duke, the
University of California-Santa Cruz, the University of Iowa, and the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and had deep exposure to a wide
variety of institutions in the U.S. through my AAA presidency, I have
reevaluated tenure, worried about its erosion, noticed the rise of STEM fields
in the academy (science, technology, engineering, and math) and its
connections to increasing privatization, and experienced what I can only
describe as growing anti-intellectualism in the public at large. In sum, I now
worry deeply about higher education and perhaps especially about the
research university.

Tenure and its erosion
   The importance of tenure at U.S. universities is that it was designed to
protect scholars from interventions – and frankly witch hunts – that had
nothing to do with developments in their disciplines. Tenure still depends on
other members of one’s profession considering someone’s teaching and
research work valuable and substantial, and it can also depend on academics
outside one’s field passing judgment, as is the case with Promotion and
Tenure Committees, Associate Provosts and Provosts, Chancellors and
Presidents of U.S. universities. So people still make decisions and those
decisions are not always by people knowledgeable enough to make those
decisions, but for a number of decades institutions insisted on keeping
politics out of university appointments and promotions. At times people
have forgotten the value of tenure and the usefulness of tenure, and at times
(such as during the McCarthy Era in the U.S. in the 1950s) people have
valued it and cherished it.
   But we are now undoubtedly witnessing the erosion of the tenure system
at U.S. institutions of higher education. There was a time when faculty
retirements and departures meant that a department would keep the line
and search for a replacement. That has been less and less the case since my
years at Duke in the 1980s. Increasingly, though not suddenly, faculty lines
revert to central administration (sometimes to deans and sometimes to
committees at that level or higher). And again increasingly, though not
suddenly, allocation of those lines depends on enrollment in a department’s


2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 29-34
ANTHROPOLOGISTS WITNESSING AND RESHAPING THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY                            31


courses, some formula that takes into account how much external money a
department brings to the campus, or some mix of reputational or statistical
rankings of a whole department, its faculty members, and even its
(post)graduate students. And when a department shrinks in size, like my
current department, administration responds by “allowing” the department
to hire people to teach but not in tenurable positions.
   I first saw this at Duke, but thought it was particular to the performing
arts or the clinical medical sciences. People in those fields were given non-
tenurable positions, in effect, making them “less valued” faculty members. At
some point in the 1980s Duke instituted and regularized faculty lines for
those faculty members, something I saw developed further in the early 1990s
at the University of California-Santa Cruz. The UCSC system specified the
number of courses those colleagues were required to teach (always more
than the rest of us) and the duties (such as research and student advising)
they were not allowed to do or, if they did them, the system would not allow
them to be counted in any evaluation or possible promotion.
   These were the days before the expansion of post-doctoral positions,
something I have seen increasingly in Europe and the U.S. over the past two
decades. Now we have more and more “postdocs” and more of them require
some teaching. As I look at my own department here at UIUC, I see more
people offering courses in different kinds of contingent faculty positions and
the balance of those faculty members and those of us in tenured or tenure-
line positions shifting. There are indeed so many non-tenurable people on
our campus that central administration has had to operationalize the various
existing titles, define their duties, and spread this information to
departments when they have such people teaching regular courses. At the
moment, for example, my own department has 6 such colleagues teaching –
all women – 6 others listed in various capacities (but not really teaching),
and 25 tenured or tenureable faculty. When I first came 10 years ago, the
department had 30 or 31 FTEs (tenured or tenurable faculty lines) and only 1
or 2 were in non-tenurable positions.

Money, privatization, and its rhetoric
  There is, not surprisingly, much talk about cuts and how to handle them.
For years all universities I have known well, especially the large U.S. research
universities belonging to the “Big Ten,” have been delighted when colleagues
have gotten grants from outside their university. Indeed there has been
pressure to get those grants, and not every central administrator has fully
understood how that privileges people in STEM disciplines. David Skorton,

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32                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


now Secretary of the Smithsonian but 15-20 years ago first Vice President for
Research and then President of the University of Iowa, did understand this
despite being a Professor of Medicine before becoming a high-level
administrator there. He used money from patents and big-time grants in the
natural, biological, and physical sciences to help underwrite Iowa programs
in the Humanities and softer Social Sciences and Area Studies programs. But
I have seen little of that here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign at least in the past 10 years.
   The pressure to bring in outside money is great, the rhetoric shows up in
hiring promotion, tenure, and marketing practices of this university, and the
parts of the university (or even of anthropology departments) that do get
those external funds are the parts that are being allowed to grow. This is
especially the case now that the governor of this State (Governor Rauner) has
de facto downsized state support for public Illinois universities, including
UIUC, its long-standing flagship institution. We are now very close to the end
of a second year without any regular state funding because the governor and
his opposition in the state legislature remain locked in a seemingly endless
battle over the state’s allocation to higher education and service organiza-
tions. As a result, there is more talk than ever before of a financial crisis and
of needed cuts, even more than when we had to take unpaid furlough days
during one of my two years as AAA President. Our salaries are being paid out
of university reserves, so it is no surprise that the university is constantly
looking for new money to bring in. The problem is that it simultaneously
then favors fields seen by the federal government, private corporations, and
big-time donors as useful and valuable enough to serve the country’s
economy and labor needs, and it makes it harder to say no to them when
they come calling – demanding things from research on topics they care
about, admission of particular students to programs and schools, and a say in
who the university hires and fires.
   So, it is simply not true that there is no money. There appears to be less
money outside the STEM fields, but huge amounts of money are sought and
spent on large and potentially income-generating new hires and their
specialties and projects. There is clearly a prioritization of people and
projects that can bring to a U.S. college or university outside money,
especially money from large sources, including (and at times especially
targeting) large corporations in science, technology, medicine, and
engineering.



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ANTHROPOLOGISTS WITNESSING AND RESHAPING THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY                            33


Repercussions
   Several things are making this possible, and one of them is public anti-
intellectualism. Perhaps this is not totally new in the U.S. but I remember
how shocked I was when in the mid-late 1990s – and while at the University
of Iowa – I had to fill out a form one week about time I spent working, and all
because one vocal critic of state universities in Iowa kept complaining that U
of Iowa faculty members only worked 6 hours a week (because in each course
students and faculty members are in the classroom for 3 hours a week and
the unit norm for faculty in the humanities and social sciences was two
courses each semester). To counter this bad image, Iowa’s central
administrators wanted to collect hard data about the time Iowa faculty
worked in their triple roles as teachers, researchers, and administrators. As I
recall, the university presented the press with data showing that the average
number of hours Iowa faculty worked each week was ca. 57. And I wondered
who actually worked as little as that, since I knew what I worked and saw my
colleagues doing about the same.
   But I think I was wrong to be shocked. Increasingly our students and their
parents worry about them getting jobs, and many of our undergraduates
double-major in order to have one major they and their parents consider
practical. Periodically some public figure mocks anthropology as useless.
This happened earlier in this decade when Governor Scott of the State of
Florida publicly named anthropology as a useless college major, despite U.S.
federal government agencies identifying anthropology as one of the
professions for which there will be many jobs in the near future. I mentioned
this in my 2011 AAA Presidential Address (published in 2012) and Bonnie
Urciuoli has been writing about the hidden, creeping manifestation of
neoliberal economics in the rhetoric of U.S. colleges and universities for
some years (e.g. 2014). At first I thought she was reading something into it
that I didn’t see, but I was wrong. She is right to identify (and rail against) all
the talk about skills in courses, college marketing, and curricula. I see it more
and more. Students are supposed to acquire skills in college so they can
adapt them, use them, and have them after college when they go to work in
government or the private sector. Being curious, developing sharpness as
critics and readers, and becoming well-rounded citizens is apparently no
longer enough. Simply knowing things is clearly not valued enough.




                                                 2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 29-34
34                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)




REFERENCES

Dominguez, Virginia R., 2012, Comfort Zones and Their Dangers: Who Are We? Qui
     Sommes-Nous?, The 2011 AAA Presidential Address, American Anthropologist,
     114, 3: 394-405.
Urciuoli, Bonnie, 2014, The Semiotic Production of the Good Student: A Peircian
     Look at the Commodification of Liberal Arts Education, Signs and Society, 2, 1:
     56-83.




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