Last week, two tenur
ed faculty members in the Cognitive Science department of the University of Lousiana at Lafayette received termination notices. They have two years to find new jobs, and if they don’t find other employment, then the university has promised to try to employ them in non-tenured positions in other departments in which they are qualified to teach.
Here is a link to a news story about this: The Advertiser Article. The article does not say who the two faculty members are, and it seems that the university is trying to maintain a degree of privacy concerning their identity. However, in case you are curious, here is a link to Cognitive Science at UL.
For me, this is interesting for a number of reasons. During my last year at Rice, as I was finishing up my Ph.D., I was invited to interview at UL. Only it wasn’t called UL at the time, it was called USL and, in French, l’Université des Acadiens. This was a big opportunity for me, because my plan was to go into ape language studies, and USL also ran the New Iberia Primate Center, a 48 acre facility that houses one of the world’s largest non-human primate breeding colonies.
I had already outlined the program of research that I wanted to embark on with chimpanzees and literacy, but I did not have a chimpanzee of my own, and I did not see how I ever would acquire one, at the time, so the opportunity to work in cognitive science at USL would have been a very good step toward achieving my research goals.
I was being interviewed by the English Department, and they were considering a number of my qualifications: I could teach linguistics, French, and Creative Writing as well as cognitive science. Louisiana has a very rich history, and as a writer I would have had access to a lot of historical documents if hired there, which when I am writing today I have to scrounge around for online.
Being hired there would have been wonderful for me on so many levels, but it just didn’t happen. I gave a job talk, I got a tour of the New Iberia Primate Center, and I was taken out to dinner. But no job offer emerged from all that. Sometimes that’s just how it is.
If we are determined, we make our dreams come true no matter what the setbacks, and even though it did mean a delay of several years for me, I did eventually start Project Bow, without any kind of institutional support.
What do you think? Should the tenured faculty have been terminated? According to the article, there are only fourteen students enrolled in the Cognitive Science program, and the university stopped enrolling new students into the program after the fall of 2010.
I used to be a big supporter of tenure, but frankly that was when I thought that I would have the opportunity to become tenured myself. I agree with the commenter who said that if tenured faculty can be terminated and then offered non-tenured positions, then tenure really doesn’t mean anything.
I disagree, on the other hand, with all those commenters who said that people who have tenure deserve it because they worked hard. Everybody works hard. Bricklayers work hard, and they don’t get tenure. Garbage men work hard, and they don’t get tenure. Independent ape language researchers with no salary also work hard, and they don’t get tenure. So, no, working hard is not a significant criterion.
Some others said that those people who educate the public deserve tenure. But that’s nonsense, too. Many of the world’s best educators, including parents who home school, do not have tenure.
Was there ever a good reason for tenure? Yes, I think there was at one time. But the reason was supposed to be to allow independent thinkers the opportunity to do research and to share their findings, no matter how controversial those findings happened to be. People with tenure were supposed to be guaranteed freedom of speech, whereas the average working stiff was not, because it was assumed that they would have something really important to say.
Do today’s academicians share important new findings with the world? Are the ones who are hired doing the cutting edge research? Or are they just maintaining society’s biases by being excellent teachers of yesterday’s received knowledge? How many of those cognitive scientists are actually working on solving a real problem in cognitive science?
I don’t really know. I just know I’m glad I didn’t get that job, because I think they would never have allowed me to do what I have done on my own with Bow. Being hired would have been a financial and social godsend, but it would probably have retarded my progress.
It would be good for scientists to have an ivory tower to retire to where politics doesn’t play a role. But in order to do that, the ivory tower cannot be funded by the public. If the public is involved, then the public gets a vote.
The academic world is not immune from the ups and downs of the marketplace. Many academicians vote liberal, if for no other reason than because it means more funding for education. But when the state goes bankrupt, due to burdening the economy to the point where it can no longer support the bloated academic institutions, then even academicians feel the pain.
Is it right to stop a research program just because you don’t have enough students enrolled? No, if it’s a good research program, that would be a shame. But in that case, you need independent funding, and you need to stop fooling the public into thinking you will give them valuable diplomas so they can get jobs in return for their tax dollars. The economy doesn’t work that way. It never did!
© 2011 Aya Katz
This is reality Aya. In some colleges and university, the number of enrollment determines the life of the department and research program. In a tight economy, even academic institutions are badly hit.
I can feel for the two tenured profs here. If their income depends on it, it is disheartening.
I hope that you continue with what you have in your heart. Bow project sort of those things. Good luck.
Tenure does not protect academic programs only faculty within those programs. I presume the ones who are terminated are those whose only affiliation is conitive
science. (Not psychology or computer science.) What are they doing? You could look them up on Google Scholar.
Here are the works of Mike Kalish, for example:
http://scholar.google.es/scholar?q=mike+kalish&hl=es&btnG=Buscar&lr=
Nets, I can tell by your search results that you are using a Spanish speaking search engine.
For that matter, the publication list for each of the faculty member is also available on their webpage. Here is the one for Michele Feist:
http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~mif8232/publications.html
Maita, yes, you are right. When funding is cut off at the departmental level, the positions of the members of the department are apparently also at risk. This would tend to make it seem safer to be an “at large” faculty member, if there is such a thing, as then only when the entire university collapses would one lose one’s job.
And as Nets correctly pointed out, by means of this information, it is possible to pinpoint exactly which two faculty members have lost their jobs.
I think that when our sympathy goes out to them, we should be most concerned that their contribution to science not be lost because of this, rather than worrying about loss of income. There are many ways to make up that income, but most of them don’t involve doing research.
I am a liberal, but one thing I never agreed with was tenure. There are a few teachers that deserve it, but I do not think all deserve it.
Sweetbearies, tenure was not really meant to be a reward for good teaching. It was supposed to be a way to protect scientists from political pressure to conform to accepted doctrine. But you are right that tenure could not possibly be something that everyone should have. It can work only if it is accorded to a very few.
The institution of tenure may be outliving its usefulness. I think its purpose was to offer professors something in lieu of a generous salary – something most colleges were not prepared to provide – and to attempt to shackle talent to the institution so that a college could benefit from the reputation of that talent. In this economy, salary and benefits are probably sufficient to do the same job.
Tom, I’ll have to disagree with you on that. Tenure is not interchangeable with salary. There are different kinds of people, and a high salary is a good motivator for some, but not for others.
There are those who would do anything, if the fee were high enough. They work very hard, but the motivation for their work is external, and they always think of how they will spend the money that they earn. Stop paying them the salary, and they will stop working. Pay them a lot, and they will work hard. The work itself is not their main source of pleasure.
Others are subject to internal motivation. They are like the caged bird who sings, not for his supper, but because he must. They have an internal compulsion that directs their work. Universities used to identify which people were like that, and they would reward them by giving them a place where they could work freely, without having others direct or circumscribe or hinder the progress of their work. These are the people who would continue to work without pay, as I do here at Project Bow. (Do I try to find funding for my work? Sure, but if we have less money, we eat less. We don’t close the project.)
Many cognitive scientists in ape language studies are like this. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh gave up a tenured position so that she could continue working with her bonobos. It was a tough call, because she had to give up security and a chance to direct her own work in order to venture into the private sector, where bosses tend to tell employees exactly what to do. She did this, because it was the only way to continue her research.
Universities can’t take away the job of a tenured faculty member in a department that has not gone defunct, but they can close the research program based on lack of funding. Sally Boysen is tenured, but her research subjects were taken away from her by stealth at night, and many died on a forced journey. I’m sure she would rather have them back, if she could, and would give up a lot to be with them.
Those of us who love our work do not think that tenure is a substitute for a big salary. We used to think that it was a guarantee that we could continue with our work unmolested, even if we had enemies and even if what we worked on was not popular.
And just so you know, in the sciences academic salaries are actually very high these days — much more than the average person could ever hope to earn in the private sector. This is not necessarily a good thing. It has a corrupting effect: people who would do anything for money are now becoming academicians. The people with internal motivation are sometimes left out in the cold.
Tenure is a promise, and it should be kept. Career descriptions and duties should have been adjusted to accommodate that promise.
Suzanne, it’s not a promise that can be kept if the whole institution crumbles, and apparently it’s a promise that is made not by the university as a whole, but by a particular department in the university. When that department no longer exists, its promises aren’t worth much. This is something to keep in mind when receiving empty promises from bankrupt individuals, business entities and even governments.
Someone can promise you the world, but if he hasn’t conquered the world, then the world is not yours — nor his to give.