Vocationalism, academic freedom and tenure ...

In this article on Vocationalism, Academic Freedom and Tenure, Stanley Fish engages Naomi Schaefer Riley's new book, The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won't Get The College Education You Pay For. Both the article and the book are about the growth of the "vocational" approach in higher education and what it means for tenure. Fish recounts Riley's argument against tenure - that more and more instructors are teaching in fields that don't need tenure and that much of the research protected by tenure is not relevant (to obscure and unimportant) or represents in fact a political agenda (generally leftist, social-justice oriented) and not the free, open-ended scientific discovery that tenure was originally designed to protect. While Riley argues the conclusion that tenure is obsolete - especially in the humanities where there are simply too few "new" things to discover to justify all that PhD research - Fish concludes ...

... that colleges and universities should stop moving in those directions — toward relevance, bottom-line contributions and social justice — and go back to a future in which academic inquiry is its own justification.

Whoever is right about what should be done, we can all see the decline of tenure and even committed, long-term, full-time employment in academia right before our eyes. So faced with one-year teaching contracts and fellowships, three-year contracts, one-term adjuncting, research grants, etc., what do we do?

For humanities people at least, those non-vocational, open-ended, big questions that used to justify tenure are, as it turns out, also often the most fun to teach. Will they be among the things that students might come to "UnFaculty" instructors for - things like literature, art and history? Those are the things, the mastery of which at the BA level also statistically translates into success in practical areas (as liberal arts BAs tend to do better in their careers than people with business degrees). But maybe we can sell those benefits, in some areas at least, better than universities. They are also the things that people want to want - perhaps as typically "chic" indicators of an educated mind - for which people might want mentored study without investing the time and money to get a whole degree. Is the rise of vocationalism at the university - usually considered a catastrophe by those of us who teach humanities - perhaps also an opportunity of another kind? Overall I find the development worrying, but it might be a place to look for UnFaculty-style teaching in the future.

For some fields this will be impossible: the natural sciences for example can be taught theoretically to some extent, but at some point real learning will need an expensive lab. For other fields, there might be creative solutions.