MURDEROUS TENURE: AMY BISHOP

She may have been, she may be, a kook, have lactose problems, have shot her brother or not, the two hard facts are: that Prof. Bishop killed several of her colleagues and that she had been denied tenure. I am not much interested in the killing itself -- Amy Bishop is far from being unique in wanting to kill the departmental colleagues who refused her tenure -- but the whole question of tenure is one that sorely need re-thinking.

I take it as stipulated that tenure at the university level -- dreamt up decades ago to protect the market place of ideas and to protect a teacher's right to utter unpopular opinions -- has long been little more than a guarantee of lifetime employment for professors, regardless of the quality of their teaching, their research or their contribution to the education of the young. And I would further stipulate (from long experience in university teaching) that the first thought of the members of any departmental committee engaged in assessing a colleague's suitability for tenure is, how would granting tenure to X affect me. One might accept a brilliant young man or woman as an instructor or even an Assistant Professor -- such people don't take much of the budget -- but as a colleague for life?

The process is slow, it is laborious -- department, provost, president, trustees -- and much more likely to reflect mediocrity than to promote excellence. As we know from the electorate at large, like favors like: women will vote for women, minorities for minorities, and dullards for dullards. The last thing any university department wants is someone who will rock their cozy craft. A productive scholar is an implicit criticism of the unproductive; a reputation outside the department arouses envy.

In the most recent case I can recall, a composer of genuine musicality, much loved by his students, much performed outside of the university's own concert halls, was denied tenure for fourteen years. The composers on his committee all, save one, knew their own talents were more modest; the candidate did not fit the kind of music which forms the current (outdated) orthodoxy of composition classes. The musicologist member thought the matter through and saw that more students were now studying to be composers than considering such arcanae as the manuscripts of seventeenth century Spaniards. The teachers of various instruments wondered whether a composer might upset the way in which they recruited profitable paying students from Taiwan, and so on down the line.

University departments are now, as the nation is, a set of interests. They are like Greek civil servants: better the country should flounder than take a cut in pay.

I don't offer this as a pretext for Professor Bishop's acts, nor is it necessarily so that she was unfairly denied tenure. I merely suggest that the criteria for the granting of tenure are so arbitrary and the results so obviously damaging to education, that perhaps the system out to be scrapped. Unless this is done, dumbing down, useless publications, PhD mills, plodders reading their one text year after year, our universities will continue to decline into the high schools they have become, the talent pool of our universities will fail to be steadily enriched, and the young faculty be forced to conform to the prevailing opinion of their seniors rather than infuse their students with the love of learning that is the only justification for the existence of universities.

STATE OF THE DISUNION

The man -- his smile, his rhetoric, his ease, his obvious superiority to the ruck -- is unfair to the Union of Snake-Oil Salesmen. Selling ice-boxes to Esquimaux (or whatever we´re supposed to call them in these days) is all in a day´s work for our pesident. That is because there are Esquimaux out there. He can sell his message to the public because we are there. But the great amphitheater he daced last night is a Great Void. True, you see the Hairy One (that´s what her name means in Italian) leaping up and down with applause, but trust me, she is just an Illusion. She is not there and she certainly is not listening to the Message, somewhere in her crafty little invisible head a machine goes round and round tallying what this elegant man is saying in terms of what it means to her Job. This will advance those desperate to have an Armenian genocide, for their cyber-votes are here; that will do well with the homosexual ¨community¨ which is also part of her constituency. Oh, I can use that one against him in November says a hoary senator from the Tea Party. Yum yum say those whose legislative wages are paid by lobbyists, that´s worth a few mill. Bingo! shout within their incorporeal selves the sales reps from states with defense industries. But don´t worry. None of them are really there. They live in Elsewhere, a marvelous country populated exclusively with professional politicians. It´s what Obama says there that speaks to such souls as they have left. For is Obama not, also, the President of the PPs, a class apart?

That there is nothing worse than democracy except every other form of government is an adage tested and true, but it is irrelevant to the State of Disunion address we heard last night. Once ´elected´these people no longer have anything to do with democracy, they are a Governing Class, a classical corporate oligarchy, which deals behind doors and lives on the Free Lunch. Bit by bit, day by day, they recede from reality, devoid of meaning and any importance save to themselves. Too bad, for it was a good speech and given by an almost good man, that is: he might be entirely good were he not one of them.

To such an audience, how can one give a good speech or sell a program? If Saint Francis of Assisi, a saint mostly known for walking around shoeless and talking to the birds, appeared before the joint houses of Congress, what he said would fall into the same abyss -- Now listen, Frank, we have to stick together on this thing or you won´t have a habit to wear next time you want to convert people to your Better Life! Because what counts in PP-Land is staying there and not being exiled to America. That would be worse than the Gulag. Have you ever seen an ex-politician? What a sorry figure he cuts! Belly up, the catfish eat him rather than the other way around. Lawdy me! says Frank. Please Massa. Out there it´s Hell.

Hell it is. Even on the level of substance, the remedies offered seem pretty hokey. Take money away from the Big Banks and they´ll find out some other way to take your money and put it into their own pockets. Does the Great Leader really believe that to correct the Education Deficit in America (seven years, I calculate, from the days when I was in the Eighth Grade in Balboa, California, reading books that now puzzle Juniors and Seniors in our colleges) what is needed is a further expansion of educational opportunity, via community colleges? There was a time when a high school diploma did indeed fit you for a decent working wage, and if our high schools could be brought back to their 1939 levels, that would be a mighty reform. Like elects like is a rule in education as in government: giving more money to the best teachers would be great, if it weren´t teachers who chose them.

Quousque tandem abutere patientia nostra? flung Cicero in the court-room. For how long are we to stay patient, eh? With the Afghanistan farce? With the health care joke? It would be no bad thing, for instance, to make sure that hospital in America were not places where we get sicker. They could start with the world-famous Massachusetts General, whose general filth is not far off that available in Somalia. But will that happen? One thing our president got right: he knows that we know what´s wrong with our disunion. That´s visible and palpable to million upon million of us. As it is visible and palpable that nothing that is said in PP-Land is real. You can´t sue them, it costs a fortune to join them, and whatever we do, so long as PPs exist, nothing, nada, will change.

Should Scientists Study History and Geography?

One of the advantages of a national system of education is the kind of public debate that ensues when 'reforms' to the existing system are proposed. The current ministry of education in France has proposed that teaching history and geography in the last two years of the lycees, devoted to preparation for the famous bac which enables students to enter universities, be eliminated for those in the technical/scientific specialization. The protests, led by Alain Finkelkraut, have aroused the usual French passion for abstract debate.

In its simplest form, the question is, do scientists need these subjects for their professional goals, or would they be better off with more science and less history and geography? We have no comparable debate here: first because the curricula are determined locally by professional 'educationalists', and second because we have long ago eliminated geography in our school systems, and basically scant history. The result has been a nation with only the vaguest notion of geography in the broad sense -- that is, not merely where things are located but of the consequences of such locations. As mathematics and music are languages, almost all human activity involves mapping, from the templates of word-processing to the geography of the human mind.

I was wont to give my students at Boston University a blank map of the world. Three out of twenty managed to place France off the coast of Japan. That would not have happened thirty or forty years ago. Similarly, my eighth grade class in Balboa, California, in 1939 used the same European history textbook as is still used, only now at the Junior/Senior level at university: a net loss of seven years.

I don't think scientists need to know history and geography to be better scientists; I believe they need to know both in order to be better people. We need far more knowledge of the past in order to act prudently in the present and for the future; and our lack of knowledge of how geography and mapping work in our minds in relating one element to another is like not knowing how to co-ordinate hand and eye in hitting a ball.