The news out of Kansas is bad. As The Chronicle’s Emma Pettit explains, as of last week, “the state’s six public universities can more expeditiously suspend and fire employees, including tenured faculty members.” And that’s without declaring a state of financial exigency, which is typically the requisite condition for getting rid of tenured faculty members.
Right now, the University of Kansas in Lawrence is the only one of the six universities in the Kansas system not to rule out adopting the measure. Ani Kokobobo, who teaches Slavic literature and languages at the Lawrence campus, describes the fear and anger on the ground. Even more afraid than the newly vulnerable tenured faculty are the staff, as Kokobobo explains: “When faculty members like me speak up, staff members rush to thank us — they often do not feel they could speak openly without risking their jobs.” When even tenure is no good, what protection does anyone else have?
The Kansas calamity, hastened by Covid-19, might be a testing ground for a question Ed Burmila asked last summer: “Are there enough academic workers with a stake in the tenure system left to defend it?” Tenure has never been merely a form of job protection, but if it’s not at least that, it’s hard to know what other ends it can serve. Last year, before anyone had ever heard of Covid-19, Georgetown’s Greg Afinogenov argued presciently: “As the status of faculty members moves closer to that of other service employees … we need to follow their example and rebuild our power from below. Tenured-faculty work may, in the process, come to look very different — more like the job protections enjoyed by the vast majority of unionized public-school teachers than like the exclusive club of today’s academe.”
We’ll see what happens.
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February 01, 2021 at 09:31PM
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Review: What's the Matter With Kansas? - The Chronicle of Higher Education
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