The eroding tenure system in higher education must be strengthened if academic freedom at colleges and universities is going to survive, a leading authority on the topic said Oct. 30 during the Davis, Markert, and Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom.
Henry F. Reichman, chair of the American Association of University Professors Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, said the decline of tenure and the “explosive expansion of contingent, frequently part-time faculty employment” are the biggest threats to academic freedom.
The annual lecture presented by U-M’s Faculty Senate is named for three faculty members who were punished for refusing to testify before a congressional committee about their political beliefs.
“The experiences of Chandler Davis, Clement Markert and Mark Nickerson should remind us that academic freedom has never enjoyed the golden age that some suggest we’re leaving behind. It has always been … contested and vulnerable,” Reichman said in his lecture in Hutchins Hall.
But he also warned, “Today, threats to academic freedom may be more extensive and dangerous than any time since those dark days of the 1950s.”
Reichman said a majority of all non-management university workers are employed on a part-time, temporary or contingent basis. Including graduate student instructors, about three-fourths of all higher education teachers are employed off the tenure track, he said, compared with about one-fourth decades ago.
Research has shown that an overreliance on short-term or part-time adjunct faculty can negatively impact students, Reichman said. He also said it weakens tenured faculty’s voice in shared governance.
To illustrate their vulnerability, Reichman offered examples of non-tenured instructors at various institutions being punished for, among other things, voicing concerns or sharing unpopular opinions.
Reichman went on to say that adjunct employment not only threatens the first and primary purpose of tenure — the defense of academic freedom — but it also offers limited economic security. Part-time faculty are paid about 60 percent less per hour than comparable, full-time, tenure-track faculty, he said.
He noted that a Marquette University teaching assistant turned to Medicaid and a GoFundMe page to finance treatment of his enlarged spleen after his university dropped health insurance for part-time instructors.
“We repeatedly hear tales of adjuncts on food stamps, sleeping in cars or even dying of medical conditions that might have been prevented with the benefits of a full-time, permanent position,” he said.
Reichman also offered some possible solutions, including unionization. He said over the last decade, a major push, largely by the Service Employees International Union, to organize non-tenure track faculty has gained considerable momentum in both public and private institutions.
“These efforts have borne fruit in major improvements to adjunct salary, benefits and, most relevant to academic freedom, job security,” he said.
Davis was among the lecture’s attendees. He, Markert and Nickerson were called in 1954 to testify before a panel of the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. All three invoked their constitutional rights and refused to answer questions about their political associations.
The men were suspended from U-M. Davis and Nickerson were fired. Markert was retained but censured, and left the university soon afterward.
Reichman, a professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay, closed his lecture by saying the fight to expand the reach of tenure — and in turn defend academic freedom — needs to involve both tenured and non-tenured instructors.
He said the profession as a whole is more vulnerable to shifting political winds today than it has been in some time.
“Nevertheless, our predecessors succeeded in the face of daunting challenges, and so can we,” he said. “If we are to avoid another era like that in which Chandler Davis, Clement Markert and Mark Nickerson saw their rights to academic freedom and free speech violated so callously, we had better get to work.”
