Jennie Rothenberg Gritz of The Atlantic interviews Andrew Hacker about what’s wrong with the American university system:
Are you against the idea of faculty research altogether, or do you think some research deserves to be funded by universities?
The problem is that there are just too many publications and too many people publishing. This is true even in the hard sciences. If there’s a research project on genetics in a lab, they will take certain findings and break them into eight different articles just so each researcher can get more stuff on his or her resume.
And many of the publications are too long. A book on Virginia Woolf could be a 30-page article. Somebody did a count of how many publications had been written on Virginia Woolf in the past 15 years. The answer is several thousand. Really? Who needs this? But it’s awfully difficult to say, “Here’s knowledge we don’t need!” It sounds like book burning, doesn’t it? What we’d say is that on the scale of priorities, we find undergraduate teaching to be more important than all the research being done.
But what about lifesaving research — for example, finding a cure for cancer?
How much really valuable research is being done on cancer? When I was at Cornell, Congress announced that they were going to pour a lot of money into cancer research. So a memo went out to the Cornell professors — not just in the sciences, mind you — saying, “Can you take your current research and cancerize it?” There’s a lot of that going on. So sociology professors decided to research cancer communications, and so on.
And then there’s the whole issue of sabbaticals. Right now, about half a million academics — assistant, associate, and full professors — are eligible for sabbaticals. At Harvard and Yale, senior professors get every third year off, not every seventh. This coming year — are you ready for this? — 20 of the 48 professors in Harvard’s history department will be on leave. They’re expected to take that time away and have a publication come out of it. Even if a professor goes off to Tuscany, he says, “I’m taking my manuscript with me and revising it there.” We don’t need that many new publications. We absolutely don’t.
A lot of the pressure to publish is tied in with the pressure to earn tenure. You argue that tenure actually doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do — it doesn’t preserve academic freedom.
Here’s what happens. Academics typically don’t get tenured until the age of 40. This means that from their years as graduate students and then assistant professors, from age 25 through 38 or 39, they have to toe the line. They have to do things in the accepted way that their elders and superiors require. They can’t be controversial and all the rest. So tenure is, in fact, the enemy of spontaneity, the enemy of intellectual freedom. We’ve seen this again and again. And even people who get tenure really don’t change. They keep on following the disciplinary mode they’ve been trained to follow.
What bothers us, too, is that over 300,000 professors have it. That’s a tremendous number. What that means is these people never leave. There’s hardly any turnover in the senior ranks — not just at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford but at small colleges in Kentucky, everywhere. You go to a campus and over two thirds of the faculty have been there at least 25 years. They begin to stagnate. In many ways, they become infantilized, embroiled in ideological issues like faculty parking.
It’s an odd mix of grounded and ivory tower thinking.