Becoming Smart
I was working on the diary rescue last night and did a search on the tag tenure since I was planning on writing about tenure this morning. I discovered Tenure for professors: It is important? w/ a poll by JPete. I have not read it yet, because I want to place tenure in my own context. I will read it later, after this is written.
We are not all created equal in terms of intelligence. We know that. That's why we have words like "smart" and phrases like "dumb as a post". I know this goes against the grain and especially against one of those self-evident beliefs. That may be why there is so much resentment directed at people who display the fact that they are smart. Lots of folks understand that there are smart people, but really get offended when one of us speaks from our position as a smart person.
Our society has developed a whole scheme, called education, which has the purpose of helping people reach their full potential, to become as smart as they can be. Effort is even made to teach people how they can teach themselves, so that they can become even smarter. We do this because we think it will benefit society as a whole to have more smart people and fewer dumb people. We have even established a certification process to classify degrees of smartness.
Education has a secondary purpose: to identify which of us should be given a chance to become even smarter. Who should be allowed into college? To whom should we provide public and private funding, to assist them to attain a broader outlook or to become more knowledgeable in a specific area? And which of those smarter people should be encouraged and/or supported to pursue becoming even smarter, by going to graduate school?
Attaining a graduate degree is a rigorous process. To get a master's degree requires completing significantly difficult coursework at a minimum, and usually also the writing of a thesis or preparation of a portfolio that displays that the candidate is indeed a master in the subject. One hopes such people will continue to endeavor to actually master that subject. That was the whole point. A master should not be a state of being, but rather a state of doing.
Some of us were selected to go further. We were culled from the smarter people and given a chance to become the smartest people. We got more coursework, discussing even deeper and broader issues in our disciplines, about matters that we didn't even know existed before we started. Often we have to take written exams over parts of our disciplines that only a handful of living humans can pass, seeking to become one of those who have done so. I can assure you, these are not multiple choice. I did have a true/false exam in topology: for each statement, either prove that the statement is true or provide a counterexample. It was the most difficult test I ever took.
Out of what we had learned and in light of the Questions that were placed before us by our professors, we were asked to synthesize new Knowledge, to make steps towards answering some of those Questions that the collective minds of the species have been trying to answer. Increasing human Knowledge is a good thing.
Those of us who manage to create what we think is new Knowledge then have to defend it. We present it to a group of Smart people, professors in our disciplines and others who are smart enough to have the capability of understanding our contribution and judging whether it is significant enough to classify us as being among the smartest people. If we pass intensive analysis and sometimes relentless attack on our work by these people, if we can defend our thesis, we are called doctors.
Some of us were allowed and/or required to also teach while we were graduate students. Think of this as our internship. Many people bemoan the fact that their college teachers in some subjects were often graduate students
And what do we get for that? For the majority of us, it means we can be underpaid as college professors. If we are lucky, we can be selected for a tenure-track position as an assistant professor. This is our residency. At the conclusion of it we hope to be declared Smart, with a capital S.
I am rather rare among the species in that I have gone through the tenuring process successfully twice, in two different disciplines. The first time, as a mathematics professor in Arkansas, I concentrated on fulfilling the duties and responsibilities of the position I had been hired to serve in. I verified that I did sufficiently well in the areas of becoming an effective teacher, an effective colleague who pulled my own weight with regards to the both the adminstrivia and the weighty concerns of the faculty, an effective mentor to my students, and a responsibly contributing member of my intellectual discipline. I made sure that I stepped across the dividing line between success and failure on each of those issues. I was declared Smart.
Being Smart does not mean one is free to become or act dumb. It means that one is free to explore the Questions in ones own way. It means one has become one of those people who everyone turns to when they need an expert. One still has to perform. We are not immune to being dismissed from our positions. The rules generally say that we can be removed for reasons of financial exigency (the position is eliminated due to lack of funds), non-performance of duties, or moral turpitude. We still have to teach our classes and serve on committees. We still have to honor and contribute to our disciplines. And we have to avoid doing anything that could bring dishonor upon ourselves, our disciplines, and/or our employers. Ward Churchill is charged, I presume, with moral turpitude by dishonoring his discipline. When I underwent a sex-change while a tenured faculty member at Central Arkansas, there was a real possibility that they would attempt to fire me by claiming moral turpitude. They did try to bait me into not performing my duties.
I surrendered that tenure to move to New Jersey in 2000, because I felt that my social status had become such an issue that it was harming my intellectual goals. I was hired in a totally different discipline in a tenure-track position at the small college that currently employs me. I took a totally different approach this time. For all intents and purposes, the five years I spent before my tenure decision was made 10 days ago were my undergraduate and graduate years. I am now going to write my thesis on how to learn a brand new discipline, to the level of being able to teach it. The object is to expand human Knowledge about how to do that. The difference is that I have already been declared Smart.
Since I was not in the traditional situation, I had to create a non-traditional approach to tenure this time and hope that my colleagues and administrators would be okay with that. I had to take the position I was assigned to fill and change it into a position that was my own, to convince my colleagues that they didn't just need a professor of programming, but rather needed a Robyn.
Tenure confers a great deal. I don't deny that job security is one of the major things that it confers. But it also confers upon us the responsibility to be the Smart people, to think about and solve problems that the majority of the people are mostly too busy in their lives to address, to create new Knowledge for all of us, to pass that Knowledge on to future generations and teach them how to pass it on, to listen to the people of the past and speak to the people of the future.
I think this calls for more than a one-year contract. This is a lifetime commitment.
--Robyn Serven
--Bloomfield College, NJ