Tenure and ‘Deadwood’ at UC

As a graduate student in the UC system and having served for nine months on a tenure and promotions committee at UC Irvine, I find Miles’ argument both misleading and wrongheaded. First, he gives no supporting evidence for the “distressingly large” number of tenured deadwood in the system, something that in my experience with the actual promotions committee caseload was very rare.

For what I found to be the few tenured UC faculty who fit his image of deadwood, Miles’ promotes a wrong-headed vision of education by insisting that UC system students be exposed to even more of their teaching. If these people have so little regard for what academic life is about (they’re thieves, according to Miles), why should we want them to educate the finest students the state of California has or can attract? In the hopes of punishing these few and protecting California taxpayers, Miles would undermine the very thing he rightly perceives a need for: “an explosion of demand for the kind of high-quality university education the UC system manages to offer at a relatively low price.”

Miles is simply wrong about tenure and teaching in the UC system. Rather than a form of early retirement, tenure is an investment in intellectual work that is carefully made during a usually rigorous process of review. If there are disruptions in the quantity of publications after tenure (Miles eschews quality, something the actual review process considers carefully) it could be the professor is taking intellectual risks by trying to push her and our understanding of a field beyond its current boundaries. While time is often money from a budgetary point of view, time is not the equivalent of effective teaching in practice.

Rather than punish a poor research record with forced teaching, why not change the tenure and promotion process in the UC system so that exceptional teaching is more directly rewarded?

ROGERS HALL

Laguna Beach