SDSU Cuts

In 399 BC, Socrates was handed a cup of hemlock. He was told that he must drink it because he had corrupted the youth of Athens. In reality, what he did was teach the youth of Athens how to think for themselves. In May of this year, San Diego State University President Thomas B. Day handed the university its cup of hemlock.

The single most devastating result of Day’s firing of tenure-track and tenured faculty members is the assault on the institution of tenure. Although flawed, the tenure process has helped foster and maintain academic greatness in this country.

It is to freedom in academia what the Bill of Rights is to freedom in the United States.

By the time a student finishes his or her undergraduate and graduate education, 10 or more years of one’s life and tens of thousands of dollars have been spent. With a Ph.D. in hand, if one chooses the least financially rewarding career of university teaching, one must sometimes compete with hundreds of other candidates for a particular faculty position. The successful applicant must then work as many as 10 years through the ranks of assistant, associate and full professor, and eventually must be considered for tenure.

The basis for tenure varies somewhat from one university to another, but at larger and better known universities and colleges the standards for tenure are similar: high levels of scholarship and teaching and service to the university. Tenure is never granted lightly, and, once granted, it provides security to a faculty member.

Why should anyone be granted lifelong employment when most people in society do not share this apparent luxury? Certainly we wish security for our family and ourselves, but tenure is only marginally about financial security. Rather, tenure is about freedom of thought and action in teaching and scholarship. Without such privilege, university professors could not think the unorthodox, defend the new and dream the unknown.

This freedom to be able to think can, should and often does have a profound effect on students. Training for a career is important, but, more significantly, students must be challenged to assess many of their cherished ideals. Higher education produces people who know that they have an obligation to society. Who knows what more we might have learned from that fertile mind of Socrates if these ideals of higher education had prevailed in ancient Greece? We must find the antidote for President Day’s hemlock before it is too late.

DAVID ARCHIBALD, Professor of Biology, San Diego State University