While I agree and sympathize with Professor Charney's on one level, on another the real problem (IMHO) is the lack of legit opportunities in Higher Ed.
In the corporate world people are fired or let go for silly reasons or non-reasons all the time: that's at-will employment. But for people in most fields they just find another job and move on; the problem here is there aren't many opportunities to teach at a prestigious university, at least not at anything resembling a living wage.
Years ago I was working for this one tech company who terminated a guy in his late 50s who'd been there over 30 years. I ran into him crying in the bathroom -- he asked me at his age, what was he going to do?
Two wrongs don't make a right -- but making people unfireable (tenure) doesn't seem fair either.
Hope Professor Charney finds another gig but I don't know if it's the outrage he presents it as here.
The article is not about his contract not being renewed, but about the reason for that lack of renewal.
Saying someone who consistently rates amongst your top performers as having unsatisfactory performance is clearly false.
Which means that not only did Duke cave in to an amount of complaints far outshone by praise, it also tried to hide this fact (circumventing its own bylaws).
Yep. I'm not disputing the injustice (at least, as his essay lays it out -- some comments on the article tell a different story of him being difficult to work with).
But contracts not being renewed -- happens all the time in the "real" world. My point is just: good people don't get their contracts renewed all the time, often for silly or dumb reasons, and it's not some cosmic injustice because most people find another job.
The fact that finding one of these jobs is so difficult should not change the basic risk/reward stature of at-will employment.
It's never happened to me personally, but a friend that managed a team of email content developers took more than six months to fire an employee who literally didn't know HTML. PIP after PIP, meeting after meeting, a union rep getting involved, etc.
The reward is not having to work with that person. Probably not a good enough reward to justify the downsides, but still a reward.
I assume this was in Europe? I've read elsewhere about some of the protections over there and length of time it could take to lay someone off as well as even putting in your own notice (like a month in the UK?).
I really wish there was a bit of a balance here in the US but I think the at-will stuff (along with stagnant wage growth) is why companies have such a hard time keeping people. Most of my working career has been (about 15 years discounting part-time work in high school) has been one in which I've worked with other people that very clearly knew or experienced that there was no such thing as stability in the modern workplace and you can be out on the street on a whim.
At least in the Duke professor's case, there was a process and a means of appeals it seems. There has to be a more human way for us to do this that balances the needs of people (and their faults) with that of a business.
Once a probationary period has been completed (usually about 2 months in most companies) a month's notice on both sides is usually the bare minimum for someone in Full Time Employment in a non trivial job in the UK. after some length of service (in the order of 5 or 10 years) that can increase to 3 or more years. Of course the employer can opt to just pay your that notice period and say farewell if you are judged a security risk, and even with this notice period in place a UK firm cannot simply "fire" you because of trivial reasons (like you manager has a hangover and doesn't like your chirpy attitude that particular day) it has to go through a process - with exceptions for gross misconduct but they are usually explicity laid out in a contract and can be validated/overturned by industrial tribunal
Maybe there's not enough academic jobs because too many people try to obtain them. And the reason there's too many is because of false advertising of what academic life is really like.
Who would really want to be a professor given what this professor is going through? And he probably didn't earn much.
In the media, though, a professor is always presented with respect. It's a professor! So kids get the wrong idea. They don't realize the professor is a bitch of the administration.
I think this varies a bit from place to place and is misleading in some ways.
I was a tenured professor who left academics for two reasons, the administrative nightmares of the university and department (to put it one way), and unrelated family reasons.
The year before I left they did a survey of faculty satisfaction at the university I was at, and found that, although about 2/3-3/4 of faculty reported that they were generally satisfied with their jobs, about 1/2-2/3 seriously wanted to leave (following an actual trend of faculty leaving in exodus). So these satisfaction surveys can be misleading and paradoxical, because the stresses are like that: you're acutely aware of the freedom and security you have, but also have very little recourse if things go awry.
As jobs go there is a lot of flexibility in some ways as a tenured professor (time, schedule), but absolutely none in other ways. It's difficult to move (although not impossible) and if you do you have very little choice in terms of geography or location. If you have family, you might be asking them to make huge sacrifices for you if they have better opportunities elsewhere, or can't move to be near you. Increasingly you're at the whims of fads in the field and among students: if you step back from doing what everyone else is doing for a bit, you get labeled as decreasing in productivity (note that I'm not talking about doing nothing, just referring to the fact that it's easy to churn out more papers or grants on things that are currently part of a trend, and where you can share work and credit; as a result, if papers or grant counts are your products, you will necessarily be less productive if you try something off the beaten path); if you challenge students (as did the author of the piece did) you get pushback from them. Increasingly I felt like academics was/is becoming full of bullshit in a way that no one wants to admit. It's fine to work in a field full of bullshit; the problems are when people lie to themselves and the public about it. The incentives are not to produce good, solid, insightful, replicable work, it seems to be to attract attention and entertain the maximal number of students.
My sense as a senior professor was that people in the same field in the non-academic sector were making significantly more money, and had more flexibility. So although they had to worry more about losing their job, if a department starting falling apart, or other conflicts arose, it was much easier to leave and move on to somewhere else where they wanted to be. Tenure is great if you're at a good institution, or if it works out for your family. If you're at a bad institution, or things go sour, and it's not good for your family, it is horrible.
Great feedback. Can you tell us more about your decision to leave? Besides the family stuff, what kind of "administrative nightmares" were you dealing with?
A lot of the administration problems had to do with internal communication problems in the department and university, and severe budget shortfalls (in part due to state politics). You could say it was climate or culture as well, but to me the primary issues were communication problems, mostly due to personal, private interactions superceding formal, transparent, public processes and discussion, coupled with a failure of people in administrative positions to recognize what was happening and respond appropriately. Where I was at, the atmosphere went from one of mutual respect and encouragement when I started, to one where there was constant mutual hostility and distrust, fueled by these sorts of "shadow" power structures that don't communicate with one another. My experiences by the end were kind of similar to what was described in the piece that's the focus of this thread, but involving different groups of faculty rather than faculty and students, and with everything, not just teaching.
I think if family considerations had not entered the picture I still probably would have stayed, or at least would have stayed long enough to leave for another university, but with the ongoing problems in the university and department, it was sort of the straw that broke the camel's back.
Interesting. Corporate America has been a similar experience for me but it's obviously you're much less emotionally and personally invested in each corporate opportunity. Thanks for sharing.
Yeah I would never suggest human failings somehow are unique to academics, unfortunately. I guess in life there's no perfect solutions sometimes; there's the constant tension of security and flexibility.
Professors are often exactly the kind of person who loves to work night and day on a topic of their interest.
People also tend to judge the job for profs with tenure. The vast majority of professionals in academia are either pursuing PhDs, post Docs or untenured professors.
Doctors have great job satisfaction once they are established too. But similar to profs the road to get there is among the most grueling.
The whole idea of tenure, is that the university expects the professor to be self motivated enough to warrant zero supervision or threat of losing their job.
A professors job is great for someone who is suited for a professors job. The traditional person who values other things may not find it to be as nice.
>the problem here is there aren't many opportunities to teach at a prestigious university, at least not at anything resembling a living wage.
I’m not so sure about this. I went to a school that is not very well known outside my state/neighboring states. Even though it was the 2nd largest school in Georgia at the time.
The teacher teaching HTML/CSS in dreamweaver was making $95k. 2 professor getting PhDs in security were making $120k and likely much more after their PhD. The department head was making $150k and the old head was making much more until she got a million dollar grant. This was 6 years ago so they likely make a lot more now.
Higher ed was never a legit opportunity in the first place. It's all gate-keeping by the establishment.
In this professor's case, they seemed to mistake experience with value. Turns out, you can use a slave-laborer (grad student) to teach classes much more efficiently. The market value of a college professor is apparently 0.
In the corporate world people are fired or let go for silly reasons or non-reasons all the time: that's at-will employment. But for people in most fields they just find another job and move on; the problem here is there aren't many opportunities to teach at a prestigious university, at least not at anything resembling a living wage.
Years ago I was working for this one tech company who terminated a guy in his late 50s who'd been there over 30 years. I ran into him crying in the bathroom -- he asked me at his age, what was he going to do?
Two wrongs don't make a right -- but making people unfireable (tenure) doesn't seem fair either.
Hope Professor Charney finds another gig but I don't know if it's the outrage he presents it as here.