100 arguments against tenure, Part II
Drawn from the profiles we’ve done of professors so far this year, we offer as proof that tenure doesn’t work a group of pedagogues but because they are so numerous, we have to give them to you in installments.
Here is part 2:
1. Donald E. Hall of West Virginia University-Morgantown is looking for a way to queerly administer colleges.
2. Scott Herring, Indiana U-Bloomington, for resurrection “hillbilly porn” that apparently only he watched.
3. Ashlee Humphreys of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, gets academic about casino gambling.
4. Gene Andrew Jarrett of Boston University, finds literary value in communist organizer, and Obama mentor, Frank Marshall Davis.
5. Russell Jacoby of the University of California-Los Angeles, tries to numerically deconstruct the 9/11 attacks upon the United States.
6. Harry Jenkins of the University of Southern California noted at the MLA conference early this year that ““The Tea Party Movement represents itself as resistance; the KKK represents itself as resistance.”
7. Steven Knapp of George Washington University whose board literally made the GWU president a million-dollar man
8. Wayne Koestenbaum of New York University wants to break out of queer studies but doesn’t want to talk about much else.
9. James Kurth, Swarthmore University managed to work conservatism and communism into the same sentence, and not as mutually exclusive properties.
10. Charles Kurzman, sociologist, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, who, like Russell Jacoby (#5 above) tries to minimize the 9/11 tragedies numerically.
11. George Lakoff of Berkeley attributes a love of authority to conservatives that he seems to require of his students.
12. 12. Doran Larson of Hamilton College regards cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal as a literary lion.
13. Bianca Laureano of College of Mount Saint Vincent offers up a history of abortion that does not gibe with the historical record.
14. Nicholas Lemann of the Columbia University School of Journalism assumes that conservatives want the same thing out of the evening news that the Left is already providing.
15. Ellen Lewin of the University of Iowa dropped the f-bomb in an e-mail to College Republicans to show the kind of civil discourse that distinguishes the academic Left today.
16. Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor economist at the University of California-Santa Barbara, does not see state budget deficits as a valid reason for denying unionized public employees the benefits that few taxpayers enjoy.
17. Joseph Litvak of Tufts University argues that the cinematic classic Dr. Strangelove “hyperbolizes the eroticism” of Americans obsessed with the military.
18. Andreas Madestam and David Yanagizawa-Drott , a pair of Harvard researchers who concluded that there would be fewer Republicans if it only rained more often on the Fourth of July.
19. Daniel Maguire of Marquette University, whose own college president admitted that the theologian’s views are “not totally consonant with Catholic teaching.”
20. John Marsh of Penn State described why education is just not for everybody: “Some people may escape poverty and low incomes through education, but a problem arises when education becomes the only escape route from those conditions—because that road will very quickly become bottlenecked.”
21. Paul Mattick of Adelphi University shows how the world looks different from inside the Ivory Tower: “Just as the Great Recession has demonstrated the limits of the means set in place during the last 40 years to contain capitalism’s tendency to periodic disaster, it suggests the need finally to take seriously the idea, as the saying goes, that another world is possible.”
22. Robert McClory, Medill, has written an admiring account of Jeremiah Wright’s favorite guest pastor, Radical Disciple: Father Pfleger, St. Sabina Church, and the Fight for Social Justice;
23. Rachel Davis Mersey, Medill, is so egalitarian that students grade each other, at least on the group project.
24. Victor Navasky, of the Columbia School of Journalism, has argued that “Objectivity is Highly Overrated.”
25. Cary Nelson, University of Illinois-Urbana, still brags about providing “draft avoidance counseling” during the Vietnam War.
26. Immanuel Ness of Brooklyn College” brags about punching cops” and “broke his arm twice,” according to his students. Maybe a couple of those punches didn’t connect.
27. Robert Novy-Marx, University of Rochester and Joseph D. Rauh, Northwestern, look at exploding public pensions and see…not enough taxes.
28. Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University still sees global warming, even when temperatures drop.
29. Manuel Pastor, University of Southern California, likes to analyze events he doesn’t attend: “The TEA Party has done very well with the politics of anger,” Professor Manuel Pastor said at the Center for American Progress. “It is a much older white demographic worried about losing their country.”
30. Abe Peck, Medill, played Boswell to the Johnson of Studs Terkel who the FBI described as “a radio/news commentator, actor, and award-winning author. Terkel was associated with a number of communist and communist connected groups.”
31. Marjorie Perloff, Stanford emerita, thinks that Dreams from My Father is a good reason to learn to read.
32. Monica Duffy Toft (Harvard) , Daniel Philpott (Notre Dame) and Timothy Samuel Shah (Berkeley) offer a more clear-eyed assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood than most intellectuals have offered. Unfortunately, they go on to equate it with the Catholic Church.
33. Christopher Pizzino , University of Georgia, is another comic book scholar.
34. Melvin Platt, University of Missouri, managed to save his Master’s in Fine Arts program by creating more adjunct positions he could call students.
35. Barry Popkin, University of North Carolina, helped feed (no pun intended) news media reports on the link between sodas and obesity and the curative effect taxes on the former will have on the latter.
36. David Protess, Medill School (Northwestern), keeps the Medill Innocence Project going, even for the guilty.
37. Asifa Quraishi, University of Wisconsin Law School, offers less-than-assuring assurances of the more radical interpretations of Shariah law.
38. Michael Reich, Berkeley, is trying to deny that increases in the minimum wage lead to higher unemployment: “In the last several years, the minimum wage has gone up and teen unemployment has gone up quite a bit but is that causal?” Reich, Professor of Economics and Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, University of California, Berkeley, said earlier this year. “We are in a recession.”
39. Peter L. Rudnytsky, University of Florida, reads Charles Dickens and sees…Sigmund Freud.
40. Daniel Safi, Colgate, derides those “intolerant” of radical Islam but may be guilty of some intolerance of his own.
41. Tyler T. Schmidt, Lehman College (CUNY), wants his education students to find out “what’s going on with whiteness.”
100 arguments against tenure, Part III
Malcolm A. Kline, October 5, 2011
Drawn from the profiles we’ve done of professors so far this year, we offer the following pedagogues as proof that tenure doesn’t work but because they are so numerous, we have to give them to you in installments.
Here is part 3:
1. New York University sociologist Richard Sennett saw in the anniversary of the 9-11-01 attacks upon the United States an occasion to bash TEA parties.
2. NYU president John Sexton claims that the high cost of education is indicative of its quality.
3. Michael Scheuer of Georgetown University, debated himself on the pages of The American Conservative and lost.
4. John D. Schwetman of the University of Minnesota-Duluth is yet another comic-book scholar. Weren’t college students supposed to read beyond this level?
5. Ellen Shearer, Medill bisected a long journalism career with a stint as public affairs director for the American Federation of Teachers teachers’ union
6. Peter Slevin, Medill is an old favorite of Accuracy in Academia’s sister group, Accuracy In Media. In a story he filed while still at the Washington Post five years ago, “Slevin claimed in the second paragraph that the constitution ‘forbids the government to show preference for any religious denomination,’” AIM editor Cliff Kincaid pointed out.“Oh really?” Kincaid asked. “Where does it say that?” It doesn’t.
7. Richard Somerville of the University of California-San Diego says “we know CO2 is increasing and it’s because of humans” even though we don’t.
8. Murray Sperber of Berkeley actually points to largely discredited sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey as a good argument for tenure.
9. In a course for which she was named Maryland teacher of the year, Deborah Stearns, of Montgomery College asks her students “to name all of the sexual terms that they know, no matter how vulgar or taboo they might be,” according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
10. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Columbia University economist, blames the Iraq War for the subprime mortgage crisis but not Fannie Mae, an agency he exonerated before the fact.
11. Margaret Stock, University of Alaska-Anchorage imagines there’s no country.
12. Geoffrey R. Stone of the University of Chicago claims that “during the Cold War, as Americans were whipped up to frenzy of fear of the ‘Red Menace,’ loyalty programs, political infiltration, blacklisting, legislative investigations, and criminal prosecutions of supposed Communist ‘subversives’ and sympathizers swept the nation,” ignoring the information unearthed since then showing that there was some validity to the concerns..
13. Cynthia Tucker recently took a position at the University of Georgia and left The Atlanta Journal and Constitution. “In a discussion on immigration reform on the Chris Matthews show liberal columnist Cynthia Tucker mentioned that when Bush and the GOP controlled Congress three years ago (2007) they couldn’t get it done either,” Accuracy in Media chairman Don Irvine wrote on May 10, 2010. “I guess she missed the 2006 election results.”
14. Richard Wald, the Fred W. Friendly professor of professional practice in Media and Society at Columbia University, as an ABC news producer in the 1990s, gave the green light to the network’s hit job on the non-union Food Lion supermarket chain in which undercover union operatives manufactured evidence of unsanitary practices by the company that the network broadcast as actual.
15. Michelle Weinberger, Medill presented research on ‘Non-Participation in Consumption Rituals–A Christmas Story’ at the American Sociological Association Conference in August [2010],” Medill Matters, “a newsletter of the faculty’s research and creative/professional accomplishments” reports.
16. John Welty, president of Fresno State University, so anxious to pass the federal DREAM Act that he overlooked the legal status, or lack thereof, of one of the student organizers promoting it.
17. Lawrence Weschler of NYUI predicts that “such people as will still be around in 2061 will be too busy dealing with the rampaging effects of global warming” to commemorate the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks upon the United States.
18. Betsy West, an associate professor of professional practice at the Columbia University School of Journalism, was one of the CBS producers fired for giving the go-ahead to the manufactured story of President Bush’s combat avoidance that brought down legendary anchorman Dan Rather.
19. 19. Miles White, University of Seattle, author of From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap and the Performance of Masculinity.
20. Medill’s Patti Wolter “spent five years as the managing editor and Editor in chief of The Neighborhood Works, a small advocacy magazine then-published by the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology.”
21. L. Randall Wray, Bard College, applies think system economics to the U. S. economy.
22. Kay R. Young of the University of California at Santa Barbara managed to work breast-feeding into a discussion on Charles Dickens and
23. Van Jones may have been too left-wing to work in the Obama White House but his ideology made him a perfect fit for Princeton.
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