Do GenXers dream of tenure?

Academics, who for the most part have supported healthcare reform for the wrong reasons, might be in for trouble if many of their arguments are used against academe. I have blogged about this before, and it turns out that I might be on the correct track after all .... Here is how the first paragraph in an opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education starts:

Is higher education in the same position as health care—ripe for reform by the federal government? Both sectors certainly face similar challenges to the established protocol: higher costs, diminished resources, uneven access, inconsistent quality, inadequate means of defining and evaluating results, greater demands, and expensive technology.

We must voluntarily initiate substantial changes.

Just as a we are way ahead of the rest of the world with respect to innovative medical and surgical techniques, our higher education system is way ahead of most of the rest of the world--here is one small little comparison. There are lots and lots of changes we could and need to implement. But, as much as we look for easy targets in healthcare reform, we offer an easy target when it comes to critiques of academe. And you know what that easy target is (and this is NOT my number one issue though): tenure.

The opinion in the Chronicle continues:

One central piece of the puzzle concerns the tenure system, hatched in another era by a generation of mostly white males with stay-at-home wives, who came of age in the 1930s and 40s. Like the work rules of newspaper guilds and auto workers, the tenure system does not fit contemporary economic realities, nor does it accommodate those Generation Xers and Millennials who work within the system under very different, and increasingly complex, conditions.

As a member of the first year cohort of GenXers--yes, I am that young, dammit!--I can easily see that my professional differences have a generational characteristic as well. I agree with the author here:

To cite just a few differences: Generation X prefers collaboration to competition; openness to secrecy; community to autonomy; flexibility to uniformity; diversity to homogeneity; interdisciplinary structures to disciplinary silos; and family-work life balance to 24/7 careers.

When, if ever, will the next generation of scholars have a chance to reconsider, and perhaps rewrite, the rules? Will the canon simply pass unquestioned and unexamined from one generation to the next, even as adherence to dogma reduces the tenured ranks? Will academe adapt to new members, or like some organized religions, will orthodoxy persist even as congregants leave?

In a Harvard Magazine article published in 2002, Richard P. Chait, a research professor of higher education at Harvard, and I proposed a "constitutional convention" at which a representative sample of faculty members, selected to mirror the diversity the academy presumably desires, would convene to rethink tenure policy. We asked, "Would the document that emerges essentially paraphrase or materially depart from the 1940 AAUP Statement of Principles on Tenure and Academic Freedom?" Based on what I have since heard from hundreds of junior faculty members over the past 15 years, with ever more desperation, I think the rules would be different.

Yes, they would be different. Indeed! The author's conclusion is the same as the one that I have been talking, writing, blogging about for a while:

Academe cannot continue with business as usual. In fact, inertia has produced, almost indiscernibly, a new status quo where tenured and tenure-track faculty members are an endangered species.