—- Com m en tary—
Tenure may not be obstacle
Editor’s Note: Hie following com
mentary was written by Robert James,
chairer of the Fine and Applied Arte
department at the University. The column
is a response to an Emerald editorial
published last term. But the material
remains current.
By ROBERT JAMES
As a tenured member of the faculty and
as the Head of the Department of Fine and
Applied Arts I have read with great in
terest your editorial “Tenure System in
Need of Change” (Friday, Dec. 1, 1972).
I share your interest in seeing the
availability of classes coordinated with
student need and interest. I am not sure
the tenure system is the obstacle.
May I share with you, first, some
feelings about the tenure system then
make some comments about staffing
problems.
No “system” is any better than the
people in it. If the tenure system were
eliminated, I am afraid the thing that
would take its place would be some kind of
civil service condition which would allow
dismissal only for “good cause” (provable
in court). The people responsible for the
decision and their values would not change
by changing the system. Letting someone
go—which is not a synonym for “fired”—
to preserve the flexibility you are ad
vocating is a possibility of the tenure
system. Allowing a faculty to become
“over-tenured” is not a fault of the tenure
system.
Your analogue regarding professional
athletes may be applicable as an alter
native to giving tenure to those hired with
grant funds. But I become uneasy as I try
to extend the analogue—Bart Starr, very
savvy ball player, has to became a coach
(administrator?) or git his gimpy old self
out of the game?
The problems this University is ex
periencing in respect to distributing and
proportioning the instructional resources
come more from a general set of cir
cumstances, in my opinion, than from the
hazards of the tenure system.
Universities, not unlike most
“established” American institutions, have
historically if not traditionally solved their
problems by treating physical growth and
health as synonymns. I believe the
emerging frame of mind attending con
cern for the environment and its resources
will give us the attitude required to solve
our problems in terms of needs. In my
mind solving problems in terms of needs is
very different than responding to
“political reality” and preserving
academic Empires.
We are creating a verb “to priority”. Its
use and definition is new, strange and
threatening for many—maybe the most
difficult for many of the higher ad
ministration because it is there that
“prioritizing” is the mo6t complex.
I do feel that the higher administration is
making a serious effort to resolve the
problems in Fine Arts. This term, six
sections of lower-division studio classes
were added by allocations from reserve
funds; this emergency allocation has not
solved the problem by any means, but it is
addressing the need.
I am not trying to generate com
placency. There are many sensitive points
for me. The load situation is one. The
faculty of this Department have responded
to the interests of the students and each
has nine classes per year. I have heard it
rumored that the load in many other areas
of the University is seven classes per year.
That is bad enough but when my ad
visees return from other parts of the
campus with quotes from faculty that they
don’t do special studies—they just meet
their classes, I begin to wonder, with what
kind of a rubber yardstick we are being
beaten. This is not a faculty gripe—it ef
fects the whole question—if it would take
six additional faculty to held just our
current offering if we each taught but
seven classes per year it would seem,
going the other way, if those doing seven
classes were to go nine we would have
some surplus.
Perhaps that line of reasoning is beside
the point, but I can say something that
may generate animosity among my
colleagues because I have tenure.
Mississippi on my mind
By WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.
When Brown vs. Board of Education was
handed down, and the schools were or
dered to desegregate, a prominent writer
pronounced the decision “bad law and bad
sociology,’’ with which assessment many
of us agreed. It remains, in my inadequate
judgment—which judgment however is all
I have—bad law.
There is very good reason for calling the
Warren Court a ‘Tevolutionary” court. It
simply took the law and stood it on its
head. There are arguments for what then
happened, particularly on the matter of
desegregation. They will tell you that the
initiative of the Warren Court deflected
what might have been true national
violence, as distinguished from the
fireworks we got in the sixties. That the
state governments weren’t doing what
they should to end Jim Crow, nor was the
national legislature, so that it was the
Supreme Court that came in to the rescue.
Let us assume, for the sake of
magnanimity, that that is correct. It does
not alter the argument that Brown was bad
law. If our legislative procedures are
constipated (and I think they are) we
should flush them out, rather than en
courage the Supreme Court to proceed as a
standing constitutional convention. Thus
the legal point.
The sociological point is proving to be a
pleasant surprise. In the state of
Mississippi, through which I have recently
wandered, there is nothing like the tension
(me read about seven years ago, when the
novelist Walker Percy was writing
sulphuric copy about the transformation of
the people he grew up with into monsters.
The fact of the matter is that the end of
compulsory Jim Crow, and the opening up,
by law, of the stores and restaurants and
hotels that were previously segregated,
hasn’t increased inter-racial hostilities;
quite the contrary. In the past four years
Mississippi has achieved a racial in
tegration unthought of in the north, the
state is prospering, and relations between
White and Black are, for the most part,
altogether relaxed.
Does it follow from this that the methods
by which that relaxation was achieved are
desirable? Well, not as a formal
Page 4
proposition; though it tells you at least
this, that coercive measures can breed
desired results.
An analogy, however strained, can be
drawn with the denazification of Germany.
There was no nonsense, after Occupation,
about academic freedom for pro-Nazis, or
anything of the sort. Textbooks were not
only banned, they were burned, vaporized.
And in due course Nazism, in Germany,
vas something you needed to go to rather
extensive libraries to stare at the skeleton
of.
The occupation of Mississippi was not
conventional, but something of the sort
was done. Mississippi lost the right to
supervise its own voter qualification lists,
to pass its own laws respecting schooling,
transportation, hotels, and restaurants.
And: it is, without question, a better place
to live in, now than before
Granted, the improvement is only a
surface improvement, put up against, say,
the exacting standards of Martin Luther
King’s dreams. But surface improvements
are improvements. If the White man
behind the counter still declines to
fraternize with the Negro, we have not got
ourself the evanescence of color. But
meanwhile, he will serve the Negro a
hamburger, and that’s, well—progress.
Of course, conservatives and liber
tarians have never denied that state force
can accomplish certain things. When the
Nazis invaded France, if truth must out,
the overwhelming majority of the French
simply—cooperated. They went on living
and, mostly, confined their contumely to
private expression. In Mississippi the
White man is still very much in charge of
things, but there is civility there, and it is
tempering race relations which, outside
the north, have not been nourished by
southern good nature.
' It is worth dwelling upon, but meanwhile
there is reason quietly but fervently, to
give thanks.
#
... of rugs and pine trees
Editor’s Note: Nan Henderson is the
Emerald’s legislative reporter for the
current session of the Oregon Legislature.
The following commentary describes
some behind the scenes action we’ll never
see in the statute books.
By NAN HENDERSON
An aura of power billowed out of the
Speaker of the House’s office as, one by
one, veteran House members filed in.
Some of the freshmen legislators were
leaving the room muttering something
about a lottery and clutching maps of the
Capitol.
Inside, The Speaker patiently listened to
arguments and wailings.
“I have to have number 800 because my
staff needs that extra corner with the wall
plug to do any kind of effective research,”
a legislator pleaded.
‘‘Besides, I leave my dog tied up
downstairs and number 800 has a window
right above the place I tie him.”
Downstairs, the Assistant Majority
Leader (in charge of freshmen) was
alternately picking names from a basket
and making phone calls: “Hello. Just
drew your name . . . yea you’re number
three so look at the map and explain where
you want to be — office and desk on the
House floor . . . Can’t you just tell me
where? O.K., I’ll wait ’till you get here.”
The particular freshman finally arrived
to make sure he got precisely what he
wanted.
“I like number 820, but I’m wondering if
there are any diagrams showing the
building’s airflow — I have difficulty
breathing,” the freshman explained.
“Number 860 looks better, but the carpet
isn’t as thick and I have corns on my feet
that really bother me when I get tense ...”
So the tour went with fifteen more fresh
men to be called before the telephone
installers descended in two hours.
Up in The Speaker’s office the tension
had errupted into some overt quarrelling
among the veterans waiting to get into the
inner-office.
“I refuse to have an office that has never
been remodeled,’’ one veteran declared.
“I don’t know why except I just like old
things.’’
“But I am going to have two ad
ministrative assistants and a part-time
barber so I need that extra chair," another
one wailed.
The door from the inner-office opened
and a two-term member appeared looking
downhearted.
‘Hey Joe,” one of the waiting legislators
called, “maybe your committee assign
ments will be good. What committees do
you think you’ll get on?”
The two-termer shrugged his shoulders.
A six-term veteran had aced him out of the
office that smelled like pine trees when the
window was left open
Thursday, January 11, 1973