October 17, 2013: I Could Have Saved Myself The Time And Gone with A Reprint*^

Did you know that academic freedom and collegiality may be natural enemies?

Did you know that academic freedom is protecting the world from homogeneity?

Well, these are apparently the sacred truths being preserved by the American Association of University Professors who, indirectly, in this story in Inside Higher Ed, supports a professor at the University of North Dakota initially denied tenure because of her “alleged lack of collegiality.” Apparently, rolling eyes at meetings, being argumentative and slamming doors are acceptable behaviors at institutions where we are supposedly training the next generation of workers or upholding all that is important about society (depending upon whichever extreme viewpoint you take).

Little did you know, other qualities the AAUP has deemed inappropriate for tenure criterion include the following:

• Personal Hygiene, which, also, encourages homogeneity and squelches individuality, as well as implying class distinction;
• Tact, which is seen as  an “artificial layer that corrupts free speech”;
• Humility, deemed in direct opposition of scholarship, the most central criterion for tenure;
• Global perspective, which “threatens the very nature of scholarship itself by taking time away from valuable research, time already being lost to that pesky criterion, teaching."

Perhaps, most painful for me, is that almost all of these egregious examples of academic boors, snobs, brats, bullies, thugs occur within the humanities.  The North Dakota example in this story concerns a French faculty member in the “Modern Classical Languages and Literatures Department” (“Modern Classical??”  Give me a break!).  Perhaps not surprisingly, the faculty committee that reviewed the faculty member’s grievance did describe the MCLL department as one of “discord, dysfunction, chaos, and interpersonal conflict.” (Apparently, the 1978 New York Yankees have nothing on these guys and gals.)  The only other group that consistently seems to display such dysfunction are often nursing departments, the one profession where routinely I hear their own saying “yea, nurses eat their young,” often said with a piece of flesh dangling from their mouths.

I guess we can determine that there is no collegial in college, no humanity in the humanities departments, and no nursing in nursing departments.

*See February 18, 2011:  12 Angry Profs

^And can I count it twice on my list of publications?