Saving Universities Through the Unionization of the Untenurable

It seems that the only things in higher education making money these days are books decrying the sorry state of higher education. Almost every week, we encounter a new release calling for the end of tenure, the need to support public universities, and the failure of universities and colleges to transform in the face of economic decline and global competition. This week I received copies of Mark C. Taylor's Crisis on Campus, Martha Nussbaum's Not For Profit, and Parker Palmer's and Arthur Zajonc's The Heart of Higher Education. Perhaps universities should simply shut down and just allow the faculty to spend their time writing their institutions' obituaries.

However the death of universities and tenure has been greatly exaggerated, and if we step back from the apocalyptic language of crisis, we can formulate a more sober analysis. While it is true that the number of faculty with tenure has decreased dramatically in he last thirty years, this does not mean that tenure can and will die out completely. Moreover, while many private universities have lost a large chunk of their endowments and public universities have suffered through state de-funding, most schools are surviving by jacking up tuition and squeezing the faculty by demanding more work for less pay.

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