The Professors

The Representative Nature of the Professors Profiled in This Volume

The modern university is a decentralized unit, consisting of quasi-independent faculties that create their own intellectual standards. Thus the hard sciences have remained relatively free from ideological intrusions; the traditional humanities and social science fields—history, philosophy, literature—much less so; and the various inter-disciplinary “studies” departments generally not at all. The university is also by nature and structure a conformist institution regardless of who controls it. It is hierarchical in organization and the apprenticeship required for admission to its ascending levels of privilege is long in duration and closely observed. The committees that manage its hiring and promotion processes are collegial and secretive, and its ruling establishment is accountable only to itself. Because the performance on which advancement is based is ultimately the production of ideas, the pressure to share common assumptions and common attitudes is far greater in universities than in other social institutions, whether governmental or corporate. In these circumstances university and departmental elites create faculties in their own image. Consequently, far from being eccentric or peripheral figures the professors in this volume are integral to the intellectual life of the institutions they inhabit and to the course of higher education in America.

During the 1960s, complex procedures for hiring and promotion were developed in universities as reform measures to do away with the existing “old boys’ network” in which candidates were hired and promoted on the basis of who they or their faculty mentors happened to know in positions of departmental power. The goal of these reforms was to maintain the highest professional standards in hiring, and to create a system in which the most qualified person judged by objective merit would be offered the position. Under the new system, positions are nationally advertised in the appropriate academic journals and the number of candidates for any one position can be well over a hundred.¹

A “search committee” is chosen by the chair of the department, which normally consists of three faculty members who in the view of the department are known both for their diligence and good sense. The search committee sifts through and evaluates the applications, which include letters of recommendation and samples of written work, and chooses between 12–15 people to interview at the annual national convention of the profession. From these personal interviews, the search committee chooses three or four people to come to campus for several days. The high point of such campus visits is the presentation of a scholarly paper before the assembled department. Candidates may also be asked to teach a class in front of observers. They will meet for extensive interview sessions with the chair of the department, and often with the dean of the college as well. After the visits, the search committee writes a detailed report on the top candidates, and ranks them. The assembled department then votes on whether to accept the nominee of the search committee. If accepted by majority vote, the search committee report then goes up to the dean of the college, with an accompanying letter from the chair. This process is so painstaking and careful that it normally lasts nine months, from middle or late summer to the spring of the following year.

Obviously the departmental chair who selects the members of the search committee and the members themselves play a crucial role in determining both the “long short list” of 12–15 who are interviewed at the national convention and the “short short list” of 3–4 candidates who actually come for campus visits and on whom the department as a whole will eventually vote. It is easy to see how this system can be exploited by faculty members with activist agendas. The composition of the search committee chosen by the chair will go a long way in determining the orientation of the candidate likely to be hired. As one senior professor at a large research university observed, “If a departmental chair chooses a political radical to chair a search committee, it is more than likely that all three of the final candidates for the open faculty position will be people who are, more or less, sympathetic to such views. Among the faculty left, this is called ‘Revolution by Search Committee.’”² This is Gram-scian theory in practice.

Almost all of the professors profiled in this volume were not only hired by search committees and departmental votes, but were promoted at least once (to a tenured rank) and often twice (to a full professorship). A promotion committee also normally consists of three faculty who are chosen by the departmental chair, and the idea also is that they should be individuals with expertise in the field and noted for their diligence and fairness. In addition, at least four and often as many as eight nationally-prominent figures in the relevant field but outside the specific university itself are asked to write letters evaluating the work of the candidate for promotion. These “outside letters” are a crucial part of the process, because theoretically they offer an objective view of the work of the candidate, untainted by local faculty politics.

An academically untrained and intellectually inadequate political extremist like Ward Churchill had to pass the close scrutiny not only of his own department faculty but of more than a dozen members of his field at the national level, in addition to the dean of his college over a period of many years, to arrive at his full professorship (not to mention his chairmanship). Given what has come to light about Churchill’s scholarship—that he simply invented historical incidents central to his academic work—not only are the scholarly bona fides of the Ethnic Studies Department at Colorado called into question by Churchill’s repeated promotions, but the implication is that his entire field—ethnic studies—is intellectually corrupt. As this volume clearly demonstrates, such corruption is not confined to ethnic studies, but has spread throughout the liberal arts fields.

More than 90 percent of the professors profiled in this text have attained tenure rank, an indication that their academic work is approved by their peers both within their department and university, and nationally (through the requirement of outside letters approving the quality of their work). Their tenure also makes them eligible to vote for decades on who will be hired in the future to their departments and who will be promoted to tenure rank. Some of the professors profiled here hold especially prestigious and lucrative “endowed” chairs, which gives them added weight and prestige within their departments. At least fourteen of the professors profiled are (or have been) department chairs at one university and sometimes more. As chairs they are in a position to designate members of search committees and shape the composition of their departments. (An academic department can include as few as a half-dozen faculty and as many as seventy or more, depending on the size of the university.)

The professors in this volume are drawn from the broad spectrum of fields in the humanities and the social sciences. They are professors of African American studies, anthropology, criminology, communications, comparative literature, economics, education, English literature, ethnic studies history, international relations, Islamic studies, Jewish studies, journalism, law, Middle East studies, philosophy, peace studies, political science, psychology, religion, sociology, and women’s studies. They teach at sixty-six representative institutions of higher learning, located in every geographical region: The Northeast (Boston University, Columbia, C.U.N.Y., M.I.T.); the Midwest (Ball State, Michigan, Northwestern); the South (Duke, Texas, Kentucky, North Carolina); and the West (Berkeley, Hawaii, Oregon, Stanford, U.C.L.A.). The list intentionally includes institutions large and small, and in many different categories: local public colleges (Metro State, Montclair State, San Francisco State); private liberal arts colleges and universities (Dayton, Emory, U.S.C.); major state universities (Colorado, Illinois, Penn State); and Ivy League giants (Penn, Princeton). The list includes Catholic institutions (De Paul, St. Xavier, Villanova), Jewish institutions (Brandeis), Protestant institutions (Baylor), and a Quaker institution (Earlham).

Thus the problems revealed in this text—the explicit introduction of political agendas into the classroom, the lack of professionalism in conduct, and the decline in professional standards—appear to be increasingly widespread throughout the academic profession and at virtually every type of institution of higher learning.