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Hello, Adjunct, Meet Prof. Cozy </p>
<p>By FRANK GANNON</p>
<p>The reason that academic politics are so bitter, as the quip goes, is that the stakes are so low. True enough, but at times the stakes can be very high. They can include, for instance, guaranteed lifetime employment, an asset that few workers in the modern economy dare even dream of. After a probationary period of several years, during which essential research and writing is to be done—the infamous period of publish or perish—a professor either wins lifetime job security or becomes, as one victim described it, academic roadkill. In "The Faculty Lounges," Naomi Schaefer Riley, a former member of the Journal's editorial-page staff, takes up the question of academic tenure—what it was intended to be, what abuses it now invites and whether it is a good idea at all. Along the way she addresses vital questions about higher education in America and its future—indeed, about the very idea of a university.</p>
<p>Tenure developed late in the 19th century, Ms. Riley tells us, as a way of providing economic security to individuals willing to devote their lives to a modestly remunerative profession. It was thus a job incentive more than anything else. The notion that tenure was a guarantor of academic freedom—allowing scholars to do maverick research and advance unpopular arguments—arose later, when professors began running up against balky legislatures and unhappy benefactors. One founder of the AAUP (the American Association of University Professors) had to leave Stanford when the widow of the university's namesake objected to his views on immigrant labor and railroad monopolies . . . .</p>
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