100 arguments against tenure, Part II

 

Drawn from the profiles we’ve done of professors so far this year, we offer as proof that tenure doesn’t work a group of pedagogues but because they are so numerous, we have to give them to you in installments.

Here is part 2:

1. Donald E. Hall of West Virginia University-Morgantown is looking for a way to queerly administer colleges.
2. Scott Herring, Indiana U-Bloomington, for resurrection “hillbilly porn” that apparently only he watched.
3. Ashlee Humphreys of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, gets academic about casino gambling.
4. Gene Andrew Jarrett of Boston University, finds literary value in communist organizer, and Obama mentor, Frank Marshall Davis.
5. Russell Jacoby of the University of California-Los Angeles, tries to numerically deconstruct the 9/11 attacks upon the United States.
6. Harry Jenkins of the University of Southern California noted at the MLA conference early this year that ““The Tea Party Movement represents itself as resistance; the KKK represents itself as resistance.”
7. Steven Knapp of George Washington University whose board literally made the GWU president a million-dollar man
8. Wayne Koestenbaum of New York University wants to break out of queer studies but doesn’t want to talk about much else.
9. James Kurth, Swarthmore University managed to work conservatism and communism into the same sentence, and not as mutually exclusive properties.
10. Charles Kurzman, sociologist, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, who, like Russell Jacoby (#5 above) tries to minimize the 9/11 tragedies numerically.
11. George Lakoff of Berkeley attributes a love of authority to conservatives that he seems to require of his students.
12. 12.  Doran Larson of Hamilton College regards cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal as a literary lion.
13. Bianca Laureano of College of Mount Saint Vincent offers up a history of abortion that does not gibe with the historical record.
14. Nicholas Lemann of the Columbia University School of Journalism assumes that conservatives want the same thing out of the evening news that the Left is already providing.
15. Ellen Lewin of the University of Iowa dropped the f-bomb in an e-mail to College Republicans to show the kind of civil discourse that distinguishes the academic Left today.
16. Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor economist at the University of California-Santa Barbara, does not see state budget deficits as a valid reason for denying unionized public employees the benefits that few taxpayers enjoy.
17. Joseph Litvak of Tufts University argues that the cinematic classic Dr. Strangelove “hyperbolizes the eroticism” of Americans obsessed with the military.
18. Andreas Madestam and David Yanagizawa-Drott , a pair of Harvard researchers who concluded that there would be fewer Republicans if it only rained more often on the Fourth of July.
19. Daniel Maguire of Marquette University, whose own college president admitted that the theologian’s views  are “not totally consonant with Catholic teaching.”
20. John Marsh of Penn State described why education is just not for everybody: “Some people may escape poverty and low incomes through education, but a problem arises when education becomes the only escape route from those conditions—because that road will very quickly become bottlenecked.”
21. Paul Mattick of Adelphi University shows how the world looks different from inside the Ivory Tower: “Just as the Great Recession has demonstrated the limits of the means set in place during the last 40 years to contain capitalism’s tendency to periodic disaster, it suggests the need finally to take seriously the idea, as the saying goes, that another world is possible.”
22. Robert McClory, Medill, has written an admiring account of Jeremiah Wright’s favorite guest pastor, Radical Disciple: Father Pfleger, St. Sabina Church, and the Fight for Social Justice;
23. Rachel Davis Mersey, Medill, is so egalitarian that students grade each other, at least on the group project.
24. Victor Navasky, of the Columbia School of Journalism, has argued that “Objectivity is Highly Overrated.”
25. Cary Nelson, University of Illinois-Urbana, still brags about providing “draft avoidance counseling” during the Vietnam War.
26. Immanuel Ness of Brooklyn College” brags about punching cops” and “broke his arm twice,” according to his students. Maybe a couple of those punches didn’t connect.
27. Robert Novy-Marx, University of Rochester and Joseph D. Rauh, Northwestern, look at exploding public pensions and see…not enough taxes.
28. Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University still sees global warming, even when temperatures drop.
29. Manuel Pastor, University of Southern California, likes to analyze events he doesn’t attend: “The TEA Party has done very well with the politics of anger,” Professor Manuel Pastor said at the Center for American Progress. “It is a much older white demographic worried about losing their country.”
30. Abe Peck, Medill, played Boswell to the Johnson of Studs Terkel who the FBI described as “a radio/news commentator, actor, and award-winning author. Terkel was associated with a number of communist and communist connected groups.”
31. Marjorie Perloff, Stanford emerita, thinks that Dreams from My Father is a good reason to learn to read.
32. Monica Duffy Toft (Harvard) , Daniel Philpott (Notre Dame)  and Timothy Samuel Shah (Berkeley) offer a more clear-eyed assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood than most intellectuals have offered. Unfortunately, they go on to equate it with the Catholic Church.
33. Christopher Pizzino , University of Georgia, is another comic book scholar.
34. Melvin Platt, University of Missouri, managed to save his Master’s in Fine Arts program by creating more adjunct positions he could call students.
35. Barry Popkin, University of North Carolina, helped feed (no pun intended) news media reports on the link between sodas and obesity and the curative effect taxes on the former will have on the latter.
36. David Protess, Medill School (Northwestern), keeps the Medill Innocence Project going, even for the guilty.
37. Asifa Quraishi, University of Wisconsin Law School, offers less-than-assuring assurances of the more radical interpretations of Shariah law.
38. Michael Reich, Berkeley, is trying to deny that increases in the minimum wage lead to higher unemployment: “In the last several years, the minimum wage has gone up and teen unemployment has gone up quite a bit but is that causal?” Reich, Professor of Economics and Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, University of California, Berkeley, said earlier this year. “We are in a recession.”
39. Peter L. Rudnytsky, University of Florida, reads Charles Dickens and sees…Sigmund Freud.
40. Daniel Safi, Colgate, derides those “intolerant” of radical Islam but may be guilty of some intolerance of his own.
41. Tyler T. Schmidt, Lehman College (CUNY), wants his education students to find out “what’s going on with whiteness.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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