Curious Tenure Poster Boy

A veteran professor offered up an odd example of the benefits of tenure in a conference here in Washington, D. C. this week. “I am proud that my university and its president, Herman Wells, stood up for Alfred Kinsey,” author and educator Murray Sperber said at a conference sponsored by the North Carolina-based John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

Sperber is a professor emeritus at Indiana University where Kinsey hung his hat for the last three decades of his life (1894-1956). Indeed, “There would have been no Kinsey Institute without Herman B. Wells,” Institute director June Reinisch wrote in 1990.

Wells himself defended his patronage of Kinsey in his 1980 biography, Being Lucky: “…a university that bows to the wishes of a person, group, or segment of society is not free…”

Author Dan Flynn, who has made an extensive study of sex researcher Kinsey, noted in his book, Intellectual Morons that the biologist stacked his studies with pimps, prostitutes and prisoners to reach general conclusions about American mores.  Moreover, “All three of Kinsey’s coauthors have since admitted that their prison histories ignored scientific sampling and focused on the most perverse sex offenders, including those who had practiced incest, rape, and pedophilia,” Flynn wrote. Flynn is the former executive director of Accuracy in Academia.

As for Sperber, despite his avowed defense of tenure, he is far from sanguine about the state of higher education in America. Of students today, he notes that “They don’t do research.”

“They go to Google but they don’t know how to search by key words and if they hit the ‘I feel lucky’ button, they can’t distinguish between BS and utter BS.”

After retiring from IU, Sperber became a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Berkeley. Although an admitted liberal, Sperber observed that, “In terms of politics, in the grad school at Berkeley, I’m considered way to the right.”

Actually many of Sperber’s proposed education reforms might be embraced by the right. For example, he complains that “too many professors grade for content” without considering grammar and style. As well, he believes that students should take a course in logic and universities should “Test every student every semester.”

He would like to see institutions of higher learning “make graduation contingent on something like the GRE” and place “more emphasis on courses on reading.”

Sperber is the author of Beer & Circus: How Big-Time College Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education. He claims that tenure allowed him to write critically of an IU icon, basketball coach Bobby Knight, while employed by the same employer as “The General.”

Nevertheless, he admits that the professor across the hall from him in Bloomington, slowed down on his teaching duties after achieving tenure in order to free up time to pursue a beloved avocation. “He became a bridge player,” Sperber remembered.

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

If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail contact@academia.org