Over at Learning Curves, Rudbeckia Hirta takes a look at the myth of the "real world". A colleague tried to defend a zero-tolerance attendance policy by saying, "If she had a job and missed a meeting, she'd be fired." That's not really how it works, though:
We have people who don't show up to class, people who cancel class for no good reason, and people who don't show up for mandatory meetings, and they (all without tenure!) still work here.
My friends with Real Jobs have griped about enough incompetent fools that they've worked with, that I don't think that zero-tolerance firing is in wide use. My incompetent students seem to manage to hold down their jobs at TGIFriday's and the Macaroni Grill. I can't believe that the Real World is as harsh a place as it is portrayed by instructors who have never worked outside of a university.
In particular, this is one of the things that drives me crazy about arguments over tenure for teachers. The whole concept of tenure is often derided as a terrible distortion of the natural state of affairs in which incompetent malingerers are fired at the first sign of malingering. The educational system is in trouble, the reasoning goes, because the incompetent are shielded from the firing that they so richly deserve.
The problem is, even the most cursory examination of the "real world" reveals no real shortage of bumbling idiots who hang onto their jobs well past the point when they would've been canned under the ideal standards that teachers are supposedly avoiding. And, ironically, the same people who complain about tenure warping the educational system can often be found complaining about their idiotic co-workers who somehow manage not to get fired...
This is not to say that there aren't people in acadeia who ought to be kicked out the door, or failing that, thrown out a window. They're there, all right. I just don't think they're that much more common in the Ivory Tower than in the "real world."
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I think tenure is a good thing on several levels. It frees people to make decisions based not on "will this help me keep my job?" but rather on "is this the right thing to do?". I'm sure there are many counter-examples where this doesn't work, but I've seen it work first hand. Sometimes a teacher (I'm actually refering to the secondary level) makes decisions that are good for the students, but unpopular with some combination of students/parents/administrators. The teacher's tenure protects them from being canned by an insensed parent putting pressure on the school board or adminstrator until time can give some perspective on the situation. If a teacher makes repeated bad decisions, they can be removed, but not just because they are unpopular.
The reason I don't like tenure is becuase of what it does to those of us who are bucking for it but don't have it yet....
The stress is unimaginable, at least for some. Seven years into your job, you face an up-or-down vote, a vote of "you now have permanent job security" vs. "you're not good enough, get out of here right now, oh, and good luck finding another academic job with this taint on your record."
Before you get tenure, there's this constant sense that you're not good enough, that you're always one mistake away from ruining your record and getting fired in a few years. Depending on where you are, it doesn't matter how good you are at a lot of things, if you have one failing it will become a veto criterion, and you will be jettisoned regardless of how much you contribute to the Unviersity. In my case, my spotty funding record has pretty much guaranteed that I won't get tenure, barring a miracle from the NSF this year and a department chair who can convince the tenure commitee that that represents "continuous funding." The result is that I've got a year or two left on this job, but have this inevitable Sword of Damocles hanging over me that will fall in a year and a half... and somehow, given that, I still have to get up my motivation to get out of bed every morning and give my heart and soul to this University that's already indicated they're not really interested in me.
Tenure is not ideal. The stress it creates on the young people among us is a problem.
And, hell, if Sean Carroll can't get tenure, then nobody should feel secure in their job.
-Rob
Project Head Start: 42 consecutive years, budget larger than the National Science Foundation's, 1604 different programs in more than 48,000 classrooms at an average cost of $7222 per child, plus paid staff of 212,000. Even Department of Education studies - sheaves of erudite ANOVA! studies - cannot fabricate any difference between Head Start larvae and control slum bunnies when reading and arithmetic appear.
What's not to like? Ban arithmetic and reading, increase budgets, mission accomplished! Imagine what the $10^11 of pork could have purchased as a Gifted Children program. One additional Feynman discovered and nurtured would have dwarfed the entire summation of 42 years of Project Head Start.
"INERT INTELLIGENCE IS THE PARADIGM OF INSTITUTIONAL RACISM!" University of California/Berkeley, Boalt Hall. I was in the audience when it eructated from the podium.
At one company where I worked, one employee was so insubordinate and incompetent that his supervisor told him that if there were any layoffs, he would be let go. That's harsh.
Mark, that's not harsh. Harsh is being fired for incompetence when there aren't any layoffs. It almost never happens, and when it does it's usually within six months of being hired. In over fifteen years at large corporations, I've seen it happen maybe three or four times. And in many instances, it's a case of a good person in the wrong position -- a hiring mistake.
Anyone who's been in the corporate sector for more than a few years understands that layoffs are an opportunity to get rid of dead weight while being able to blame it on the bean-counters. It also works out better for the person being fired^H^H^H^H^Hlayed off in terms of finding another job.
Not that there's anything particularly "real world" about corporate life. It's just as arbitrary and conventional as any other human institution.
Once I listened to a fellow go on some tirade about academia, saying, "Just wait til they get out in the real world!" And I answered, "For scholars, academia is the real world."
During my recent adventures in the "real world," I have seen a *lot* of people (at least, it was a lot, relative to the total number of employees) get fired, for a variety of reasons, including:
* unsatisfactory performance, as judged by higher-ups
* losing an office-politics battle
* changing direction of company meant their job was no longer necessary
* disliked by new management
In all cases, it was a combination of multiple factors. For example, if the folks whose jobs were deemed no longer necessary had not also been
Continuation from #6 (I hit "post" by accident):
...had not also lost the office politics battle, the new management might have tried to fit them into a different position.
So, while you're right that missing meetings or whatever would probably not get a person fired immediately, but it will put them in a position where they'll probably get fired when a business reason comes along.
I used "harsh" ironically. The guy in question had refused to do something his supervisor had told him directly to do. I was amazed that he was not fired. The only employee that I know of who was fired had a long record of not coming to work and refusing to follow direction. He was eventually fired. Then he did what every employer fears: he sued. I am pretty sure he lost, but that's the kind of hassle most employers don't want.
whereas in the Real World, you have that feeling for life.
Pam hits the nail on the head. I left the Real World for the non-profit world. I make less, and I will get fired if I fuck up or break certain rules, but I won't get fired for any of the reasons Pam listed. It's like a huge weight has been lifted.
I've spent time in academia, corporate America, and as an independent businessman, and in my experience that list is in increasing order of the "realness" of the "world". It seems simply a matter of how directly one's good and bad decisions effect one's compensation.
That said, I'd say the variance of the "realness" is quite high, leaving plenty of independent businessmen that are more incompetent than plenty of academics. Tenure seems more of a problem in high schools, where I met some of the most incompetent people I've met anywhere, than it is in colleges.
Of course, this is all from limited personal experience. I'd be curious to see some sort of study of the issue, though just objectively defining the terms we are bandying about would be quite a chore in itself.
I have seen people get fired for good reason. I have seen people not get fired when there was ample cause, in my opinion, to do so. And I have seen layoffs come a sweep through several times like cleansing brushfire (which, like any other brushfire, gets some of the good with the bad, too.)
My suspicion is that if I worked for a smaller company, my world would be even more "real" than it is now. I certainly played my part in making the world very real for several people at a tiny company, a few days ago.
It's obviously absurd that you'll be fired for missing a meeting. But pointing out that absurdity, as a backhanded defense of tenure, is equally absurd.