Once More on Taylor

Graham has a couple of posts up on Taylor (here and here). I would disagree on the 7-year contract part, if only because in this environment that would be whittled down to 5 then 3 then 1-year contracts. And the part about it helping to raise salaries meets with a similar problem. Also, how would it? If there’s a glut right now keeping the market artificially low, then how would that be improved if, say, a person having done two 7-year contracts is having to compete with all those others as well? How many schools would simply opt to hire a cheaper up-and-comer?

I wish I could find a link, but a while ago, I saw a really old article (circa the 60s) about why tenure would never go away, and it was precisely because schools would never want to give up their major talent. Well, that hasn’t quite worked.

But in any case, Graham makes a great point about the affect of the article (regarding that he seemed to simply enjoy telling grad students in a previous work that they would have no careers): it’s so badly argued, as are his other articles, that one gets the point that he just simply likes jousting about it and offending his colleagues, as opposed to saying anything substantive. I’ve read his previous articles on this as well as his articles on getting rid of departments and telling grad students to find other careers. Never, even when quoting the most empirical data, does he ever cite anything, suggesting this really is just armchair stuff. But we have great colleagues who have studied average salaries, salaries over time, salaries of tenured vs. untenured, and so on. They’ve also studied the impact over time on institutions that have moved away from tenure. Instead, he literally just makes up data in his head about salaries.

He seems to think the only argument for tenure is that academics like to have job security and not to work. He doesn’t care about this issue anymore than a dog really wants to catch its tail, or at least he doesn’t care about actually researching a topic he is writing about. It’s the pose that matters.

Alas, his argument against tenure is only working in one particular case.