“Canada’s first boat people were the Norse who came ashore a thousand years ago in Newfoundland.”
Read the rest of Michael Valpy’s article on the boat people here. There are some errors of historical fact in it, as you would expect in a newspaper article, but his basic message is a sound one.
Have a look at this very interesting and thoughtful article about tenure. Christopher Beam is against the North American tenure system, but the article isn’t egghead-bashing by any means. In fact, he sympathizes with professors and recognizes that it can hurt all parties: universities, students, and academics. This is very different from the standard right-wing “talk radio” critique of tenure.
Key passages:
the clincher for the anti-tenure argument may come from the very people it is supposed to benefit: academics. Specifically, young academics. Consider the career path of an aspiring full-time tenured professor… by the time you come up for tenure, you’re 40. For men, the timeline is inconvenient. But for women who want to have children, it’s just about unworkable… Princeton President Shirley Tilghman once called the tenure system “no friend to women”
Sounds pretty plausible to me. The tenure system can be terrible to women.
Defenders say that tenure helps attract the best and brightest. Universities can’t match the salary offered by a pharmaceutical company or an investment bank, the thinking goes, but they can offer job security. Yet the appeal of job security may be overrated. Tenure may be an added incentive, but it’s almost never a deal maker.
Last month, Atlantic Magazine blogger Megan McArdle has sparked a lively online debate about the future of tenure. I suspect that this debate inspired the Christopher Beam article cited above.
McArdle is totally opposed to tenure for academics. I don`t agree with everything she said in that article, but she has a great command of the language. I particularly liked this sentence, where she was dissecting the old argument that tenure protects freedom of political speech:
The current tenure system only protects revolutionary, dangerous ideas to the extent that they spring full blown from an academic’s head after he has secured tenure, startling the hell out of everyone who hired him.
In a follow-up to her original post, Megan wrote:
One of the interesting response I’ve seen from a lot of people is that tenure is a non-pecuniary reward that enables us to keep the cost of teaching lower. That’s one way to think about it. But I think of it not in terms of annual salary, but as an accounting cost. And in accounting terms, hiring someone on a five year contract at $80,000 is much less expensive than hiring them on a forty year contract at $65,000. One is a liability of perhaps $350,000; the other, of millions… Imagine I offered you one cell phone contract for two years at $100 a year, and another for 50 years at $90 + inflation. Would you really consider the second contract “cheaper”?
On one level, McArdle is right. Tenure creates a huge “off-balance sheet” liability for universities. But the very fact this liability isn’t on the books explains why universities are unlikely to abolish tenure in the future. Abolishing tenure would likely involve commutation payments to tenured professors. “Ok, nobody at this university will have tenure any longer, but in return for giving up tenure, you all get $X thousand cash”. Borrowing the money for the commutation payments to end tenure would add to the institution’s on-balance sheet indebtedness.
That would be difficult to do at the present time, especially since myopic people tend only to see the obligations on the university’s books, such as pensions. They don’t see how borrowing money now can actually reduce one’s long term obligations.
In the 1850s, the Canadian government borrowed money in London to fund the commutation payments of that ended the seigneurial system and gave farmers in Lower Canada freehold tenure to their land. See “An Act Respecting the General Abolition of Feudal Rights and Duties”, passed in 1854. We were only able to do this buy out because the costs of borrowing were relatively low at that point. In the 1860s, when interest rates in London were much higher, it would have been much far difficult to have raised the cash to buy off the seigneurial class.
The Seigneurial System of French Canada
The financial situation the world right now resembles that of the 1860s. The 2008 liquidity crisis and its aftermath, which have devastated universities, is strikingly similar to the crisis that followed the collapse of the Overend Gurney bank in 1866.
Moreover, voters are now firmly against the idea of governments taking on more debt. So I don’t see provincial or state governments providing the cash for the commutation payments needed to end tenure.
I think that I have found another hole in McArdle’s argument– she doesn`t consider that fact that the job security that comes from tenure is a non-taxable benefit. In terms of security of future income, the salary given to a tenured professor is more like a government-issued annuity or a GIC than the earnings of, say, a small businessperson. A small businessperson`s income is more like anticipated future earnings from investments in the stock market– you might make a little money, but you might lose it all. It could be feast or famine. Promising a professor that his or her income will be paid until age 65 regardless of performance or market demand is like giving someone an annuity. You have peace of mind.
Consider now the issue of taxability. If an employer offers you a free gym membership or a bus pass as a non-salary perk of the job, you have to pay income tax on it, with the government estimating its approximate cash value. It is easy for the income tax authority to estimate the value of the gym membership. It can go to the website of LA Fitness and get a quote. But if the employer offers a low but lifetime-guaranteed salary instead of a higher but less secure salary, the tax rate on the salary isn`t affected by the fact it is more secure than a more precarious income that you might derive from another occupation. Given that most academics are in fairly high income tax brackets, taxability is an important factor. If tenure were abolished and academic salaries became more precarious, universities might have to offer higher salaries as a way of getting people to work for them. Indeed, Boston College, which recently abolished tenure for some new academics, compensated for the lack of job security with higher salaries. Of course, those higher salaries are taxable.
Federal income tax was re-introduced in the United States in 1913, following the passage of the 16th amendment. At the time, income tax was levied on just the top 2 or 3 percent of the population, a group that probably included full professors as well as doctors and dentists. The legal concept of tenure emerged at roughly the same time, also in the United States. I strongly suspect that this wasn’t a coincidence, since tenure is a way of giving your employees a non-taxable benefit.
Another thought occurs to me. Does the existence of tenure influence the mix of personality types that are attracted into the professoriate? Does tenure select for cautious, risk-averse people?
Anyway, I had better get back to work on this publication. I need to be tenure-ready by the time I become a father.
🙂
Alan Taylor has a new book coming out on the War of 1812, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies. The publication date is in October, but you can pre-order it here.
Taylor will be speaking about his new book at University in Toronto in October. I shall post details when they are available.
“In this deeply researched and clearly written book, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Alan Taylor tells the riveting story of a war that redefined North America. During the early nineteenth century, Britons and Americans renewed their struggle over the legacy of the American Revolution. Soldiers, immigrants, settlers, and Indians fought in a northern borderland to determine the fate of a continent. Would revolutionary republicanism sweep the British from Canada? Or would the British empire contain, divide, and ruin the shaky American republic?”
Born in Maine, Alan Taylor teaches American and Canadian history at the University of California, Davis. His book The Divided Ground examined the legacy of the American Revolution in the Great Lakes region. He has won the Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes for American history. He also serves as a contributing editor to The New Republic.
Books of this sort make me wonder whether it is time for historians of 19th century North America to abandon terms such as “Canadian” and “American” (i.e., United States) history entirely. Perhaps it would be better to speak of “Great Lakes region history”, “French America history”, etc.
News that a shipload of Tamil refugees is steaming towards Canada’s Pacific coast has generated a big debate in Ottawa over what to do with these would-be asylum seekers. Participants are making comparisons to past incidents of this nature. Olivia Chow, an NDP MP, invoked the memory of the Komagata Maru:
“Ms. Chow pointed out that when Canadian officials have turned away a ship with passengers seeking asylum in the past, the results have been tragic. After the Komagata Maru was turned away from Canada in 1914, British soldiers shot 26 of the vessel’s passengers upon its return to India.”
Whether this argument involves the use of history or the abuse of history is a matter of opinion. I’m pleased to see that the Komagata Maru incident is now famous enough for an MP from Toronto to refer to it when speaking to a journalist. That’s very encouraging to me, since the Komagata Maru incident is an important chapter in Canadian history. This news item caught my eye, since I’m currently putting the finishing touchs on a book that, among other things, looks at early Sikh immigration into Canada, with a particular focus on war veterans. The voyage of the Komagata Maru was, in all likelihood, funded by German intelligence agents as a way of weakening the British Empire.
In this podcast, the environmental historian Mark Kuhlberg discusses his new book on the history of forestry education at the University of Toronto.
The podcast was released several months ago and I am only now getting around to listening to it.
I would like to draw your attention to a great article in the TNR by historian John Summers about the politicization of historical research and teaching.
The article focuses on Staughton Lynd, a New Left historian who wrote explicitly politicized books about topics such as the American Revolution that were designed to create usable pasts for his own political causes, such as desegregation or opposition to the Vietnam War.
Lynd denounced the idea of detached, apolitical scholarship about the past as wrong, if not immoral. Some of the material in this article will be familiar to people who have read Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: the American Historical Profession and the Objectivity Question. John Summers makes an interesting observation when he compares Lynd to the right-wing radicals who invoked the American Revolution for their own purposes.
I liked this bit:
“To compare Lynd’s attempt to revive the Continental Congress for the 1960s with today’s conservative revival of the Boston Tea Party is to scratch the surface of such ironies. From radical historians to the conservative faction on the Texas Board of Education and the Arizona government, everyone today wants their country back, by way of their own, “alternative” history. Eager to discover what the past can do for them, few seem as eager to know what it may demand of them.” This article is about the teaching of United States history in the United States, but the lessons can easily be applied to other countries.
Eric Rauchway is one of the rising stars of the history world. He teaches US history at UC Davis. He is young and has already published three books: The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2008; Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America. Hill & Wang, 2006; Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America. Hill & Wang, 2003. He contributes to a pretty interesting blog. I’ve read Blessed Among Nations and loved it. It’s an important book that every _Canadian_ historian and every historian anywhere who is interested in globalization should read.
It turns out that Rauchway has now published a novel set in the 1920s. He took a minor character from the Great Gatsby and made him the central character of a book called Banana Republican. Great title. Check out this NYT review.
“Tony Judt, the lauded and controversial historian whose work took on communists, Zionists, monetarists and finally the degenerative disease that trapped him in his own body, has died. He was 62.”
See more here.
WorldCat’s Author Profile for Judt has some interesting bibliometric data about his career. During his lifetime, Judt generated 51 works in 110 publications in 11 languages. His works are now held in 7,844 libraries worldwide. That’s fine monument, I would say.
Judt wrote books targeted at different audience levels. If we assign a value of 0.01 to a book that large numbers of children can read and 1.00 to a book that only a true academic specialist could penetrate, the average audience level of his books was 0.66. His most accessible book was his best-seller Postwar: a History of Europe Since 1945, which comes in at 0.53. This book was praised by top scholars and read by ordinary people on the subway. It is the dream of most history professors to write books of that sort. Postwar‘s Amazon.ca Sales Rank is #161 in Books. Being the 161st most popular book in Canada isn’t bad for a thick work of historical scholarship.
Kevin Tennent has posted a list of readings for a possible undegraduate seminar on business history on his blog. You should check it out.
I thought I would bring your attention to a new prize designed to incentivize research into the history of corporate social responsibility. It may interest people who present at the Business History Conference.
The CEBC Halloran Prize in the History of Corporate Responsibility recognizes a paper presented at the BHC annual meeting that makes a significant contribution to the history of corporate responsibility. Corporate responsibility is understood to embrace the many ways in which the firm relates to the political realm and the wider society. The prize, which consists of a $500 award and a certificate of recognition, is to be offered annually for a period of five years at the Business History Conference 2010-2014 annual meetings. Relevant topics might include, among others: business engagement with and action on social issues, environmental issues, labor-management relations, business giving, influence of religion on business practice, business influence on government policy, organizational development and strategy related to this topic, etc. The competition is open to papers written in English and dealing with the topic during the twentieth century up to the present time.
2010 Winner:
Rob Goldberg, University of Pennsylvania
“Black Power in the Dollhouse: Shindana Toys and the Business of Social Change”
For more details, see here.
The Past Speaks 