Last week, two tenured faculty members in the Cognitive Science department of the University of Lousiana at Lafayette received termination notices. They have two years to find new jobs, and if they don’t find other employment, then the university has promised to try to employ them in non-tenured positions in other departments in which they are qualified to teach.

Here is a link to a news story about this: The Advertiser Article. The article does not say who the two faculty members are, and it seems that the university is trying to maintain a degree of privacy concerning their identity. However, in case you are curious, here is a link to Cognitive Science at UL.

For me, this is interesting for a number of reasons. During my last year at Rice, as I was finishing up my Ph.D., I was invited to interview at UL. Only it wasn’t called UL at the time, it was called USL and, in French, l’Université des Acadiens. This was a big opportunity for me, because my plan was to go into ape language studies, and USL also ran the New Iberia Primate Center, a 48 acre facility that houses one of the world’s largest non-human primate breeding colonies.

I had already outlined the program of research that I wanted to embark on with chimpanzees and literacy, but I did not have a chimpanzee of my own, and I did not see how I ever would acquire one, at the time, so the opportunity to work in cognitive science at USL would have been a very good step toward achieving my research goals.

I was being interviewed by the English Department, and they were considering a number of my qualifications: I could teach linguistics, French, and Creative Writing as well as cognitive science. Louisiana has a very rich history, and as a writer I would have had access to a lot of historical documents if hired there, which when I am writing today I have to scrounge around for online.

Being hired there would have been wonderful for me on so many levels, but it just didn’t happen. I gave a job talk, I got a tour of the New Iberia Primate Center, and I was taken out to dinner. But no job offer emerged from all that. Sometimes that’s just how it is.

If we are determined, we make our dreams come true no matter what the setbacks, and even though it did mean a delay of several years for me, I did eventually start Project Bow, without any kind of institutional support.

What do you think? Should the tenured faculty have been terminated? According to the article, there are only fourteen students enrolled in the Cognitive Science program, and the university stopped enrolling new students into the program after the fall of 2010.

I used to be a big supporter of tenure, but frankly that was when I thought that I would have the opportunity to become tenured myself. I agree with the commenter who said that if tenured faculty can be terminated and then offered non-tenured positions, then tenure really doesn’t mean anything.

I disagree, on the other hand, with all those commenters who said that people who have tenure deserve it because they worked hard. Everybody works hard. Bricklayers work hard, and they don’t get tenure. Garbage men work hard, and they don’t get tenure. Independent ape language researchers with no salary also work hard, and they don’t get tenure. So, no, working hard is not a significant criterion.

Some others said that those people who educate the public deserve tenure. But that’s nonsense, too. Many of the world’s best educators, including parents who home school, do not have tenure.

Was there ever a good reason for tenure? Yes, I think there was at one time. But the reason was supposed to be to allow independent thinkers the opportunity to do research and to share their findings, no matter how controversial those findings happened to be. People with tenure were supposed to be guaranteed freedom of speech, whereas the average working stiff was not, because it was assumed that they would have something really important to say.

Do today’s academicians share important new findings with the world? Are the ones who are hired doing the cutting edge research? Or are they just maintaining society’s biases by being excellent teachers of yesterday’s received knowledge? How many of those cognitive scientists are actually working on solving a real problem in cognitive science?

I don’t really know. I just know I’m glad I didn’t get that job, because I think they would never have allowed me to do what I have done on my own with Bow. Being hired would have been a financial and social godsend, but it would probably have retarded my progress.

It would be good for scientists to have an ivory tower to retire to where politics doesn’t play a role. But in order to do that, the ivory tower cannot be funded by the public.  If the public is involved, then the public gets a vote.

The academic world is not immune from the ups and downs of the marketplace. Many academicians vote liberal, if for no other reason than because it means more funding for education. But when the state goes bankrupt, due to burdening the economy to the point where it can no longer support the bloated academic institutions, then even academicians feel the pain.

Is it right to stop a research program just because you don’t have enough students enrolled? No, if it’s a good research program, that would be a shame. But in that case, you need independent funding, and you need to stop fooling the public into thinking you will give them valuable diplomas so they can get jobs in return for their tax dollars. The economy doesn’t work that way. It never did!

© 2011 Aya Katz