Invisible Adjunct

No, it just changes the identity of the censor. What chance does someone who really dissents from the prevailing orthodoxy have in most departments? To ask that question is to answer the larger one.

It's hard to get tenure unless you have already demonstrated that you have nothing of consequence to say.

On the other hand, one at least has the option of changing course after getting tenure. What chance do you have without it?

"It's hard to get tenure unless you have already demonstrated that you have nothing of consequence to say."

What an absolutely perfect, Ambrose Bierce-style aphorism! It makes me think that a "Devil's Dictionary" for the academy would be great fun to read.

The "Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education" has already been written by Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt":

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0415922038/qid=1059154207/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-8775383-9083814?v=glance&s=books

"On the other hand, one at least has the option of changing course after getting tenure. What chance do you have without it?"

The million dollar question. Are there other ways (eg, laws protecting against wrongful dismissal) to protect academic freedom, or is tenure the only possible safeguard? And if the process of achieving tenure involves the domestication of dissent and the silencing of unorthodox views, at what point do you say that the very system that is meant to protect academic freedom infringes too heavily on the very same principle?

There's a difference between having nothing of consequence to say and having dissenting or unorthodox views.

Once you're on a tenure track at an American university, chances are excellent that you'll get tenure. (Check out the statistics on this if you have doubts.) Some might want to claim that tenure-track people suppress their exciting, fertile, unorthodox ideas because they think they won't get tenure if they express them. I'd say - based on a good deal of experience - that university professors in the humanities tend to be timid followers and therefore are very unlikely to have ideas of any kind, threatening or unthreatening. Thus I think the issue of intellectual integrity and tenure is a non-starter. Most people who truly have generative and unorthodox ideas will pursue them pretty much under any conditions short of a gulag.

My experience is that you are unlikely to get hired into a tenure track job if your views dissent from orthodoxy in the hiring department, even if you pretend they don't. I only got hired by places where I didn't need to do any pretending about what I really thought. Maybe I'm just a bad pretender :)