How many fields of pursuit in America come with a guarantee that the employee can never be fired?
Owners typically cannot be fired, but corporate boards of directors often fire CEOs who come in with poor results. Sports managers and coaches get fired all the time. School teachers can be fired. First responders can be fired. In law firms, when an associate “makes partner,” he theoretically cannot be fired, but that is because a law firm partner actually becomes a part owner of the firm. So he does not get a set hourly wage anymore but a share of the firm’s annual profits. In many firms, the new term for a “law partner” is a “shareholder.” And even then, if the partner fails to continue bringing in new business or billing a reasonable number of hours, he will get pressured intensely to leave. I worked for ten years at three of America’s most prestigious firms — Jones Day, Akin Gump, and Baker and Hostetler — and I saw this first hand.
So the campuses are full of tenured professors — approximately half their faculties — many of whom are legit and many others of whom barely work at all.
People get fired. Deans get fired. The president of the University of Pennsylvania got fired recently, and that snake was followed out the door by the plagiarizing former president of Harvard. In time, the president at Columbia rightly will get the boot. Presidents and other elected government officials get fired by the voters, or they simply get termed-out. Almost everyone, other than owners of private businesses, can be fired. (READ MORE from Dov Fischer: Sue the Members of the College Boards)
Except for tenured university professors.
And that is just wrong. And outrageous. It is corrupt. There is nothing like it.
I was a non-tenured adjunct professor of law for sixteen years at a once-fine Southern California law school, and also for six years at an outstanding University of California law school. An “adjunct” is a part-timer. We are hired to teach, but are not expected to be on campus 9-5, holding office hours, attending committee meetings, sponsoring or guiding or mentoring individual students for graduate papers or law review submissions, and publishing scholarly articles in respectable law reviews. Rather, we are hired only to teach. Some of us adjuncts are not such good teachers and do not last very long. Many others of us are far better at teaching than are the tenured professors whose roles are described above. We love teaching, and we are fabulous at it. We love our students and give them far more personal time than the tenured professors do because teaching and students are our passion, not publishing weighty law review articles that no one ever reads.
There are downsides as well as upsides to being an adjunct. We do not get the employee benefits that tenured professors do. No health coverage. No life insurance. Virtually no pension. We have to pay for parking every time we show up. We get no office to meet students, so we have to meet with them at coffee shops or outdoors on campus. And our contracts are for six months only, only one semester at a time. One wrong step, and sayonara.
I taught for 16 years, so was hired and rehired 32 consecutive times. They could have dropped me any term they wanted, but the students loved me to pieces, and I was one of the most effective professors at the law school. How do I know? Because I received hundreds upon hundreds of emails from my students over those sixteen years saying so, even emails two and three years after they graduated saying that, looking back, the only class and professor they took in all their law school education that proved valuable in actual practice was mine. One wrote me that she was working for a partner who did not know a certain rule of civil procedure, so she quickly chimed in, without researching, and told him the law. He responded: “Pretty sharp! Where did you go to law school?” She told him. He replied: “Oh, that one. I’ll bet you had Fischer!” Her retort: “Who else?”
I have hundreds of these, close to a thousand such affectionate letters. I kept them in case I ever got fired over political correctness and cancel culture. When my beloved wife and best friend of twenty years, dear Ellen of blessed memory, passed away in July 2020, I knew it was time for me to “call it a day” with law teaching. I already had achieved far more than I ever hoped to attain as an adjunct. I no longer needed the money. No longer wanted to grade final exams. But I had continued doing it because I absolutely loved my students of all ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds and teaching them, and it was a 90-minute car drive each way — three hours total every Wednesday — during which Ellen of blessed memory always accompanied me. Those three hours with Ellen were worth everything in the world to me, especially as she became ill. As an added bonus, her presence allowed me to use the carpool lane, saving an hour on the drive. Once she passed and went to Paradise to be with the souls of the Righteous, and with COVID rampant on earth, and me diagnosed with terminal interstitial lung disease (saved later only by an emergency lung transplant), I realized I had to give up law school teaching, like Joe DiMaggio did with the Yankees, at the top of my game.
And then I got a push. The great Rush Limbaugh, G-d rest his soul, for the third time in three years, read an entire article of mine on his radio show. Whenever he would do that, it would guarantee an extra 100,000 or more readers of that column. Once, he even got me one million readers. So Rush read it, and it made waves, and two wacko leftist professors at the law school demanded that I be “investigated.” I was not sure what would be investigated. I am an American citizen and have papers to prove it. I had a circumcision on my eighth day. I have copies of my college degree from Columbia, my graduate degree and rabbinical ordination (s’mikha) from Yeshiva University, and my law degree from UCLA. I even have a certificate that I was a good boy and drank my milk in first grade. But the wacko leftists demanded an “investigation.” The Dean of Adjuncts — yes, there is such a thing — phoned me apologetically to tell me he would have to “investigate” me. I used a procedural loophole to delay any “investigation” for two days. I called Jim, a dear friend, the best plaintiffs’ employment law attorney in California, thereafter two former federal chief circuit court judges, and finally an old buddy of decades, and they all unanimously counseled me to walk away. (READ MORE: The Blessing of the College Riots)
I no longer needed it. I no longer needed the money. I had experienced the prestige of being called “Professor Fischer” for 16 years, along with “Rabbi Fischer” for forty. Ellen of blessed memory no longer would be spending three hours in the car with me every Wednesday. I no longer would have access to the carpool lane. I no longer would have to grade another final exam. And, with my corroding lungs, I dared not stand in an over-filled classroom (as my classes always were) amid the height of COVID. So I hung up my syllabus and just walked away.
Let them investigate that.
They once were the 37th best law school in the country. Now they are #61, tied with Seton Hall and the University of Kentucky. But they do have an impressive “Black Lives Matter” web page.
Within 48 hours, I picked up a new income opportunity that paid more than they ever paid, at half the hours, and twice the fun. G-d is so good. I love G-d, my life, and my new wife. But I miss Ellen z”l of blessed memory terribly.
So that is the life of an adjunct. A touch of job insecurity like everyone else. By contrast, a tenured professor cannot ever be fired except for “moral turpitude.” So the campuses are full of tenured professors — approximately half their faculties — many of whom are legit and many others of whom barely work at all or fail to keep up with their assigned subjects. They re-use the same reading lists and syllabi for so many years that students would think the sociology or political science class for which they signed up actually is one in history. They do not prepare. They assign less challenging term papers and administer easier final exams that can be graded by a Scantron machine, rather than by a human being. They are not available for their students because they are busy at committees or researching and writing scholarly papers about deconstructing constructions. They cannot be fired. They are useless, often narcissistic, haters because they are safe to spout any garbage that comes to their minds that day, and their decaying presence blocks opportunities for enterprising newcomers to advance.
A beautiful example can be found in the great Russel Crowe film, “A Beautiful Mind.” The guy is a genius, a brilliant, remarkable mathematician. But he does not care a rat’s petootie about his students. He hates even going through the motions of teaching. He just wants to think and publish. (The story is far more gripping than that, but this pertains here.) That is what too many tenured professors are. How do I know? I studied under them. I worked alongside them. I know them. To be fair, no blanket description can fairly describe an entire class of people. But the shoe fits.
Tenure goes back to the American Association of University Professors 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and even earlier. The idea was to protect free expression and intellectual freedom to think, to explore, to take daring risks in pursuit of knowledge. But in today’s world, the impact is the opposite: it imposes ideological strictures of severe conformity. Professors seeking tenure in a liberal arts field where the faculty department is predominantly or even uniformly liberal and progressive/woke are forced to conceal and even to transform their views to accord with the department’s left orthodoxy, or they will be denied tenure or even initial employment. Therefore, anticipating their future careers, they must publish politically correct views in journals and be wary of what they post on social media. From the day they enter grad school, in fact, they must be careful to select a topic for their dissertation that will not get them “dinged” when they seek academic employment.
Tenure is a century old, out of date, and must be stopped. Laws must be enacted, both by the federal and any state government that allocates money to colleges and universities, that any institution receiving such public funds — toward scholarships, fellowships, student loans, research, or even by means of tax exemptions — must document to the government that the school no longer maintains a policy of academic faculty tenure. (READ MORE: Colleges Must Stop Admitting Foreign Students for Two Years)
That does not mean that professors should be fired every term. On the contrary, any experienced excellent professor always will be rehired over an inexperienced newcomer. However, the dross will be discarded and the chaff sifted out. Those who use their classrooms as platforms to indoctrinate and brainwash will be held to greater scrutiny. If they are teaching lies, their lectures and classrooms will be exposed by students with video clips on social media, and public outrage will place their employment in jeopardy. College and university directors and trustees, fearing — correctly — they themselves will be sued by the federal government and in parents’ class actions, will act to remove the garbage. Tenured professors will have no choice left but to teach and publish wisdom and useful knowledge, not Hate America poison or conspiracy theories that George W. Bush worked with Bin Laden to take down the World Trade Center’s twin towers.
As part of a comprehensive program to fix the rot in our colleges and universities, the practice of academic faculty tenure must be abolished.
To receive Rav Fischer’s Weekly Extensive Torah Commentaries or to attend any or all of Rav Fischer’s weekly 60-minute live Zoom classes on the Weekly Torah Portion, the Biblical Prophets, the Mishnah, Rambam Mishneh Torah, or Advanced Judaic Texts, send an email to: shulstuff@yioc.org
His 10-part exciting and fact-based series of one-hour classes on the Jewish Underground liberation movement (Irgun, Lechi, and Haganah) and the Rise of Modern Israel can be found here. In it, he uses historic video clips of Irgun, Lechi, and Haganah actions, decades of past Arab terrorist atrocities, as well as stirring musical selections from the Underground and video’d interviews of participants, to augment data, statistics, maps, and additional historical records to create a fascinating, often gripping, and scholarly enriching educational experience about issues that remain deeply relevant today as Israel engages in an existential war in Gaza against Hamas terrorism.
His latest deeply moving weekly series of informational and inspirational programs on the Hamas Gaza war may be found here.
His 40-part Bible Study series covering all of I Samuel (First Samuel) intensively with Talmudic and Midrashic commentaries, and now into II Samuel is now up here.
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