I appreciate Provost Mark Schlissel’s P’15 illuminations captured in The Herald’s article, “U. deficit could constrain budget planning” (Nov. 8) — that “the University would die” if it did not use its resources to expand really sheds some discerning light on why yearly tuition hikes, underpaid graduate students, understaffed dining services and collapsing chemistry cabinets are okay. Old Brown would croak if we allocated resources to these matters instead of a new dining hall with a fire pit.
Of course, Schlissel didn’t stop there. He stated, “If we could eliminate academic tenure, we wouldn’t have to grow,” because, The Herald paraphrases, “the University could replenish the faculty with new hires to generate fresh ideas.” My intuition tells me that making faculty members increasingly disposable is not the best strategy for attracting faculty or incentivizing the production of these fresh ideas. But this is no joke: Administrators have been eliminating full-time, tenure-track positions from academia since the Reagan era, seriously diminishing the power of faculty in decisions of employment and curricula. Today, under 30 percent of teaching positions in higher education are full-time and tenure-track. Further, without the job security of tenure, academics become seriously compromised in the ability to express political views in ways that administrators find threatening, a critical point in the events surrounding the protest against New York City Police Department Commissioner Ray Kelly.
Students and workers, professors and union employees: we cannot let Brown balance its budget and build its fire pits on our backs in a silence we are obliged to maintain while bigots are paid to inflict their speech on us.
Stoni Tomson ’15
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