The Evil Urge

Yale's most secret society

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by tenure. Back during my sophomore year, Lee Wandel, the director of undergraduate studies of Renaissance studies and wife of Berkeley Master Harry Stout, was denied a job at Yale and had to move away from both her husband and her young son—Princeton snatched her up at once and gained one of the premier scholars of Protestant Reformation Christianity. Departments like Italian routinely reject fine young professors because it is simply University policy to keep the herds thin. The history department came under fire in February when Serge Lang claimed that tenure recipient Daniel Kevles had forged his research. Now, assistant history Professor Lee Blackwood, GRD '94, has run afoul of departmental decree by protesting alleged corruption—he called himself a "heretic" in a recent interview—and may have suffered professionally for it.

At Yale, an institution that has a morbid preoccupation with secrecy, the tenure process holds the same kind of voodoo mystery as the midnight initiations of Skull and Bones. One wonders if the same people denying tenure to current junior faculty didn't make some sort of blood pact years ago in the tomb, between shots of absinthe and sex with townie whores on the Chippendale, not to hire anyone here unless they're "one of us."

The whole process lends itself to this kind of theorizing because no one truly seems to understand it. A recent report to Yale by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges following its grant of reaccreditation identified the tenure system as "perhaps the most divisive single issue on campus." It went on to relate that, "Many tenured faculty members we met seemed unable to explain the policy or the process clearly and junior faculty feel that they get varied accounts from different people they consult." Why doesn't anyone seem to know what's going on? Even Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead, BR '68, GRD '72, has been quoted as saying (I hope with tongue firmly in cheek) "The Yale system is not self-evident to the natural mind."

Maybe he has a point. There is something fundamentally unnatural, or at least antiquated, about "faculty ladder" politics: a feudalism in which junior serfs serve quietly with the dim hope that they will one day be recognized and transported to professorial nobility. But according to Blackwood, he was willing to accept the rules so long as they were administered without prejudice. Then, a junior faculty member was denied tenure, but was reinstated as a teacher when an influential friend protested to the chair of the committee. Blackwood spoke out against apparent cronyism, and was "punished" for protesting by being denied tenure himself.

It's tough, of course, to know who's telling the truth. Any good historian understands that stories are more complex than any one side ever wants to admit. And if history is made by the winners, it also seems to be made by the whiners. Blackwood clearly has an interest in cashing in on his integrity, maybe as compensation for the Yale paychecks that he won't be receiving after May.

Perhaps what lends the most credibility to Blackwood, though, is that no one else is saying anything. If the history department has nothing to hide, why does it feel so threatened? As usual, representatives of the University are handling this issue with clandestine ineptitude—the same hush-hush politics and denial of wrongdoing that has caused them public relations nightmares in the past, as with the Suzanne Jovin case. They could learn a lot from President Clinton, who is quoted in this week's issue of Newsweek with the self-deprecating quip, "It isn't the mistake that kills you—it's the cover-up."

As a gesture of goodwill, and a long-term survival strategy, Yale needs to forget the lessons it learned from years of secrecy and come as clean as possible. As I look back on the people who have been teaching me the triumphs and mistakes of human thought over the last four years, I would like to believe that history professors can put away departmental politics, perhaps even betray the trust of compatriots and sacrifice their comfort, for the benefit of a communal ideal. After all, what do they have to fear? They've already got tenure.

The tenure system is meant to protect freedom of expression, to give a speaker the security to voice unpopular opinions and still return to work the next day. If what Black-wood says is true, the actions of the history department betray the spirit of what they are seeking to protect. When "publish and perish" becomes the rule, academia loses all its credibility. Unless Yale comes to that realization, it will lose the wise—and dissenting—minds that are its greatest strength.

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