Monday, August 3, 2020

An Extended Rant on the Failings of Richard Lockeidge's *Twice Retired*


This is something I don’t do very often when reading a novel set largely on a college campus, because it is fairly often that the author does not have a full understanding of the institutions, and of the ways in which decisions are made.  Sometimes, however, the impulse is too strong to ignore.  That’s the case tonight, now that I have finished reading Richard Lockridge’s Twice Retired.  The murder (of the chairman of the college’s board of trustees; he’s a retired Army general, named Philip rmstrong) in the midst of protests against the war in Viet Nam (the book was published in 1970).  I am, with some reluctance, going to pass over his treatment of the protests and the protesters, and focus on his depiction of the (fictional) Dyckman University.

I will make only one comment on the mystery.  In keeping with the other books in this series, Lockridge has made it quite easy for the reader to identify the murderer.

What follows is an extended rant on my part on Lockridge’s failure to get the setting of his story anywhere near right.

Early in the book, two of our protagonists arrive at Dyckman to interview Carl Benson, an not yet tenured assistant professor of English (whose primary field is composition).  They enter the classroom in which Benson is concluding his class in “Advanced English Composition.” The scene is described as follows:


There were some fifty young men and women sitting in the room…

Let’s stop right there.  This is a selective, expensive private university.  I attended (from 1965 to 1969) such a university (albeit not in New York City).  Composition classes tend to be small because grading in such classes is time consuming and difficult.  It’s difficult enough to give essays in any course, but composition is different.  In other disciplines (such as mine, economics) grading can be easier, even of essay exams, because there are, usually, more nearly and less nearly right answer.  But in a composition class, it is the process, the individuality, that matters.  Even in an introductory comp class, grading a large number of papers would require a great amount of time.  My intro comp class (required of all of us) was a class of about 20.  This is an advanced comp class, where the nuances become even more important.   A 50 introductory comp class would be difficult; an advanced comp class of 50 would be a brutal assignment.


And the class is winding up, and Benson addresses the class.  I should note that we are nearing the end of the semester.  There is a suggestion in the text that he has been lecturing, which is, in and of itself unusual in a comp class.  In any event, Benson addresses the class:


“Imitate no one.  No one.  Learn the rules,  Yes; then learn to ignore the rules.  Make your own rules.  Rules that are rules.  Your own rules…[following an interruption, in which Benson takes note of the investigators]…Nine tenths of you will never learn to write,  Of that one tenth—that doomed tenth—two thirds will fall victim to the Hemingway syndrome.  Chop. Chop, chop, bang.  [A student drops her notebook, and Benson proceeds to humiliate her.  Eventually he continues; we are told he speaks “angrily.”]  Find your own way.  In writing as in other things in your life.  If any of you learns to write.  You will be under pressure to conform,  Most of you will conform, in the end.  It is the safe way to live.  The establishment approves of conformity.  It sometimes even rewards conformity.  Do as you’re told.  That is the eleventh commandment.  For those of you who are black it is the eleventh and the twelfth.  [A pause to regard the investigators.]  There may be one of you who understands what I am saying…One of you who will, even as he grows older, continue to be free.  If necessary, to defy.  Defy in his life and in what he says, writes, about his life.  For that one[another pause to look at the investigators]…the last fifty minutes will not have been completely wasted.

Seriously.  Lockridge thought that academics—some academics, anyway—actually talk like that?  In a moment, I’ll get to Benson’s future at Dyckman,  Suffice it to say that if I were the chair of the English department, and (as we shall see) Benson did not have tenure, I’d not renew his contract.


Now.  What would happen in an actual advanced composition class?  To begin with, it would be small, probably fewer than 20 students.  The class would not consist of a professorial lecture.  The students would read their work aloud, most likely, so that the class (not just the professor, but the entire class) could engage in a discussion of the work.  (Even in 1970 that’s how it would have gone.)
  

Benson does not disappear from the stage.  He becomes a focus of the investigation—because Armstrong, the chairman of the Board of Trustees—is pressuring the university’s president to fire him.  Again, as it happens, Benson is nearing the end of his probationary status, and is a candidate for tenure.  And this leads to the next badly handled element of the book.  As Lockridge writes it, the decision on tenure (or not) is entirely that of the university president (James Decker).  And (this, unfortunately, was in the 1950s and 1960s all to common) Armstrong has made it clear to Decker that Benson must be fired.  (Decker would prefer not to fire him.)  So how did tenure decisions then get made?  In much the same way as they are still made.  The school hires someone to teach in a specific program, school, department.  This may be a position for which there is no potential offer (eventually) or tenure.  Ot it may be a tenure-track appointment.


The way tenure-track appointments generally worked, then and now is this:  The new professor is hired for a probationary period (typically, in my experience, 6 or 7 years.  Baring something exceptional—such as extremely bad performance, or overt personal or professional misconduct—the new faculty member teaches, does research, which gets published in professional journals (or in the case of, say, a poet of a writer, writes and publishes).  Let’s say the probationary period is 7 years.  The candidate, beginning in his/her 5th year, prepared an application for tenure which includes all of their professional accomplishments.  A candidate’s research/publication record is reviewed by outside reviewers, who assess the quality and importance of the work.  The candidate’s reaching record is also reviewed, using information from student course/teacher evaluations and (again) outside assessments, particularly if the candidate is basing the case for tenure on excellence in teaching.


The dossier is reviewed by a committee composed of members of the candidate’s department or program, which makes a recommendation.  The first level administrator (department/program chair, or. In some cases, a program dean) makes a recommendation.  There is usually an additional review by tenured faculty—an all-campus promotion and tenure committee—and then by the university’s chief academic officer.  Which goes to the university’s chief administrative officer.  In general, a negative recommendation at any level is the kiss of death.   Then it goes to the Board of Trustees.  And, in the 1950s, at any rate, during the height of the McCarthy years, many candidates for tenure whose cases go to the trustees were, in fact, effectively fired.  


In the more recent years, a denial tenure is not an immediate (i.e., end of the academic year) dismissal.  The unfortunate candidate for tenure still has that last year or his or her initial contract which, if you have been one of the unfortunate ones, you spend (as I did in the 1986-87 academic year) your final year looking for a new job, and trying to make sure the people you have been working with will say good things about you…after all, you’re going to need letters of recommendation, and, if your most recent colleagues have nothing good to say about you,  you have a real problem.

That is almost certainly more than any of you want to read, but I feel better.

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