Understanding the Development of Student Thinking in the College Classroom
mutually acceptable compromises;” most faculty do not have the luxury of “fair” negotiation with their institutions. My point is justifiable if one notes that there is an increasing number of untenured and nontenurable faculty at most public institutions, secular private institutions, community colleges, religious colleges, and historically Black institutions. Indeed, Poskanzer presumes the model of the research university, stating on page 105 about service to the institution that a professor’s “conduct as an institutional citizen, while of genuine importance and value to a college or university, is not as essential to the work of the institution as his or her teaching and scholarship.” This presumptive statement evidences a bias toward particular kinds of institutions and particular kinds of faculty work. Poskanzer’s presumption about the centrality of particular kinds of faculty work and the predominance of the research-university model also accounts for his statement on page 70 that “faculty have little to fear from extra-institutional challenges to their teaching.” Those of us in schools of education will find this statement problematic, as federal and state governments, corporations, and private foundations clearly exert direct or indirect pressure on faculty to teach in ways that are assumed to lead ultimately to better test scores in children. Many schools of education faculty (nay, many faculty everywhere) are pressured to succumb to a vocationalist, mercantile understanding of teaching and learning. So, indeed, faculty, especially in schools of education, have very much to fear from extra-institutional challenges to their teaching. In making the point about extra-institutional challenges to teaching, however, Poskanzer points out that institutional challenges to faculty work are clearly problematic for faculty autonomy. There can be no question about this point, but one must also find problematic the somewhat false dichotomy set up here. Faculty and their institutions, while distinct entities, are mutually constitutive of each other. Institutions are not disembodied things. They require the action of individuals to remain institutions as such. Institutions certainly constrain faculty choices, but faculty are an essential part of what make up institutions. Thus, faculty may be complicit in the constraints they seek to challenge. In this sense the legal distinction between the institutions and its faculty is false: Faculty behavior may actually be institutional behavior. All in all, however, these disagreements are more philosophical than technical. Poskanzer’s Higher Education Law: The Faculty is an interesting, informative, and very useful book that works both as a teaching tool and as a guide to understanding the legal land mines that are part and parcel of what we as faculty believe we do.