THE CONTINUING SELF-IMMOLATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION.

An Inside Higher Ed columnist contemplates tenure riturals.  Tenure is a form of hiring, faculty governance is political, and coalitions and factions among the faculty intrude extraneous considerations into the votes on faculty and college committees.

When we rely instead on hidden networks of knowledge and power, we create a system that will always disadvantage marginalized scholars and advantage scholars from privileged groups.

In other words, those unspoken rules and vague expectations contribute to holding down and pushing out scholars of color, queer scholars, scholars of/with (dis)ability and others historically marginalized in the academy. Such processes and norms were frequently created with exclusionary and sometimes white supremacist, cis-heteropatriarchal and ableist intentions. While academics need to have a deeper conversation about who came up with the rules and how we might rewrite them, simply being more explicit about the tenure and promotion process can serve as an equity intervention.

Cut through the pomo-babble, and perhaps what you have is a columnist making a case that "collegiality" ought be part of the promotion formula, and the existing insiders ought screen for collegiality by, oh, being collegial.

I suspect, though, that it's just another case of deconstructing institutions at your peril, with that word salad disguising the possibility that there's an affirmative action asterisk on a lot of those allegedly marginalized scholars.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but perhaps the people who have the task of shaping the next generation of minds ought to have some standards and some ability.