UNFINISHED BUSINESS

In his first annual report Dean Ferguson has erected an impressive monument to the late tenure controversy, and inscribed thereon a sad and gentlemanly epitaph to the ten assistant professors. With a wealth of facts and figures the Dean has traced the origins of the tenure crisis which broke last year--the over-expansion of the optimistic twenties, and the retrenchment necessitated by a stationary budget and the Committee of Eight's new rank system. He describe the care with which the Administration regretfully lopped off the now-famous ten, and points out that while ten men were fired, about twenty-three were given permanent posts, an exceptionally large number.

If this is all there is to the tenure fight, then what was the shooting about? Was all the criticism levelled at the Administration "premature, as Dean Ferguson maintains? Was the violent opposition to Administration policy registered by Phi Beta Kappa, the Teachers Union, the Student Council, a powerful insurgent Faculty bloc, a half dozen student organization, and hundreds of undergraduate petitioners all cockeyed?

The answer is No. Students, admittedly, didn't know all the facts and figures. Nor did most of them want to. All they knew was that ten brilliant men had been pinched off between the slide-rule and the axe, and would leave great gaps that could never he filled by renumbering courses. Take the English Department, for example. Four assistant professors were given terminating appointments last spring. All are here now Presumably two will lock up their brief-cases for the last time this spring, two more in June, 1941. This year these men are giving eight half-course, and carry a large portion of the tutorial work in English, Slavic, and Comparative Literature. Undergraduate were rightly worried about who would teach these courses and carry this tutorial load when these four men had gone.

But the criticism was not all negative, despairing, and unconstructive. Surely the Faculty opposition was not uninformed. By November the crisis focused on the problem of "frozen associate professors"--of which there is no mention in Dean Ferguson's report. Briefly, the opposition denied that the case of the ten assistant professors was a budgetary question. They pointed out the incontrovertible fact that the burden of dismissals had fallen so unequally as to cripple three departments. And the opposition's solution, the frozen associate professorship scheme, was adopted by the Faculty, and presumably approved by the Administration. These "frozen associate professors were designed to introduce flexibility into the new tenure system by enabling departments to keep their permanent staffs at full strength without unbalancing the budget.

If traditional standards are to be preserved, the hard-hit Departments must make full use of their hard-won privilege. The Faculty Dean's report may have sounded the final gong on the tenure fight, but there still has been no pay-off. To use a phrase of Dean Ferguson's the matter of the frozen associate professorships is still "unfinished business."