A Dragon Called Tenure

Abstract

freedom as ordinarily exercised displays a curiously presbyopic quality: it readily discerns problems at a distance from the campus but has great difficulty seeing those right around home. Not many years before the AAUP was formalizing the rules of tenure as they already existed in the better universities, a professor of English at Columbia was writing to Ludwig Lewisohn, then a graduate student, that it was terribly hard....for a man of Jewish birth to get a good position....I cannot help feeling that the chances are going to be greatly against you. It was a statement of fact, devoid even of moral indignation. That Jews are now abundantly represented on faculties of American colleges and universities is owing to the enhanced emphasis on science in the Second World War and to the subsequent expansion of higher education itself. No thanks at all are due to the exercise of aca-