As a member of the NEA through my faculty union, I get the NEA Higher Education Advocate, a goofy little monthly newsletter left over from the heyday of desktop publishing, which features mostly really short clips of news about academic economics and highly predictable, rarely applicable, career advice. The only part of this thing that's actually worth reading is"The Dialogue," a pro/con column featuring -- in highly abbreviated form -- both sides of a burning question about academic institutions and practices. And, if you remember what the question is from last month, there's a few very short responses from readers in the letters column on the back page.

This month's question is"Should untenured faculty vote on tenure and promotion?" and both respondents manage to raise decent issues, but without actually making strong points. Frankly, I haven't been so entertained by this publication in the two years I've been getting it.

Robert Sanford's"No" raises the question of the risks which participating in the process would pose for junior faculty (most of us would accept those risks, by the way; describing it as"no-win" presumes the worst possible result), but concludes with hoary old platitudes about tenured faculty as"the guardians of university culture and department values" (are things going so well that we could say they're doing a good job, overall?) and untenured faculty as"unproven" (well, you hired us) and"not yet in a position to vet the qualifications of others" (but we sit on hiring committees all the time!) and lacking the"experience and authority" to participate in these grown-up decisions (though junior faculty are often better versed in the current literature and disciplinary standards than senior faculty). It's the most unapologetic public defense of the medieval guild nature of the profession I've seen in a while.

The"Yes" from Paula Pedersen lands a bit closer to the mark, but completely ignores the issue of untenured tenure-track faculty (as well as the specific issues of tenure and promotion votes) to focus on the issue of non-tenure track instructors' (which she calls" contract faculty"; I've got a contract, too, but OK) integration with departmental decision-making. She points out, correctly, that non-tenure track instructors are often quite productive and integral to departmental operations and that they have stakes in the department and institution which are no less than that held by tenured and tenure-track faculty. Particularly in the case of departments which are, as she describes her own, fully one-third staffed by adjuncts (probably more, if you count student hours or even just classes, since most full-time adjuncts don't get the"research release" and teach more sections/courses than tenure/tenure-track faculty). She invokes and rejects"separate but equal" at the beginning of the piece and concludes with a jarring reference to Dr. Seuss's"Star-Belly Sneetches" and while I sympathize with her need to find shorthands and shortcuts in a short piece, neither of these really help her much.

(I'm not holding the misspellings in the headline against her personally ["star-bellied sneeches"], but the implications of applying that story to academia as a metaphor boggle the imagination: I didn't get my Ph.D. from Sylvester McMonkey McBean, if you know what I mean. Feel free to use the comments section to discuss which Seuss story is the best metaphor for academic life: I'm leaning towards"The Zax" myself).

My answer to the question? Why not? It's tenure-track junior faculty who have the highest stake in tenure decisions: we're going to be working with these people for a long, long time. I'm very sympathetic to Pedersen's argument about including non-tenure-track instructors in departmental matters, but since many departments use ABDs or MA holders as adjunct faculty, I'm less sanguine about a blanket endorsement of including them on hiring, tenure and promotion committees. I'm not a huge fan of guild-master Sanford's satisfaction with things as they currently sit, however, and I think including untenured faculty in these decisions might considerably improve mentorship and other working conditions under which junior faculty labor. I'm on record supporting greater accountability for tenured faculty, and widening the decision-making pool would, I think, lessen the"generation gap" problem and bring more of the rigor we're increasingly applying to graduate programs and hiring to the internal workings of the departments and universities themselves.