What does a tenured professor have to do to get himself fired?
Tzvee Zahavy has found out. Hold tenured professorships simultaneously at two universities -- in his case, the University of Minnesota and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte -- and do the jobs required, but don’t tell anyone.
For that, you get yourself fired. Fast. No appeal. Nothing. You’re out, your career is over, you’re history. Go collect garbage or sell insurance. Mr. Zahavy was forced to resign in January not from one, but from both professorships. He had taught courses on Judaism at Minnesota for 17 years before taking the position in Charlotte last fall, publishing several first-rate books and many articles and doing other yeoman work in academe. I know; he did his Ph.D. with me. He was an authentic scholar. Now he’s a bum.
So that’s what you have to do to get yourself fired. But you don’t get fired for much else.
Where I teach, a splendid campus in the Florida State University system, a professor recently got mad at her dean and, on the first day of the semester, canceled her course and refused to teach 350 students. She wasn’t fired. Nothing much happened, except the dean was mighty mad.
At this same university, a professor was angered at his colleagues’ decision not to reappoint him as head of a committee, so he refused to go to any department meetings or to serve on any committees or even to talk to anybody. He wasn’t fired. People went about their business and did his work for him.
Where I used to teach, at Brown University, one department routinely called meetings but excluded professors whom other faculty members didn’t like. No one was reprimanded, nothing much happened. The provost never even answered the letters of the ostracized professors.
The president of Brown at that time followed suit; he didn’t feel like answering letters from a department chairman whom he found bothersome, so he didn’t. The chairman left, along with five other top professors.
Professors who miss classes don’t get fired. Professors who come to classes unprepared don’t get fired. Professors who don’t hold office hours for students, who don’t share in their department’s work, who won’t even talk to their colleagues from one month to the next, don’t get fired. Unless budget problems intervene, everyone gets across-the-board raises every year, no matter what they do -- or more to the point -- no matter what they don’t do.
But they perish if they don’t publish, don’t they? Don’t bet on it. Tenured professors who don’t publish a line from one decade to the next don’t get fired. In fact, if they’re amiable, they’ll get themselves appointed dean of the graduate school or vice-president for research, and, if they’re really swell fellows, they’ll get a presidency.
In the business world, you get fired for not doing your job. But you don’t get fired for doing two jobs -- they call it moonlighting -- if you do both of them well. But the business world is built on enterprise, and the academy is a tight, closed guild that insists that a tenured position is so demanding that no one could possibly do an adequate job in two positions. In the business world, if you go “consulting,” on your own time, no one cares, and in the academic world, if you spend one day a week off campus -- which many institutions allow -- everyone praises you for enterprise.
So what was Mr. Zahavy’s crime, for which the only suitable punishment was to be fired by both universities?
In part, what he didn’t do was his crime: He didn’t tell his dean and get permission, which university rules require. But, as I’ve shown, you can do lots of things that make your dean mad and still not get yourself fired.
Taking two salaries without telling anybody certainly is wrong and should be penalized. For that he should have been -- and was -- punished appropriately. He had to give back the moving expenses and salary that he received at Charlotte. Mr. Zahavy’s real crime, though, was not actually a crime but a sin: He sinned against the profession of professor. He sinned by letting out the dirty little secret of academe: We professors have very cushy jobs -- if that is how we want things. For the sin, he got fired.
Faculty members have persuaded the world that we need a whole week, five or even six working days, to teach two or three courses. These two or three courses typically amount to six or nine hours of classroom instruction a week, for 14 weeks, in two cycles (semesters) a year. For 168 hours of work -- or 252 hours if you figure nine hours of instruction -- we get a year’s pay.
The calculation that we use to justify this is simple. We figure two hours of preparation for each hour of teaching, so for two courses we do six hours of teaching and 12 hours of preparation, or 18 hours of work. If we teach nine hours, that’s 18 hours of preparation, for a total of 27 hours of work. We then add another hour of reading in the general subject area for each hour of teaching, for either six or nine more hours of work. That means 24 hours of work to teach two courses or 36 hours to teach three. To fill up the rest of the week, there is the huge volume of time we are supposed to be spending on research -- in the lab, in the library -- to make our contributions to learning. Then add in the committee work, the office hours, the time spent with students: Oh, lordy, am I busy!
On the basis of such a schedule, which ignores the fact that, once they prepare lectures, some faculty members may give the same ones for 10 or 15 years, we contend that we are overworked. Then Professor Zahavy comes along.
Mr. Zahavy taught his six hours a week at one university and another six hours at the second. No one noticed; the students didn’t complain that he was unprepared or missed classes. He continued to write his articles. He came and went around the two universities just as everyone else did. Only when people in Charlotte began to wonder where his wife and family were did they begin to ask questions. Then the dreadful truth came out: He was doing two jobs -- very well, thank you.
But we professors have explained to the whole world that the best that we can do, with enormous difficulty, is one job.
It is true that for a portion of the professoriate, six hours of classroom time represent a major commitment of time outside of the classroom, an important part of a very busy week. Those are the professors who learn, keep up with others’ scholarship, ask fresh questions, pursue large problems; they are drawn by curiosity, driven by intellectual ambition. Those are the professors who write and publish. For them, teaching is an important chapter in their scholarship: They share with young people what they know and what they are learning.
But we all know many faculty members who do not fit that model. They don’t publish and they don’t perish. They get raises. How they fill their days (apart from forming and passing opinions on this and that) I have never figured out. People get tenure by describing books that they are writing, which never appear. They never are fired for false advertising.
Professor Zahavy let the cat out of the bag by showing that some people can fulfill the duties of two professorships without too much strain. If he could teach 12 hours a week, commuting halfway across the country to do so, what about the workloads of other faculty members, particularly those who do not publish? For provoking that dreaded question, he got himself canned.
Jacob Neusner is distinguished research professor of religious studies at the University of South Florida.
