Gratton on Mark Taylor

GRATTON RESPONDS to my earlier posts on Taylor’s anti-tenure piece.

He disagrees with my seriously entertaining the 7-year contract provision, on the perfectly reasonable basis that “in this environment that would be whittled down to 5 then 3 then 1-year contracts.”

True enough. All I had in mind is that immobility, the flip side of tenure, can be one of the more frightening aspects of the academic career. In most other lines of work you can move if needed or desired, whether for family or personal reasons. But in academia, you’d better think not twice but thrice about leaving a tenured position to go anywhere else. And this can create a general feeling of stagnation both in a given department and in a given individual life. As a general rule there is little lateral movement in academia (at least in the humanities) and it’s mostly stars or near-stars who do all the moving. And it would be nice to shake that up a bit.

But my favorite part of Gratton’s post is when he agrees with me that Taylor seems to enjoy striking contrarian dance poses: “He doesn’t care about this issue anymore than a dog really wants to catch its tail…” Nice line, Peter.

And now for my own amusing but slightly juvenile story about the man. In graduate school I knew someone who playfully referred to Taylor as “Doonesbury,” since (I was told at the time) he bore a strong resemblance to a character from that comic strip: not any character in particular, but just the general style of what the characters tend to look like. I didn’t quite understand what that meant, but then while still in graduate school I went to one of Taylor’s papers at a conference, and had to bite my lip the whole time to avoid laughing, because in those days he really did look just like a Doonesbury character.

I’ve also been told (by someone who visited the place) that his students at Williams College were very devoted to him, which speaks well of him. But I’ve tended to find his newspaper pieces on academia to be too eager to strike a nerve. Sometimes it feels like he’s been reading too much Stanley Fish in the Chronicle of Higher Education.