Reply to professor Grunberg's comments

Professor Emile Grunberg and I are old friends. Our friendship is of nearer 40 than 35 years' standing. We agree on the need to preserve the essentials of the tenure system as protection for congenital dissidents like ourselves. Most of our disagreement reduces, I believe, to three points. First, and most important of these is the need for compromise, which I maintain, and I think Professor Grunberg does not. There was no practical way to emancipate black slaves without injury to white plantation owners in the 19th century. I know no practical way to enfranchise black majorities in southern Africa today without loss, or at least without high risk of loss, to white settler minorities. Neither do I know any practical way to assuage what, in my moments of truth, I see as equitable complaints of my younger colleagues against the inter-generational imbalances of the existing tenure system without at least the risk of loss to my approximate contemporaries. In this situation, what is one to do? Professor Grunberg, in the unaccustomed role (for him) of Jefferson Davis or Ian Smith, points out, entirely correctly, that our contemporaries may lose by changes of the sort I proposed last March, and that legalistically speaking that is all there is to it. He refuses to compromise with a Stresemann. I fear he assumes the risk of having to make terms later with some Hitler-i.e., losing the essence of academic freedom as inter-generational discontent builds up and explodes. Such is the normative.cum-strategic difference of opinion between Professor Grunberg and myself. Second, under a single head I lump several related factual issues, whose several truths and falsehoods are not, however, empirically certain. I maintain that sloths (or dead wood, or fuddy*Duke University. duddies) are made and not born, so that the change I propose would force the fuddy-duddies of all ages to keep up with their fields, improve their teaching, and-or develop their administrative skills, with great all-round benefit to the academic community. Professor Grunberg believes sloths are born and not made, so that my proposals would accomplish little or nothing beyond imposing nervous strain and Byzantine politicking on aging sloths. I am not sure I am right about the facts in the case, but would like institutions to have more rather than less freedom to find out experimentally, (It may also be that Professor Grunberg is right for his depression generation and I for my postwar one-in which mediocrities have been "tenured in" by hasty appointments in the immediate enrollment crises of 1946-48.) Third, as Professor Grunberg points out, I have been quite free in suggesting sweetened pension systems for early (forced) retirees without indicating how they might be financed. Financing methods would, I suppose, vary widely from one institution to another. In some cases academic salaries and fringes may indeed suffer, as Professor Grunberg may intend to imply. My own feeling on this financing point is that the status quo proves that "where there's a will, there's a way." Sweetened pensions are already being financed for early retirees in a number of fields, provided only that the retirees have served for long periods. The military are an obvious case in point: the Federal civil service is another. We will hear a good deal more about "30 years and out" collective-bargains in private industry, probably led by the Auto Workers. (The Pacific Coast longshoremen worked out such an arrangement years ago, regardless of age, for Asians willing to leave the U.S., but that is admittedly a special case.) So why not academe?