On Jan. 26, while books were being removed from libraries throughout the United States and the librarians who selected them were being attacked, the Hawaii Senate was poised to remove the protection of tenure from librarians at the University of Hawaii.
On Jan. 26, while medical scientists needed police protection before they dared to recommend that people get vaccinated, the Hawaii Senate was poised to remove the protection of tenure from researchers at the UH.
Proposed Senate Bill 3269 was before the Senate Higher Education Committee, and its purpose was to transfer academic control of the university from its Board of Regents to the Legislature and then reduce tenure’s protected freedom of inquiry to a dead letter for teaching faculty — and totally erase it for librarians, researchers and everyone else with instructional responsibilities.
The idea at its core went before the UH Board of Regents last October, and community response was so overwhelmingly negative that the regents dropped the whole thing. But on Jan. 26, it was back again, this time in the Capitol, and it was just as bad as before.
On Feb. 2, though, the Higher Education Committee’s chairwoman executed a neck-snapping 180-degree turn on SB 3269 and changed her mind. Guess what, says her modified bill, SB 3269, Senate Draft 1: This week we’ll think about tenuring librarians and researchers after all — or sort of think, in a dead-letter way.
But if the Legislature starts back-seat-driving its university and begins granting academic privileges on a political whim, it can take them away again on another political whim. We’ve just seen a demonstration of that. And specifically for the University of Hawaii, it may be close to fatal. Here’s why.
At universities, most researchers do their work in intellectual isolation. It’s in the nature of teaching that most of it has to be at the beginner level, and on university campuses that means there won’t be much classroom demand for the specialized content that researchers study. So researchers communicate with other researchers off campus by gathering at conferences and presenting their information there. Those conferences are where research’s social work gets done: not just the conversations where ideas are exchanged, but the hiring. At a state school like UH, hiring a researcher with contacts made at conferences can generate prestige in the media and bring millions into the treasury.
But specifically in Hawaii, it’s extra hard to hire that kind of researcher. The unalterable reason is this: Hawaii is a long, expensive distance from everywhere else. A researcher in Hawaii will have a harder time getting to conferences than a researcher in, say, Connecticut — and a harder time getting known, and a harder time getting grant money. So if other things are equal, a researcher will prefer Connecticut to Hawaii.
Of course, though, other things aren’t equal. Connecticut is cold and snowy, and Hawaii is Hawaii. That matters, but it doesn’t matter very much.
Yale University, for instance, is in Connecticut. Its campus is gentrified, but the surrounding area is rust-belt and, oh yes, cold. But that campus also happens to sit atop a $42 billion endowment that supports great libraries, great laboratories and great students. Offer a professor the choice between a job there and a job at the University of Hawaii, and chances are large that she’ll soon be happily shopping for snow boots.
And now start playing games with tenure at UH and the competition will be pretty much over — not just with great schools like Yale but with schools that are in Hawaii’s league. They’re already within driving distance of the professional conferences, and that’s strike one against Hawaii. If tenure is changed to a game of chance on top of that, the University of Hawaii might as well just pick up its ball and go home.
So please, senators: For the sake of Hawaii, let Senate Bill 3269 lose.
Jonathan Morse is retired from the University of Hawaii-Manoa and his wife is retired from the Hawaii State Library; the views expressed here are his personal opinions.
