Previous comments on the Nebraska legislature bill to eliminate tenure at Nebraska's college and universities.

 

 

 

Comments on Tenure Issues in Nebraska

John Janovy, Jr., Varner Professor Emeritus

The kindest thing that can be said about Sen. Loren Lippencott’s bill to eliminate tenure at Nebraska’s colleges and universities is that it’s a product of profound ignorance about American higher education. And Gov. Pillen’s position that the “system needs to be reworked” suggests that he learned little or nothing about how the system of American higher education really works while a University of Nebraska Regent or as a UNL student/athlete. As a reminder to both these gentlemen, the University of Nebraska Board of Regents Bylaws are available as a pdf download to anyone with online access anywhere in the world. Chapter IV. Rights and Responsibilities of Professional Staff outlines the evaluation methods and criteria for continuous appointment and termination. The Nebraska State College System board has a similar document, also available online. In terms of performance review, Nebraska college and university faculty members are evaluated far more extensively, far more regularly, and by people far more qualified to judge their work, than are elected officials.

For the benefit of those state senators supporting Sen. Lippencott’s bill, here are a few simple rules that apply to American higher education. My qualifications for proposing these simple rules, provided at the end of this letter, are based on experience. Now, the rules:

1. Colleges and universities are not businesses, even though they may use similar accounting methods. These institutions do not exist to make money.

2. American higher education exists to provide a large, exceedingly diverse, complex, and technology-dependent nation with the human resources needed to understand that nation’s role in global affairs, maintain its supply of highly-skilled personnel, interpret the diverse forces that have an impact on our citizens’ quality of life, and remind us of what it means to be a human being. The latter function is particularly important, given humans’ propensity for dehumanizing their fellow Earthlings for reasons involving power, religious beliefs, and skin color. 

3. Faculty members are, collectively, higher education’s most expensive asset, but without them, colleges and universities do not exist. It is in taxpayers’ vested interest for this asset to be maintained and provided incentive for ongoing engagement with the missions of teaching, research, and service. Continuous appointment and review are also important incentives for this asset to invest its own intellectual power in the institution’s missions over time.

4. Colleges and universities establish curriculum requirements as an attempt to produce both the depth and breadth required for future teachers, health care professionals, engineers, attorneys, business professionals, visual and performing artists, historians, and citizens with enough of an education to move between careers, take advantage of employment opportunities provided by changing times, guide their own children through those same changing times, and participate meaningfully in that discussion of what it means to be a human being then act accordingly.

5. Tenure also protects the long-term research projects, including those of economic importance to the state and nation, by ensuring that faculty members can pursue that research without constant concern over re-appointment, especially if there are outside funds involved (of which the university collects a fraction as overhead.)

That list of so-called rules is a summary of what I learned from 92 semesters as a UNL faculty member, 88 of them assigned to large enrollment introductory science courses, 38 of them in administrative positions, including a Dean’s level appointment (Interim Director of the State Museum), and all of them (92) actively involved in research and publication (100+ scientific papers and 25 books). During that time, I read approximately 500,000 pages of double-spaced student writing, ranging from first-year students’ essays to doctoral dissertations, voted on numerous tenure review cases, served as my department’s Promotion and Tenure Committee chair, and served on committees that heard tenure denial appeals.

Never during those 92 semesters, did I see a case in which the fact of continuous appointment was so detrimental to the State of Nebraska that it needed to be eliminated statewide, but I saw plenty of cases in which tenured faculty members were deeply engaged with the university’s tri-partite mission of teaching, research, and service to the best of their abilities, resources, and opportunities and to the benefit of Nebraska citizens. Elected officials have a responsibility to truly understand the potential impact of their actions on state agencies, and that does not appear to be the case with Sen. Lippincott’s proposed legislation.

A review of Sen. Lippencott’s record indicates support of a long list of potential legislative actions, most of which are not too surprising for a self-proclaimed conservative. The origin of this tenure elimination bill is a little bit of a mystery, however, unless we interpret it in the most unflattering way, namely as an attempt to convince right-wing extremists in his district that he’s okay with the GOP’s demonstrated fear of education, especially that supported by taxes and delivered by people who can and will talk about human affairs in ways he finds offensive. That’s not enough of a reason to support actions that are clearly damaging to the state’s colleges and universities, which we all know have been major economic drivers throughout their history.

As an aside, Sen. Lippencott’s bio, as presented on his web site, shows clearly that he graduated from UNL and immediately got a job directly related to his major. In other words, he succeeded because of the role that faculty members, quite a few of them tenured, played in his life. Although we tend to glorify his later job as a skilled fighter pilot in the U. S. Air Force, it’s probably a good idea to remember that “fighter pilot” is a government job with excellent benefits and he could easily have finished a government career in the military, retiring with benefits, comparable to those enjoyed by college profs.

In his later career as a Delta pilot, he greeted me at the door of a plane in Ecuador and asked where I was from. Upon hearing “Nebraska,” he gushed that he was a Cornhusker, too, and we had a nice conversation. If I met him today, I’d probably say “Thanks, Loren, for getting me to Houston safely, and by the way, that bill to eliminate tenure at Nebraska’s colleges and universities is a pretty dumb idea.”

The Infamous 1973 Gran Torino Station Wagon

 

The 1973 Gran Torino/Missing Photo Album-Scrapbook Story:

John Janovy, Jr.

Sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, we bought a new smallish station wagon, a 1979 Mercury Zephyr, as a family car, but mainly as Karen’s car. A year or two later, I decided that it would be better in the long run if our good, relatively new, family car was not driven to Lake McConaughy, and Martin Bay beaches, over the washboard gravel roads between Cedar Point Biological Station and the lake, so I went into Ogallala to the Ford Agency and paid $600 for a well used, light blue, 1973 Ford Gran Torino station wagon. That would be Karen’s go to the beach car, and we left it out at CPBS during the winter.

The Ogallala part of this Gran Torino experience took place while I was CPBS director, mid-1980s. When I would go out to CPBS in May to start my summer’s teaching, research, and administrative duties, and before Karen and two of our children would come out, I would get into that station wagon, clean it out, make sure it was running okay, making sure that there were no mouse nests in it, get the oil changed, tires checked, etc. One summer I turned on the air conditioner and sure enough, there had been a mouse in the fan, and of course it got pulverized. That led to a highly educational day in which I took the inside all apart, removing the dashboard, etc., got out the fan, cleaned it off, and reassembled the interior. I also remember personally replacing brake shoes. And, when I eventually brought that vehicle back to Lincoln, did the tune-ups—points, plugs, timing, and once even a carburetor job (interesting; it had a large engine with a four-barrel carburetor)—I used it as a field car, and even driving it to Denver with several students to the American Society of Parasitologists annual meeting. When our son turned 16, that became his vehicle.

Now, fast forward thirty-eight years, to the Cedar Point Biological Station 50^th Anniversary celebration, August 16-18, 2024, and the annual Rocky Mountain Conference of Parasitologists (RMCP) meeting at CPBS, September 5-7, 2024. As a contribution to that celebration, Karen spent the previous year assembling a truly massive, and highly archival, combination photo album and scrapbook, containing photographs going back to the early 1980s, pictures of staff and some students, class rosters, newspaper clippings from the 80s and 90s, etc. This was a truly major contribution to the historical record of that program, initiated in 1975, and the place where so many parasitologists, including those now in major academic and scholarly positions across the country, got their professional start. That album/scrapbook was a major hit, studied by attendees at the 50^th Celebration, and later at RMCP. Then it disappeared.

When Karen and I went into Goodall Lodge for breakfast on Saturday morning, September 7, the album/scrapbook, product of Karen’s work for the past year, was gone. Subsequent efforts by CPBS staff to find it, have failed. It was not alive; it could not have flown off somewhere by itself. It was on the dining hall ping pong table Friday evening; by Saturday morning, it was gone. My e-mails to people I knew were at the RMCP meetings produced no information about what might have happened to it. After a couple of weeks of trying to trace it down, hassling the CPBS administration (who assured me they were looking for it everywhere, and I believe them), I finally admitted that I was as angry as I have ever been over something that has happened at UNL. As a result of that anger, I decided to reconstruct as much of that album/scrapbook as I could, and publish it. Thus I got into our files of photo negatives and started scanning. That effort will take a while, but in the meantime, here is another Gran Torino story. The connection to the CPBS photo album is finally admitted at the end of this piece.

Sometime during that vehicle’s time in Lincoln, the front passenger side door got bashed in. I don’t remember the details, but nobody was hurt and no police reports or insurance claims were filed. It just happened. The next summer, when I had it out at CPBS, I went over to the salvage yard at Brule, found a wrecked 1973 Gran Torino with a good door, bought the door, and replaced the one that was bashed in. The only problem was that the new door was yellow, and the rest of the car was blue. So, I painted the yellow door with some outdoor enamel that was fairly close to the right color. The photo attached to this story is black and white, but you can tell that the right front door has trim missing; I don’t know whether this pic was taken before or after I painted the door, but probably after.

Eventually the 1973 Gran Torino wagon started leaking transmission fluid, and I was not going to get it fixed. So I drove it to El Reno, Oklahoma, traded it in on a new Ford Taurus for Karen, and drove the Taurus home. I don’t remember all the family car situations during the late 1980s and early 1990s, but I know that at some point in our family history, we owned four Fords and/or Mercuries of various styles and ages, and that I did routine under the hood maintenance on all of them. Eventually, the family automobile supply sorted itself out, I bought a Dodge pickup, and I quit doing that under the hood stuff because my training, mainly on a 1955 Ford I owned when I was in the army, no longer applied.

The CPBS film files that I had at home included a roll of black and white negatives that had a bunch of pictures of the 1973 Gran Torino station wagon, and because that car was an interesting piece of our CPBS experience, and because I was so pissed at the fact that Karen’s archival work had disappeared, and because I was doubly pissed at that disappearance because there was no way in hell it could have walked off into the hinterlands by itself, I decided to write this piece and post a picture or two of that vehicle.

If anyone finds that photo album/scrapbook, let me know.

 

 

 

The Flatwater Folk Art Museum in Brownville, Nebraska

 

The Flatwater Folk Art Museum – Brownville, Nebraska

John Janovy, Jr.

Let’s ask a question: What if only one percent of the vehicles slamming along I-29 between Omaha and Kansas City slowed down and took the U.S. Highway 136 exit at Rock Port, Missouri, for a nine-mile jaunt into Brownville, Nebraska, and a tour of the Flatwater Folk Art Museum?  The answer is obvious to anyone who’s visited that museum: For the remainder of their trips, and the remainder of their lives, those travelers would be wondering what was going through the minds of people who made those objects. Eventually, by the time they reached Omaha or Kansas City, they’d be pondering the role of art in the everyday lives of everyday people, remembering times that design overrode functionality in items they’d purchased, and planning to stop in Brownville again on the way home for a second, more serious and reflective, look.

We expect to be impressed with internationally recognized treasures in the world’s major museums; we’re stunned, however, by the personal impact of folk art because it makes us think about what we as individuals value beyond its monetary worth—images and pieces that remind us of our beliefs, experiences, cultural environments, and traditions—those elements that combine to make us who we’ve become since birth. Human lives are built from the circumstances of our birth and the events in which we participate, not always by choice. Piece after piece in The Flatwater Folk Art Museum’s collections seem to state that common fact about our existence. They all are powerful statements that no matter who we are, we share this very human trait with people we’ve never met and are never likely to meet, but we share that trait through their art and thus what they were thinking when they decided to make those pieces.

It’s obvious that the Flatwater Museum’s collections were assembled by director George W. Neubert with this characteristic in mind. Every piece is powerful, embedded with skill, focus, attention, and purpose by the person who made it. No matter what’s on the walls or shelves, you can envision the artist at work, not in a New York studio but maybe in a garage, out on a back porch, in a barn, or sitting at the kitchen table after children have gone to bed. Much of it seems to focus on the commonplace—shoes, a hat, fishing lures, religious figures, pottery—but handled in such a way that it acquires dignity, timelessness, and backstory. In this way, the objects remind us that all humans have dignity and backstory, and whatever they accomplish in their times on Earth can, and typically do, produce something that can seem timeless, if that something is only a memory. But when whatever they decided to make sometime during their lives ends up in a museum, everything that maker brought to the human experience becomes timeless even if the person is long gone.

The museum’s building itself, a repurposed church moved to Main Street and 6^th, in a town that doesn’t have many streets, comes across as a piece of folk art itself—found, recognized as a familiar and timeless artifact, rescued, and changed into an object with a new purpose and a new message that’s a greatly expanded version of its original one. The museum director’s description of this building and its contents tells the story:

The folk art collection of the Flatwater Folk Art Museum is a collection of vernacular expressions and creations reflecting the human spirit and passion of common folk celebrating the diverse and universal traditions of life’s experiences, ceremony, and rituals.

It’s impossible to walk through this building without picking favorite pieces, then thinking about why those pieces stand out in your mind as something special. The masks remind us that our faces are our most distinctive features, and that what we do with them parallels what artists do with the idea of a human face, a way to present us with the leading issue of our time, and probably of all our history: the distinction between a kind—a species, our species, as represented by a skull in a hand-made glass-sided box titled H. SAPIEN—as opposed to an individual. Individuals, not kinds, make art, including folk art; kinds make war.

That last principle could easily have been the driving force that produced a human figure with blue legs, a red torso, and an obvious canine head, its round white eyes staring out, and a story written around the figure on its yellow background:

An old man told his grandson, my son, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all . . . one is evil . . . one is good.” The boy thought about it and asked “which wolf wins?” The old man quietly replied, “the one you feed.”

That’s exactly the kind of museum piece one remembers, especially in a world awash in violence fueled by hatred and despair.

On a more pleasant, and perhaps relaxed, note, much of one wall is occupied by fishing lures, all of them hand-made, of course, and collectively telling us something about the range of ideas people believed would help them solve a problem, namely catching a fish, and then putting those ideas into practice with their hands, pocketknives, and paint. The center piece, however, is far too large to be used as a real fishing lure unless someone was going after orcas, and the fins suggest it could have been a weathervane. Maybe in its original location, but there by a folk artist, when it pointed in a certain direction, it was time to go fishing. Its mouth full of teeth, made from nails pounded in and heads, instead of points, sticking out, could easily be the most distinctive feature of this masterpiece, a simple but powerful reminder of folk art’s fundamental nature.

Like most museums, this one both merits and inspires repeated visits. Director George W. Neubert has granted permission to take photographs, but subsequent use of those images for purposes other than as an excuse, or maybe inspiration, to try making your own folk art, will need his permission. The town of Brownville is rightfully proud of its reputation as a cultural hot spot, with the Flatwater Folk Art Museum as its centerpiece.