
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 6, 1993                   TAG: 9310150373
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARIE WATERS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TENURE ISN'T MEANT TO BE A REWARD

CHARLES A. Wood Jr., executive assistant to the president of Radford University, is an impressively skillful, talented, flexible, hard-working, dedicated person who is extraordinarily good at his work. But what in the world does tenure have to do with it?

Tenure is not a reward but a protection for the faculty and university. It's an effort to ensure that special interests cannot control what is taught and how, or what is studied and how.

The university, in the ideal held by most academics, is a place where people try very hard to search for knowledge and to tell others what they've learned in their search. Restrictions on the search, or on the telling, keep the university from doing its job. Realistically, the university may be the only place in this world where searching for knowledge and telling the truth are apt to be valued.

So it makes sense to protect the searchers and tellers by calling them scholars and by giving them tenure; they can continue to search and tell. The university need not agree with them. So far, this is how Virginia and other parts of the nation have achieved and maintained first-rate university education in a world of mediocrity. Tenure at least tries to guarantee that students and citizens can ponder and evaluate more than one idea at a time.

What does this have to do with Charlie Wood? Nothing, which is the unfortunate and exact point of this letter. Nothing in the position he holds, or in any position he has ever held at Radford, needs the protection of tenure now, in the past or in the foreseeable future. That's why Radford University's Faculty-Staff Handbook includes rules for granting tenure, none of which apply to Wood.

Like most of my former colleagues, I like Charlie and really don't care whether he has tenure or not. In fact, I'd be surprised if he were the initiator of this action, and will not be at all surprised if it compromises his effectiveness with many of the most respected and valuable people he must work with.

But I have too much respect for the university and its faculty to be able to shrug this off as one more piece of silliness. Tenure for an executive assistant to the president is a perversion of the tenure concept and process.

\ Marie Waters of Radford is professor emeritus in psychology at Radford University.

by CNB