President Rawlings addresses newly tenured faculty

Twenty-three of the 36 faculty members who received tenure between May 1997 and March 1998 pose with the president, the chairman of the board of trustees, the provost and five academic deans at the May 22 dinner hosted by the trustees in the Statler Ballroom. Jon Reis/Photolink

Here is an excerpt from President Hunter Rawlings' address at the Cornell Board of Trustees' dinner for newly tenured faculty members May 22.

The faculty are the university's most important intellectual resource, and tenure is critical to sustaining institutional excellence. Faculty members are recommended for tenure only after a long period of probation and a careful review of their work. Tenure is not an entitlement; it is a privilege earned through documented distinction in the key components of the university's mission -- teaching, research, scholarly work and public service.

And it is not an easy victory.

Every one of the newly tenured faculty members here tonight has come through an arduous tenure review process successfully, and his or her work has been judged by colleagues to be both significant and of the highest quality.

Yet it is important to remember why universities have tenure in the first place -- not to reward individual achievement or even to increase the prestige of the institution, but rather to ensure the advancement of knowledge.

According to the Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure, first issued by the American Association of University Professors in 1940 and now the standard for colleges and universities in the United States: "Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good. ... The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition."

Excellent scholarship is not always popular scholarship. I've always liked the story about the uneasy relationship that existed in the first half of this century between the Columbia Board of Trustees and one of the university's well-known professors, historian Charles A. Beard.

It has been said that a special fury animated the trustees whenever Professor Beard published still another of his iconoclastic interpretations of American history. On one occasion, a trustee is said to have asked the president of the university, Nicholas Murray Butler, whether he had read Professor Beard's last book. And President Butler is said to have replied, "I hope so."

Nonetheless, freedom of inquiry is fundamental to institutional excellence, and universities have an obligation to provide faculty members with a free intellectual environment in which to develop their ideas. As the AAUP Statement on Professional Ethics notes: "Professors, guided by a deep conviction of the worth and dignity of the advancement of knowledge, recognize the special responsibilities placed upon them. Their primary responsibility to their subject is to seek and to state the truth as they see it."

But those who accept tenure also accept several additional responsibilities -- as teachers, as colleagues, as members of an academic institution and as members of their communities -- and these are outlined by the AAUP as well.

As teachers, for example, "professors encourage the free pursuit of learning in their students. They hold before them the best scholarly and ethical standards of their discipline. Professors demonstrate respect for students as individuals and adhere to their proper roles as intellectual guides and counselors." And as members of an academic institution, "professors seek above all to be effective teachers and scholars."

As Cornell, under the leadership of Vice President Ron Ehrenberg, has moved to strengthen tenure standards across the university, we have recognized the mutuality of responsibilities between the university and those to whom it grants tenure.

On the one hand, the university owes the faculty an open and supportive intellectual environment in which to develop their ideas. On the other, the faculty owes the university responsible contribution to the intellectual life of the campus. This includes taking students as seriously as ideas.

Morris Bishop, in A History of Cornell, includes among Cornell's most memorable professors George Lincoln Burr, Cornell Class of 1881. Burr's Cornell career illustrates the mutuality between the university and its tenured professors that continues to this day.

Burr was a person of somewhat eccentric habits. Even in old age, he was apt to set off on four-day walks to Rochester and elsewhere to meditate on weighty topics, and he gave up his bed in favor of a sleeping chair, so that he would be ready to work whenever he was awake.

Bishop describes him as someone whose "enormous erudition humbled his colleagues." In the classroom, though, he was known as "a great teacher, a true inspirer, whose lectures would often rise to an eloquent chant."

When Burr died in 1938, Cornell historiographer Carl Becker wrote a stirring tribute, which Professor Bishop recounts in his book:

"George Burr -- how imperishably the name is written into the history of this university and the life of this community! ... The richly stored and alert mind, keen as a Damascus blade, slaying the spurious and the inept with the deftest wit, pouring forth a wealth of relevant and curious lore for the illumination of matters great or small. ... The indefatigable scholar and bibliophile, browsing and brooding in the stacks, with the still concentration of the mystic poring over some rare manuscript, or with loving touch caressing the frayed covers of ancient books. ... Valiant and intrepid crusader in the cause of human freedom and enlightenment! If there be any intangible possession that distinguishes this university, it is the tradition of freedom united with responsibility -- freedom to do what one chooses, responsibility for what it is that one chooses to do. ... no one ever did more than George Lincoln Burr to endow Cornell with this priceless possession."

With your acceptance of tenure, Burr's legacy now comes to you. Your promotion to associate professors with tenure -- which we recognize and celebrate this evening -- brings with it both enormous freedom and weighty responsibilities -- to your discipline, your students, your colleagues and to Cornell.

It marks a new phase of your careers -- in which you have the freedom to carry out your responsibilities ethically and humanely and with great erudition.

We look forward to your continued scholarly accomplishments and your continued contributions to the intellectual community of Cornell.