The only consistent theme of this book is that the current state of higher education is in disarray, especially by the standard of conservatives such as the author. She catalogs a slew of shortcomings which bear little relationship other than her asserted opinion that they would all be magically improved were tenure eliminated.

She offers surprisingly little as to what should take its place, especially if you believe -- as she does not -- that faculty need protections against the arbitrary political and personal administrative actions for speaking "truth to power": "Many Americans might wonder why academic freedom is a principle worth defending anyway. Don't some radical faculty members deserve to be run off campus?" Her answer, of course, is yes.

As to be expected from a conservative, she has special disdain for the social sciences and the humanities, which she believes had said all that needed saying by the seventeenth century. There has been no growth of knowledge in these fields, so for faculty to be judged on their "research" is a farce, and distracts from the primary goal of teaching, although, to hear her speak, she'd just as soon they didn't bother with such pointless topics that have little to do with getting jobs and economic returns for the university. Even the physical sciences have come to be tainted through "the addition of departments like 'climate science' that have public policy at their heart rather than observational research." As I said, she's a hard core conservative. 'Nuff said.

In her view the professorate is more aligned with "dermatologists and corporate managers and shoe salesmen," and that, consequently, "the more a college education is vocational, the less you need tenure." It would be easy to catalog the several claims that suggests this journalist does not know her subject deeply. "No tenured professor has had any of his speech restricted." Really? Her own urgings to silence departments of area, ethnic, and gender studies (they make the mistake of arguing, she ironically decries, that women and other minorities should be treated fairly) better proves the need for academic freedom protections.

To be fair, Riley does raise several valid points, but that almost seems to be by accident, and rarely in a way that coalesces into a coherent argument concerning tenure. The description of the mistreatment of adjuncts and graduate students is especially alarming, but undermined by her naive and unsupported claims that such abuses arise from, and would be solved by the elimination of, tenure. The more likely source is the view that she endorses, which regards education as a commodity like any other, to be manufactured and distributed at the lowest possible costs.

Her anecdotal accounts argue less for the elimination of tenure, than for the fact that while tenure serves a valuable purpose, its alignment with that purpose has become problematic. But no insights into how to solve that difficulty will be found in these pages. Those interested in a more sophisticated approach, from the opposing camp, might consider Matthew W. Finkin and Robert C. Post's For The Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom. ( )