Success Is Not Independence

The 1940 statement that created academic tenure said why it was needed. Tenure existed to secure two things at once: freedom of teaching and research, and “a sufficient degree of economic security.” The statement called the pair “indispensable.” A scholar who can be dismissed for what she says does not have that freedom, whatever the rules promise.1

That was a real advance, and it solved one version of the problem. Tenure covers the minority of academic workers who hold it; most faculty now work off the tenure track. It protects a person inside one institution, against dismissal by that institution. It says nothing about the mentor who writes the letters, the funder who renews the grant, the co-author who controls the data, or the small field whose senior people remember what you said at the conference.

A career is usually read as progress toward independence. Better jobs, promotions, professional relationships and recognition each look like more room to act. Each also raises the cost of acting against the arrangement that produced it. Someone may hold the legal right to criticize an employer while depending on that employer for income, health insurance and the reference that opens the next job. The right is real. So is the dependence, and the second decides how often the first gets used.

None of this requires anyone to forbid criticism. People understand what they stand to lose, and they adjust what they say. The adjustment is usually small and reasonable on its own: a softened argument, an omitted paragraph, a smaller reform proposed instead of the question of who holds authority. No single concession looks like submission; the series does.

Positive relationships make the mechanism harder to see. A mentor may genuinely support a career. An institution may provide real opportunities and encourage a junior person to contribute. Bad intent is not required. Continued support is simply not guaranteed, and gratitude points the same direction as fear of what the arrangement can withdraw. Someone may moderate a criticism out of loyalty and never notice that loyalty was doing the work a threat would have done.

Inclusion has the same structure. A seat at the table is an improvement, and it also gives the person holding it something to lose. The closer someone gets to the people who decide, the more expensive it becomes to challenge how they decide. That is one reason people can grow more cautious as they grow more successful: the success is made of relationships a serious disagreement would put at risk.

The problem is old enough to have a record. Institutions have been built to answer it, and what they did is more instructive than any definition of freedom.

The Flint sit-down strike is the clearest case of one kind of answer. In December 1936, workers at General Motors stopped the line by occupying the plants, and in February 1937 the company recognized the United Auto Workers.2 An individual worker had the legal right to complain about a foreman and no practical way to survive doing it. A union did not end dependence on GM for wages. It made the dependence less unilateral: a grievance procedure, a contract, and a body that could act when one worker could not. The freedom on paper did not change. The number of people who had to be retaliated against did.

Highlander Folk School, founded in Tennessee in 1932, answered a different question. It trained labor and civil rights organizers, and its citizenship schools taught adults to read and to register to vote.3 Its measure of success was unusual: people who left it could organize without it. The school did not build a permanent membership that depended on its direction. It built the capacity to act elsewhere, which is why the citizenship schools could move to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1961 without the work ending. An institution that makes itself dispensable is a strange thing to call successful, and it is the closest thing to a test of emancipatory education.

The Freedmen’s Bureau shows the failure mode. Created in 1865, it ran schools, supervised labor contracts and tried to settle formerly enslaved people on land. The land part failed: President Andrew Johnson restored confiscated property to former owners, and by the time the Bureau closed in 1872 most freedpeople remained dependent on landowners for work and shelter, including the people who had owned them.4 Legal emancipation had ended the ownership of persons. It had not created the material base from which a person can refuse a demand. A right that arrives without resources is a permission with a different letterhead.

Mondragón, Porto Alegre and Kerala each changed a different dependence, which is why they are not interchangeable. The Basque cooperatives that began in 1956 gave worker-members ownership and governance rights, and did not abolish managers or market pressure.5 Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting, from 1989, gave residents authority over part of a municipal budget rather than a forum to advise the officials who spent it.6 Kerala’s People’s Plan Campaign, from 1996, moved a substantial share of state planning funds and decisions to local bodies, while leaving them dependent on higher-level funding.7 Ownership, authority over resources and devolved discretion are three different transfers. An institution can make one and leave the other two untouched.

Across all of them, dependence on a person’s goodwill was converted into something the person could claim: a contract, a capacity, a title, a budget line, a vote. That conversion is the work, and it is why an institution’s founding purpose cannot settle whether it is emancipatory. A union can protect workers from a company and discipline a member who disagrees with its leadership. A cooperative can take ownership from shareholders and leave managers in place. A school can teach independence and reward conformity to its own doctrine.

So the test has to be internal. An institution’s claim to be emancipatory is strongest when the people who depend on it can organize against it, challenge its leadership and change its rules without losing the security that makes disagreement survivable. That is a demanding standard, and it produces a paradox: the institution has to use the power it holds to reduce the discretionary power it can exercise over others.

How far someone advanced inside an institution says little about their independence; it is the foreclosure that decides it. What matters is how much freedom they keep when their judgment conflicts with its interests. An institution’s measure is how much authority the people it governs acquire over the conditions of their own lives, including the authority to challenge the institution that helped make their independence possible.