Somebody said he should. I don’t want to put them on blast. I don’t know who they are, really. Their bio says they’re faculty at a public university in the States, so they probably know how things go around here about as well as me. Why should he retire? They suggested that were he to retire his position at the University of Arizona, that it would open up a tenure line for “ECRs”.1
Let me begin by saying I do not have a particularly strong emotional connection to Noam. Like many linguists, my academic family tree has many roots at MIT, where Noam taught until quite recently. I have met him in person once or twice, and I found him polite and unassuming. This is a surprise to me. The Times once wrote that Noam is “arguably the most important intellectual alive today”, and important people are mostly assholes.
But I do have very strong intellectual commitments to Noam’s ideas. I think that the first chapter of his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) is the best statement of the problem of language acquisition. I believe that those who have taken issue with the Aspects idealization of the “ideal speaker-listener” betray a profound ignorance of the role that idealizations play in the history of science.
I think The Sound Pattern of English (SPE), which Noam cowrote with Morris Halle, is the most important work in the theory of phonology and morphology. I believe that the critics who took issue with the “abstract” and “decompositional” nature of SPE have largely been proven wrong.
I even admire the so-called “minimalist program” for syntactic theory Noam has outlined since the 1990s.
It is impossible to deny Noam’s influence on linguistics and cognitive science. We who study language are all pro- or anti-Chomskyians, for better or worse. (And I have much more respect for the “true haters” than the reflexive anti-Chomskyians.) I don’t think Noam should apologize for his critiques of “usage-based” linguistics. I don’t think Noam can fairly be called an “arm-chair” theorist. I think generative grammar has made untold contributions to even areas like language documentation and sociolinguistics, which might seem to be excluded by a strict reading of Aspects.
And, I admire Noam’s outspoken critique of US imperialism. While Noam may have some critics from the left, his detractors (including many scientists of language!) are loud defenders of the West’s blood-soaked imperial adventures.
As a colleague said: “I like Noam Chomsky. I think his theories are interesting, and he seems like a decent guy.” He is a great example of what one can, and ought to, do with tenure.
None of this really matters, though. I do not think he “deserves” a job any more than any other academic does. So, could Noam clear up a “tenure line” simply by retiring? The answer is probably not. Please allow me an anecdote, one that will be familiar to many of you. I teach in a rather-large and robust graduate linguistics program at a publicly-funded college in one of the richest cities in the world (“at the end of history”). Two of our senior faculty are retiring this year, and as of yet the administration has not approved our request to begin a search for a replacement for either of them. Declining to replace tenure lines after retirement is one of the primary mechanisms of casualization in the academy.
Even if you disagree with my assessment of Noam’s legacy, the availability of tenure is not directly conditioned on retirements (though perhaps it should be). Noam bears no moral burden for simply not retiring. If you’d like to fight back against casualization of labor, take the fight to the administration (and to the state houses who set the budgets), don’t blame senior faculty for simply continuing to exist in the system.
PS: If you enjoyed this, you should read The Responsibility of Intellectuals.
1: I had to look up this acronym. It stands for “early-career researchers”, though I’m not quite sure when one’s “early career” starts or ends. I find that an unfortunate ambiguity.