Posted on 10/04/2021 6:55:58 AM PDT by karpov
In a recent article for the Martin Center, Duke professor Mike Munger asked an important question: should “a political board composed of nonacademics…be empowered to evaluate faculty proposals on hiring and curriculum in the first place?”
He argued that, in practice, boards have already ceded that authority. For many years, shared governance, at least on the issue of hiring and tenure, has been reduced to faculty governance. Evidence of this is readily visible. During the recent controversy surrounding Nikole Hannah-Jones and the UNC Hussman School of Journalism, faculty voiced their belief in the faculty-dominance model. Deen Freelon, an associate professor in the Hussman School told the News & Observer that it’s important for faculty to “assert our independence at our school.” And Daniel Kriess, another UNC journalism professor, argued that Walter Hussman was attempting to subvert “the will of the faculty.”
Even when boards have statutory authority to review tenure applications, as they do at UNC-Chapel Hill, they usually just rubber-stamp the recommendations of administrators and faculty hiring committees.
The Problem with Faculty-Only Governance
But as Munger points out, a faculty-dominated governance structure has unintended consequences. He (citing Henry Manne) notes that faculty have very little skin in the game. “The faculty gain nothing from improvements, and they lose nothing from mistakes, since costs are being paid by the endowment, and by the diligent and selfless efforts of the trustees and the president.” (And in the case of public universities, costs are also borne by taxpayers.) Faculty governance, therefore, isn’t especially concerned about academic quality or university expenditures.
To these concerns, we might add that existing faculty are prone to select and promote new faculty who are like themselves: interested in esoteric topics (instead of teaching), living in an ideological bubble, and often divorced from the alumni, students, donors, and taxpayers
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
It is actually time to rethink universities as a whole.
I can’t think of any other line of work what’s if you have a certain amount of seniority your guaranteed a position.
This is right up there with congressional term limits. Its a great idea but it’ll never happen.
Conservatives may be a minority on most university faculties, but do we want to let politicians in Democrat-run states remove all conservative professors from public universities?
I think we should reimagine tenure before we rethink it.
It’s been time for a long time.
That’s my thinking. It might be better for companies to simply spell out the 4-5 courses what they want students to take, and then students can take them online. Colleges and universities can be sold off as condominiums, senior living centers, etc.
You starve the beast with school choice. Universities will wither on the vine as their value is getting more recognized. Community colleges on the trimester system teaching trades is the way to go. Can the government make it happen? That’s the question.
Time to think government should be out of the education business.
You beat me to it.
You’ve got the right idea. The university system is truly nothing more than indoctrination centers designed to separate gullible youth and their more gullible parents from their money and values.
Only one of mine did the traditional four year college route. He went to a small private engineering university that had no sports teams, no mascot, no black student union, no dorm, no leftist indoctrination, no activity fees, no diversity office etc.
They have an apartment building. Want to eat, cook it yourself. Apartments held up to eight students. His roommates were white, black, whatever. They didn’t care about skin color, they cared about academics and becoming engineers.
STEM schools, trade schools, and, if you really feeled called to study the humanities, great books programs. Slash 90% of the bureaucracy to make it affordable. No tenure.
STEM schools, trade schools, and, if you really feel called to study the humanities, great books programs. Slash 90% of the bureaucracy to make it affordable. No tenure. (I meant to write it without a typo.)
“It is actually time to rethink universities as a whole.”
Absolutely. And forget tenure, since it now only protects Leftists.
And you’re right about universities, but they’re not going away. But a lot can be done to ‘reform’ them, which would be the ending of the massive amount of federal money going to them.
I think in Texas, the average age of a Master Plumber is 63 years old. Think about that for a minute and think about all of the potential Master Plumbers who instead wind up with dead-end lives due to the above federal subsidies. Things are really f’d up, but they could be fixed...if we would stop trying to punish RINOs by replacing them with Democrats.
However, with plumbers, fitters, electricians and other skilled trades a Master’s License is acquired through a test. The test is administered by different constituencies in different states and local cities, but still a test. Some areas it is strongly controlled by unions and in other areas more by code officials.
You hit the nail on the head. In this day of the Internet, individual learning is finally feasible.
The problem is that the NEA/AFT Unions, ruining…er…running the public schools, are turning out illiterates without the tools to learn, especially in college, where the “fearless sifting and winnowing” of information is supposed to take place.
Instead, the colleges and universities, with the exception of Hillsdale and one other, are nothing more that insane asylums, run by the inmates, indoctrinating students to be progressive cannon fodder.
Unless you are in engineering or the hard sciences, you are not going to learn anything in college…you will have your head pumped full of liberal bullshit, that will leave you with not marketable skills for the rest of your life.
Beat me to it.
Time to restrict higher education to those who thirst for actual knowloege and process.
Let each university have their own tenure policy.
Let’s do a survey.
How many NON-LIBERALS have gotten ‘tenure’ in the last 3 decades?
Ever notice that “tenure” is an anagram of both “neuter” and “tureen”? It really does explain the way that males are treated on campus these days (unless they are males of colour and/or muslim).
I have been slowly working on a piece, which contains the rough form of these lines:
“-because if he wants
to obtain tenure,
he requires a mansplain neuter,
with his balls in a vise
and later served up in a tureen...”
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