Posted on 06/27/2006 8:27:11 AM PDT by freespirited
Yup. Have known a few of them myself.
Churchill and Berthold. Add in the "million Mogadishus" guy and you have a good start on a new Legion of Doom.
What they did in the Army.
Scholars say tenured professors are rarely fired.......
And that's the big problem.
No one should be guaranteed a job for life. Especially someone in the field of educating our kids. It rewards mediocrity and incompetence.
What is the history of tenure? Why was it put in place to begin with?
Amen to that.
Well, I'm happy that I was wrong and that WC is getting the axe after all. It shows the power of the internet and websites like the FR. He'd have never been fired without the new media to shed the spotlight of truth on his fraud and deceit.
UC Santa Cruz needs a new chancellor...maybe they can lure Ward Churchill there.
I'm not sure of its origin, but the reasoning behind it is that it frees a professor to conduct research that challenges the status quo without fear of being fired. Frankly, given the present academic atmosphere, tenure probably protects non-leftists professors (if they can hide their views long enough to get tenure) more than leftists.
Note that Churchill is not being fired for his opinion. He is being fired for plagiarism and other related misconduct.
In theory the professor is supposed to have shown excellence, before he or she receives tenure. Theory and practice don't always coincide.
Too often, the professor who are good teachers don't get tenure, because they aren't always good researchers. But it's research that is usually the more important aspect of tenure these days, so teaching gets short shrift -- and is often handed off to teaching assistants and junior, often non-tenure-track, faculty.
Guaranteed a job for life?? Isnt that some sort of French plan?? No wonder its so screwed up.
As a taxpayer I say let him sue and I'll happily pay. It is worth it if it has a chilling effect on this kind of completely irresponsible behavior in the professoriate.
The man doesn't have a scholarly bone in his body and having him as a professor at an institution that is supposed to search for truth is is a travesty.
Boulder is above much of the atmosphere. Sometimes the oxygen gets a little thin.
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If you don’t have tenure, the professors who get fired will be conservatives.
The administrators are always leftists since the search process exposes any leanings. I remember seeing one administrator candidate being blackballed by one of our hardline Marxists because he had published in a Quarterly that actually admitted all opinions. Leftists hire leftists, even in staff positions. The more turnover you get, the further left your campus drifts.
So Conservative professors would, if they were employees at will, get sacked and they would have little defense. To my certain knowledge, our administrators have harassed conservative professors by laying charges against them and then not providing evidence. And more charges and more charges, until the professor goes underground or quits. One conservative received a very nice position by faculty vote and the administration, the next day, hit him with a five year probation.
Faculty are experts at manipulating administrators too. Since I have two hardline Marxists in my department who are very cozy with the administrators, some charge could be trumped up and, if I were employed at will, I would either have to cave in and hew the party line or I would be gone.
Do you think I could assign Thomas Sowell or Ayn Rand or Bernard Lewis if I did not have the protection of tenure?
I swear I am going to do a vanity on this subject.
McVey
I'm heading into an academic job myself in a few months. I'm not sure how I feel about tenure, but I had another career before getting the PhD. I find that people who know they can do something else don't find tenure to be the answer to everything.
I think tenure can reward mediocrity and incompetence, but many schools have post-tenure reviews, it's becoming harder (at least at Research 1 schools) to be deadwood.
The problem I see with tenure is that it maintains professors whose areas/skills are no longer needed. I'm a big fan of learning all kinds of esoteric stuff, but if students no longer see 14th Centure French poetry as vital to their education, it's time for the person teaching that course to go or develop a new area of expertise.
I'm on a message board for academics and you should hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth by new PhDs who can't get a job because schools just don't want their area anymore. They bemoan the lack of tenured jobs, mostly, I think, because they know if they had to leave 1 job teaching French poetry it's going to be hard has hell to find another. I don't think these folks are incompetent; they just teach in unpopular (and to students, unproductive) subject areas. Academic freedom be damned, what they want is to keep their jobs even if there are no students in the classroom.
For me, I don't have a need to bring politics into the classroom, but if tenure can protect libs spouting off all kinds of crap, I'd like to think it would protect a conservative who makes the 'mistake' of putting an American flag on her office door.
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