And this is why tenure exists!
And why so many want to get rid of it :(
Yeah, tenure definitely a double-edged sword. On the one hand, being able to voice potentially unpopular opinions is important. On the other, having dead weight occupying faculty positions which brilliant younger folk would kill for — folks who would be more productive, more engaged, and contribute more to the world — is…well, maybe not great.
Feels like we could have both by ditching tenure and allowing professors to express their opinions (so long as it doesn’t interfere with teaching, of course).
Anecdotally, my business ethics professor in college was a very open libertarian. I’ll never agree with his politics, but despite that, he was an excellent teacher, and one of the better ones I had at the school overall. On the other hand, none of the classes I had that were run by tenured professors were any good, with one professor even giving us the wrong exam once and having us complete it anyway, even though it had material we weren’t even expected to know.
tenure was created to prevent nazi interference with academic freedom. and here we see nazi interference with academic freedom thwarted by tenure
on gaza *GENOCIDE.
Not to downplay the seriousness of the title or claims, but undergraduate enrollment is in a relatively steep decline. It seems to go without saying that faculty members without tenure would be near the top of the list for cuts.
Side note…did theintercept recently go paywalled? I don’t remember having issues in the past.
Not paywalled for me
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There’s no official tally of the number of academic workers who have lost jobs or faced suspension over support for Palestine, not least because higher education in this country is disarticulated, often privatized, and reliant on short-term contract labor.
“The bulk of our inquiries, even our cases, have to do with violations of due process related to non-reappointment, to dismissal, to tenure award, et cetera,” said Anita Levy, senior program officer with the American Association of University Professors.
Footage capturing the arrests of Emory Philosophy Department Chair Noëlle McAfee and economics professor Caroline Fohlin, the latter who was slammed brutally to the ground by cops, was shared widely online.
On his X account in mid-October, in the wake of stridently bellicose remarks from Israeli officials, Shaw wrote in a now-deleted post that Zionism “is beyond a mental illness; it’s a genocidal disease.” The target was unambiguously Zionist ideology and its adherents, not Jews for being Jewish.
It really started to pick up after 1967,” Palestinian American scholar and author Steven Salaita told me by email, referring to the period of the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, a time when support for Israel was growing in the U.S. “Too many people to remember have been negatively affected.
It was extramural speech — an essay for a leftist publisher — that earned a suspension from teaching for Jodi Dean, a tenured political theorist at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York, where she has taught for 30 years.
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