Tenure has been failing for a long time, not due to “free speech” issues but because like every other industry the post-secondary sector has become increasingly corporatized, with executive salaries skyrocketing while faculty are slowly being turned into a virtual temping pool filled with adjuncts working for starvation wages.
But that’s a subject for a different thread.
Tenure does not mean a guaranteed, untouchable job for life. It merely means instructors can’t be fired without cause. The fact there are fewer tenure-track positions is simply fiscal: non-tenure track positions pay little, and adjunct positions even less. This is despite soaring tuition costs, but that’s another subject for another thread.
Tenure, scmenure. Academic freedom, academic shmeedom. She has a job and she publicly embarrassed her employer. Everybody else gets fired for doing that, so should she.
I still don’t get all the claims about academic freedom when she didn’t post any of this in her capacity as an academic. It’s her own blog, and she’s not even making an academic argument.
Academic freedom means that you can explore your field without fear of reprisal. The goal is to make sure that unpopular ideas are not rejected out of hand, but actually studied.
While I wouldn’t agree, I could see people arguing that this is just political speech that she did off-campus, while not on the job. But claiming it’s about academic freedom is saying she’s doing it in her position as a professor, and thus gives even more reason to believe the school should act.
Not even those who support her seem to be able to separate this blog from her professor position. So why complain if the students can’t, either? It seems even her defenders assume this sort of stuff leaks out on campus.
Bo hates when other people do that!
Bambi only pawn in game of life.
Bambi’s mother was killed by a hunter, and Bambi never got over that.
I’d be interested to hear a follow-up from @Hari_Seldon about reconciling his direct knowledge of her with the viewpoints in this thread.
I agree, this is not an issue of academic freedom, despite what Azar herself thinks. Rather, it seems to be another case of someone being disciplined at their work for something they said outside of work, as a personal citizen. I have come around to believe that the disagreement among the public in these situations is almost always about whether what was said meets the threshold of offense for the discipline to be warranted or not, as opposed to being purely about “the principle of free speech”.
For example, I think if she said something like “the Holocaust didn’t happen, but if it did, it was because the Jews deserved it” on her blog, I don’t think anyone would disagree that she should be disciplined (probably fired). I think the vast majority of people, if not everyone, would think that a statement like “George Floyd was a criminal and deserved what he got” absolutely merits discipline. But I don’t personally agree that “BLM is to black New Brunswickers what Islamists are to Muslims” crosses that threshold. IMO, it’s a dumb statement and there are a number of silly posts on her blog, but nothing that I’ve read so far that crosses the threshold (I’ve only really skimmed through the few posts linked in this thread though). Criticizing BLM as an organization does not come across as inherently racist to me, any more than criticizing Greenpeace comes across as an attack to environmentalists in general. I disagree with her characterization of BLM but I don’t think racist intentions are the only explanation for her posts.
See, I disagree that these are the only two possibilities - rather, I think smart people can write dumb things. Or, if you want to frame it differently, it should be OK for dumb people to be professors as long as they are competent in the field that they are teaching/researching. Just because she might post incoherent ramblings on a blog doesn’t mean that she is equally incoherent in her professional life.
As I said, though, some of the complaints that the university is investigating are about the professor’s using her public blog posts to lament and disparage various “woke” beliefs of students she’s taught, who are identified by name. Professionally speaking, I think that sort of behavior is a HUGE no-no for a faculty member.
I totally agree that would be very unprofessional and would merit discipline. I missed your post about her calling students out by name on her blog, but I read the Global News article that you linked earlier and didn’t see any reference to her doing that - did you find that from reading another source, or from reading more of her blog posts? I realize I haven’t read the posts that you linked in your previous posts, just the original ones in GreenWyvern’s post.
Her field is “health psychology”.
In any event, the problem is not that she’s dumb per se. It’s that she’s either a racist, or too dumb to grasp that her posts very much appear to be racist. If she has any other valid point, she is unable to state it coherently.
In my opinion, it’s not acceptable for someone to have a faculty position with teaching responsibilities if they reveal in any context that they do not respect the human dignity of all their students. Bigotry against a subset of one’s students does not fall under the umbrella of the free exchange of ideas in academic discourse.
I’m sorry, I could have sworn I put this link in my most recent post, but now I can’t find it there either. Here it is, butt-naked just to make sure it’s visible:
Here’s the specific text I was referring to: