Perfect. I think the public in Wisconsin is deciding. I hope more states follow suit and abolish tenure if anything at the primary and secondary levels (pre-college).
No, that should be the goal of a trade school. A university is not and should not be the same thing.
If the university cares about quality of teaching, it won’t award tenure to low quality teachers in the first place. If it doesn’t care about quality of teaching, eliminating tenure isn’t going to make things any better.
This confirms what I was talking about earlier in the thread. Universities serve a dual purpose: research and education. In the 19th century, this made sense. You had to gather a group of smart people together for both purposes, and every professor did some research and some teaching.
Today, many professors are greater researchers and poor teachers. (Russian math professors who barely speak English, for instance–they made up a third of the Department when I was at Vanderbilt.) They all have tenure of course. They don’t serve the educational purpose of the university well, but they’re there and it’s impossible to get rid of them.
Today’s universities are outdated. The research and educational components should be split into separate institutions, so that great researchers can focus on research and great teachers can focus on teaching. The sciences, engineering, and medical schools should be split from the humanities, so that the smart people are not distracted by the shenanigans of the dumb people.
Now I’m even more confused. Is this the “but he started it!” argument? If not, what are you getting at? I’m not interested in who brought it up, I’m interested in why you think it’s relevant enough to discuss in the thread until I say something about it, at which point it’s suddenly irrelevant.
To some extent this is already the case, in the sense that there are institutions that focus on teaching (including but not limited to many community colleges and small private colleges) and those that focus on research. And I think that in many cases students (and their parents) should pay a lot more attention to the degree to which an institution considers the quality of undergraduate education to be important when deciding where to go to college—and if they can find out what criteria are used in deciding which faculty are awarded tenure, that can be an important clue.
There’s a theory that research and teaching positively influence each other: being an active researcher makes a professor a better teacher, and vice versa. I think in some cases this actually does happen. In other cases, though, it does not. The case against conflating research and teaching was made eloquently by Morris Kline in his book Why the Professor Can’t Teach, which can be read freely online; see in partcular CHAPTER: 4 The Conflict Between Research and teaching. The book was written in 1977, about mathematics, but is probably still relevant today to many subjects.
Vanderbilt admits a mere 12.7 percent of applicants:
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-acceptance-rate
This tells me that Vanderbilt students are, relatively speaking, academic champs who don’t need to best teachers. It’s much better these good researchers, who are mediocre teachers, be at Vanderbilt than at a branch state university location, or community college, where students commonly need top-level instruction to make up for deficits in their mathematical preparation.
I realize that you have proposed an alternative – let great researchers research, and wonderful teachers teach. But this won’t do anything to get good teachers to the students who need them most, as they already attend schools lacking a heavy research emphasis.
Vanderbilt’s $4 billion endowment could indeed be used to grab for its highly privileged students the best college-level teachers in Tennessee. But then some other students won’t have those teachers.
Come toVanderbilt, we have mediocre teachers!
New slogan rocks.
I’m a tenured faculty member, and I have not found “quite a few” faculty who do this. On the contrary, the vast majority of faculty work their asses off, and for a lot less money than they could earn doing something else. I used to teach GRE and LSAT prep, and can score a 180 on the LSAT every time I take it. Instead of making millions practicing law, I make thousands teaching and writing philosophy. You’re welcome.
There seems to be little point in trying to make that argument to those convinced that all academia is useless to begin with, and that universities had better get with the times and turn themselves into trade schools for plumbers and welders and start churning out Patriotic Workers for the factories of the nation. These are the teachings of the Great Leader Kim Jong Walker.
IME it’s usually a case of funding drying up. Every department I’ve experienced has some duds. I’m not sure how you measure it. We could probably find something in the NRC report on grad schools:
http://sites.nationalacademies.org/pga/resdoc/
Since this thread involved the relationship between tenure and academic freedom, it seems worth mentioning the case of Teresa Buchanan. She is, or rather was, an education professor at Louisiana State, until she occasionally used the word “fuck” in class, made jokes about sex, and once used the phrase “don’t be a pussy”. Anyone familiar with the intellectual climate at universities will guess what happened next. A student complained to the administration, the administration charged her with I’ll-defined misdeeds like “verbal abuse” and “harassment”, she was subjected to a long series of trials and hearings, and finally she lost her job. So that’s the sort of thing that would have been prevented if she had tenure, right?
But here’s the punchline: she had tenure. It didn’t help.
Meanwhile, Professor Zandria Robinson of Rhodes College has taken up the job of explaining why so many people don’t like academia any more.
Maybe a good start would be agreeing that, even in a University position, you don’t get to have Free Public Money for Life No Matter What You Decide to Do Each Day.
That’s what tenure is.
At least the Great Leader has the option to bazooka the incompetent when they fail to measure up. 
I am doubtless not the only one amused by the fact that anti-tenure advocates implied that “tenure doesn’t protect professors” and that “tenure protects professors too much” in successive posts.
This might be the cause of the confusion: (emphasis mine)
[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
I’m confused–if tenure isn’t a factor, how on earth is Kipnis’s case relevant to a thread about tenure? I don’t think it’s appropriate to consider me off-topic if you’re the one who brought up the off-topic example to begin with.
[/QUOTE]
So, since he didn’t bring it up, well, you can figure out the rest.
Because plumbers’ jobs don’t generally require the search for and publication of sometimes politically unpopular truths.
If you want researchers to be free to study and think and speak, you have to protect them from the fallout of unpopular or even heretical speech. That’s how we eventually get rid of popular bad ideas.
I suppose it is way too late to point this out, but Walker’s proposal has little to do with politically unpopular truths. It deals with situations when the money runs out.
IOW this bill does NOT say “Professor X said that white people are the devil or that 9/11 was an inside job or rape culture is the reason for Bill Cosby, so fire her.”
Like I said, probably too late.
Regards,
Shodan
It’s both, actually.
I don’t see how choosing curricula affects tenure. Does it mean a professor would be fired for choosing to teach off his own book, instead of a cheaper one?
Regards,
Shodan
They deal with a completely different kind of crap
Academic tenure is the most misunderstood element of university employment. It only means one cannot (generally) be fired without cause and a hearing - as opposed to lecturers, junior faculty, and adjuncts who can be dismissed at will. And tenure does not protect against budget cuts and layoffs or the consolidation of departments or universities. No professor I know of is sitting back and enjoying their “tenure.” However, people outside of the academy seem to regard it as the next best thing to a noble title.