Wow, you got taught by the faculty? I’m jealous. Most of my teachers were grad students.
I did have a handful of really good teachers who apparently weren’t researching anything at the time.
But go figure, I thought tenure was for demonstrating a skill in the educational process.
Your father probably has four times the education and five times the brains of the average Kentuckian, so he is probably underpaid.
Do you actually know which of your horrible teachers had tenure?
Heard of them lately?
I used to work at Bell Labs. People have been very confused about what we do.
90% of Bell Labs was development - product development, software development, etc. 10% was research. Where did the money come from? Our old monopoly status, supported by the government. As soon as we lost that, the money available for research slowly got whittled away, and researchers (except for a few rock stars) got pressured into doing more practical things.
Corporate basic research has always been funded from monopoly money. IBM had a ton of it, getting cut now. Microsoft has some. Google does too. By monopoly I don’t mean the legal term, but a company with pretty much assured profits from a dominant position.
BTW, you should remember that Penzias and Wilson made their discovery not from doing radio astronomy research, but from trying to figure out the source of interference on microwave transmissions. And they were in research.
Why don’t companies continue basic research when money is tight? Because, even if the success rate is good, the ability to make money off the research is usually rotten. Examples are legion, including the mouse you are using and the ethernet that is somewhere in the path from your computer to mine.
I wasn’t in research proper, but I and my group were half research funded, I had close connections to research people, and one of the people in my group got funded directly by Area 11, so I know what I’m talking about.
This is long enough, so I’m not going to go on about why government funded basic research makes sense.
You are aware that any university that is likely to be involved with research is non-profit, aren’t you?
Where do you think the money for research is going to come from? Upping undergraduate tuition still more? Grad students doing research get their tuition paid, so it ain’t going to come from them. Not to mention that the facilities to do research are very expensive. I think some universities have limited funding to bootstrap new researchers. But it is quite limited.
Some companies fund some university research, but it is quite limited since the professors rightly demand the right to publish the results. I’ve funded students when I was at Bell Labs. The major benefit is access to good new students, not the work.
I’ve been on several NSF review panels. I saw no corruption. Clearly 15 mostly good proposals competing for five proposals worth of funding causes lots of discussion, and not everything worthy gets money. NSF has strict conflict of interest rules, in that if you even were a co-author at some point with one of the proposers, you leave the room and do not participate.
The bullshit NSF panels I have been on are for small business funding, forced on NSF by congress who can’t stand the professors getting money and not “entrepreneurs.” Most of the proposals were crap, often coming from companies which do nothing but get grant funding and never actually start any businesses. The level of review was much lower too. I finally got “fired” when I refused to lead the discussion for a grant on a subject I knew nothing about.
What are you missing? Everything, since you clearly know nothing about how universities and research funding works.
Yog, this is a more polite version of you-know-who’s broad brush arguments about various groups. I’d truly like to see this sort of argument die out unless you can find some sort of evidence that your argument applies to all conservatives. Let’s try to dial that back in the future.
Is this whole “firing professors because of their political views” really that big of an issue? One that requires tenure to resolve?
I have never heard of someone being fired for being Republican or Democrat, voting for Obama or Romney, or teaching a Scalia jurisprudence or an Earl Warren one. The times that I have seen “academic freedom” being used to defend a professor is when one has truly whackadoodle beliefs and keeps teaching the students his version of history instead of the curriculum.
If a history professor wants his whole class to be about how there should be a worker’s revolution to overthrow the government or that slavery should be legal again, then it would be a good thing to get such extreme views out of the classroom. The students are the ones who suffer from such things.
At least one conservative professor has been discriminated against because of his political views, and there’s ample evidence of discrimination against conservatives in the academic world.
It doesn’t have to be their political views. It’s to protect them to persue any unpopular line of research. It could be a shunned view on frost evaporation just as likely as flat tax boosterism.
Mike Adams sounds like an abrasive asshole who relishes making his co-workers unhappy: in one column, he refers to a co-worker political opponent as an “animal.” Nevertheless, it looks like a jury found that he was discriminated against for his political views. He wasn’t promoted, the jury found.
That wasn’t the question.
If you wanted to answer the question asked, you need look no further than Ward Churchill, another abrasive asshole who relishes making his co-workers unhappy. Only the political speech that a jury found contributed to HIS firing was extreme (and hateful) leftist speech.
Why, I wonder, did you go for a non-example to answer the question, instead of an actual example to answer the question? Is it because you want to perpetuate the narrative that it’s the mean and nasty left that stifles speech?
As CarnalK has already noted, tenure is primarily the protection of academic freedom in research. Say, for instance, climate change research in an institution that was receiving major endowments from the oil or coal industry, or research on the health effects of tobacco in the heart of tobacco country. While the precise meaning of “whackadoodle beliefs” isn’t entirely clear, I can assure you that professors who demonstrably fail to do their jobs can and do get fired, whether tenured or not. The difference is that firing tenured faculty requires a more formal process.
Digging a little deeper into that first example makes me wonder what you think you see there. The guy wasn’t being fired, the question is whether or not he deserved a promotion, and looking closer I found, among other things …
that students complained that his extreme political views were being proselytized in the classrom,
that the guy was a total jerk who publicly attacked his own colleagues,
that many of his claimed publications were academically irrelevant,
that he failed to exercise his right to appeal through the normal university appeals process, and instead took his grievances directly to the legal system in what appears to be an act of public grandstanding, and
that the claim of discrimination was the finding of a jury whose competence to judge his academic standing was questionable to say the least, and that the university categorically denied discrimination and was appealing the decision.
If there’s “ample evidence” of poor conservatives being so downtrodden, you must surely have be able to come up with a better example! And as for your other link, the one that supposedly offers such “ample evidence” of terrible discrimination, it actually offers no evidence whatsoever. What it says is that the majority of social psychologists self-identify as liberal. I’m shocked, I tell you! 
IOW you didn’t actually read the article all the way to the end.
Or else you agree that a group of whom 37.5% would be biased against choosing a black person as a colleague could not be described as having any bias against blacks.
Regards,
Shodan
That’s not an accurate summary.
Here are some quotes from the second link that constitute evidence:
Did you read those paragraphs?
Why aren’t they evidence?
I thought this quote was presciently applicable to the SDMB:
When I asked Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale who edits the journal where Haidt’s paper will appear, what he thought of the research [that there is a hostility towards conservatives that creates barriers to entering the field -my edit], he pointed out what he believed to be a major inconsistency in the field’s responses. “There’s often a lot of irony in this area,” he said. “The same people who are exquisitely sensitive to discrimination in other areas are often violently antagonistic when it comes to political ideology, bringing up clichéd arguments that they wouldn’t accept in other domains: ‘They aren’t smart enough.’ ‘They don’t want to be in the field.’ ”
And so you liken ideological discrimination to racial discrimination as well? Is someone who always votes a straight party line a bigot?
If 37.5% of any given group is decidedly hostile to Elbonians, and the rest of the group has no particular opinion regarding Elbonians, are we going to say that the group as a whole is not prejudiced against Elbonians? Certainly we cannot say that if said group were to judge the employment prospects of an Elbonian and a non-Elbonian, the Elbonian candidate is likely to be judged fairly and equitably to his/her counterpart. Even if the majority of said group has no prejudice whatsoever, neither pro nor con, we cannot reasonably believe that the prospects for each candidate are equal, when clearly they are not.
As is the word “crisis” to describe underfunding for the concept (tenure) which shouldn’t exist in the first place. 
And they drag down property values, listen to loud music, and don’t keep up their lawns.
It means what it often does - ‘We welcome a diversity of viewpoints from everyone who agrees with us.’
Regards,
Shodan
No.
But the two cases differ markedly, which means you have offered a False Analogy.
We’re not discussing whether bigotry is in play. In fact, the accusation of bigotry would itself be an ad hominem attack, and not an argument – so of course I wouldn’t have made such a claim in this discussion.
We’re discussing the claim that the field of social psychology places barriers to entry into the field for people of conservative political beliefs.
In discussing that claim, Bloom’s observation was that there are people who would readily accept, as evidence for racial discrimination, the fact that the racial group is dramatically underrepresented. Those people, says Bloom, would not accept rebuttals such as “They don’t want to be in the field.” Yet, says Bloom, not only do they accept such arguments in this case, but they offer them.
So there’s an analogy to racial or to gender discrimination being used, but it’s not an analogy that meaningfully extends to voting.
Well it’s just that you quoted and seem to agree with Shodan who seems intent on comparing it to racial bias. And the bit you quoted remarked on the “irony” because the subjects of his study are usually “exquisitely sensitive to discrimination” in other areas. As in judging people for their beliefs is similar to other discrimination. Just asking if you agree with the people you’re quoting.