7 ms·

Tenure makes a lot of sense for research university positions. Research can take a long time to be fruitful, and many avenues of research won't pan out at all.

Tenure makes a lot of sense for research university positions. Research can take a long time to be fruitful, and many avenues of research won't pan out at all. Tenure helps enable researchers to focus on various problems instead of being stuck to what will have the most payout in the shortest term. It's never been quite clear to me why tenure makes sense for instructor positions, either at the college or pre-college level. I say this as someone who was a tenured instructor at a community college for a number of years.

plg 12y ago
I guess one answer is the following: that "academic freedom" (which is one of the motivations for tenure, i.e. it protects one's academic freedom) applies not only to research but to teaching activities as well... but again, you're right, in that perhaps this makes sense in a university environment (in which curriculums can easily vary in many ways, and still be valid) but not so much in elementary schools, primary schools, high schools, etc, in which a curriculum is more restricted in its scope, and pre-defined using standards, etc.
opendais 12y ago
It is because of bullshit like this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-207079/Evolution-banned-US-schools.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-207079/Evolution-ban... "The word "evolution" will be removed from school books in the deep south of the United States under a new proposal." How much do you want to bet violating such a ban would lead to immediate dismissal without tenure protections? This is a school administrator that tried to get such a ban passed. EDIT: Since there seems to be some confusion, I've italicized the word immediate since people seem to think it was irrelevant.
- dlss 12y ago
  I think the courts are a better solution for that problem. Having a couple "crazy science teachers" with tenure shouldn't even count as a solution IMO - especially if that causes people to be more careful about who they give tenure to... EDIT: I said "better solution" not "perfect solution". I would love if you speculate about what a perfect solution is though!
  - opendais 12y ago
    School administrators, not teachers, are the elected crazies.
  - joeclark77 12y ago
    The courts? Have a judge pick the textbook? I can't think of anything that could possibly go wrong. School choice is the solution. Let parents hold the schools accountable, because they're the only ones (apparently) who put the kids' education ahead of political pet causes.
    - pavel_lishin 12y ago
      School choice may not be a viable option for lower income families, especially in non-urban settings.
      - refurb 12y ago
        It would be under a voucher system, but the teacher's union doesn't like that idea.
        pavel_lishin 12y ago
        It's been awhile (high school) since I've read about voucher system; how do they work nowadays? Is there a way to cover transportation cost and time?
        opendais 12y ago
        A voucher system that properly enabled children in poor neighborhoods (by covering the related costs) would be a good idea.
        ironchef 12y ago
        It's not just the union as charter schools are (in general) just as mixed of a bag as public schools. There was a Stanford study back in 2009 that spanned 16 states and showed around 20 percent of charters outperformed and 35 percent of charters underperformed their peer public schools. Actually this reminds me they were supposed to have another round of outcomes last year or so. I'll have to go and see again how things have changed. (Offhand, it wouldn't surprise me if it's relatively close overall).
- w1ntermute 12y ago
  Sounds like the solution to that is to make it illegal to ban these topics (and then firmly enforce that law), rather than giving the teachers tenure.
  - opendais 12y ago
    I think you've never experienced unofficial pressure in the workplace before when you need to put food on the table. ;) Tenure is much, much more effective than trying to make a law like that work reliably. Every time some new topic came up that was politically charged, you'd need to amend it. What happens when the people you consider to be the "wrong people" are in charge? They get their way.
    - yellowapple 12y ago
      If it's unofficial, then there's not much to be worried about. Do your job and you'll be fine. I honestly don't think tenure is more effective than actual legal enforcement, namely because tenure isn't really effective for that purpose at all, especially when we're considering that the older teachers - the ones who benefit from tenure - are the ones who are probably in support of such pressure, which is more likely directed at the younger teachers, relatively fresh from college, who want their students to learn about the proper science they learned about in school but are afraid to do so when their paychecks are on the line.
  - Bud 12y ago
    That's not even in the possible range of solutions. Remember that lawmakers and law enforcers in red states are actively hostile towards teaching science, never mind teaching anything at all about the body, such as sex education. It's not going to be made illegal, and such laws will not and would not be enforced in the areas in which this is a problem to begin with, i.e., Republican areas.
    - w1ntermute 12y ago
      > Remember that lawmakers and law enforcers in red states are actively hostile towards teaching science, never mind teaching anything at all about the body, such as sex education. Then do it at the federal level. Fuck the troglodytes in the red states.
- chamblin 12y ago
  Isn't it just as, if not more, likely that a teacher would i.e. refuse to teach evolution (or even just be generally incompetent) and irremovable because of tenure? How does that improve anything?
  - opendais 12y ago
    Ah, but that is a violation of the curriculum and clear cause for removal. Tenure isn't some magical invulnerability to being fired. It simply slows the process to a crawl and forces the collection of a mountain of evidence to fire someone for cause. If someone intentionally, and repeatedly, violates the curriculum you can fire a tenured teacher. You can't acquire that mountain of evidence in the 12 months between getting a ban on evolution passed and having it repealed in federal court.
    - joeclark77 12y ago
      You just contradicted yourself. You're saying here that tenure cannot enable teachers to defy the school board.
      - opendais 12y ago
        I didn't actually. Tenure doesn't give them immunity to the school board and/or other administrators. It does last long enough that abuses of the system and/or unofficial pressure to be resolved before the teacher actually loses their job. Firing a teacher with tenure can take 12+ months. Clearer?
        Variance 12y ago
        Joe is right, you did contradict yourself. You originally said that tenure allows teachers to violate stupid school board decisions and to teach evolution anyway. Here, you said that tenure does not allow teachers to not teach evolution if the school board mandates it. Which is it? Can the school board fire teachers for not following the curriculum? If so, then school boards can stop teachers from teaching evolution. If not, then teachers can choose to teach Creationism. Either way, tenure doesn't matter.
- eastbayjake 12y ago
  The freedom to teach unpopular ideas also includes the freedom to teach that water has feelings and you can change its molecular structure by yelling at it, or that vaccines cause autism, or that global warming is all a bunch of bullshit made up by the liberal media. Pick your poison.
  - opendais 12y ago
    Please cite examples of this actually occurring and the teacher not being fired for 12+ months? I used the word immediate for a reason that seems to be lost on some people :/
    - eastbayjake 12y ago
      No, I'm agreeing that a science teacher who taught kids that water has feelings would be fired immediately without tenure protections -- and deserves to be fired immediately! But tenure protections would not just protect an evolution teacher in Mississippi, it would also protect Gwyneth Paltrow's right to teach kids batshit crazy things about molecular chemistry based on new age pseudoscience. It cuts both ways.
- ameister14 12y ago
  You make a point in a later comment "Except a Creationist school district would be a violation of Church/State separation and the trial relating to that would stop the teacher from being fired." So tenure protects teachers long enough for such a trial to occur. I understand that. But wouldn't a wrongful termination suit do the same? After a couple of these, the State would pass guidelines on hiring and firing so that they don't get sued.
roc 12y ago
Because school administrators may be blocked from outright banning the teaching of evolution/sex education/unpopular-but-actual history/etc, but could simply threaten/actually fire teachers until the entire staff was agreeable to their desired curriculum.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  The obvious solution there is to not provide administrators with tenure either.
  - roc 12y ago
    The problem isn't rogue administrators, it's an abusive majority deciding en masse to harm/under-serve a minority. You don't get an administrator seeking to ban the teaching of evolution without a majority of voters in the district (or at least political support) who agree with that. So the ability for an administrator to be fired doesn't enter into it. Even if one were to go "too far", they're just going to be replaced by another who shares the same general values, but perhaps with a more tactful presentation.
    - Variance 12y ago
      On the flipside, doesn't tenure allow teachers to defy a progressive administration and teach Creationism just as easily? Tenure doesn't help any particular agenda, such as science and evolution; rather it enables all agendas, and teachers can be just as bad as they can be good, like all people. The solution is to make teachers accountable to a curriculum and ensure that the curriculum is teaching evolution, via the courts if necessary.
      - opendais 12y ago
        Yes. And then they eventually would get fired for it. This isn't about protecting a progressive viewpoint against a conservative one. It is about protecting teachers from being forced to service Political Viewpoint X or lose their job immediately.
Alupis 12y ago
I think we've all been there... had some teacher for some class in some grade that made the students wonder "how on earth are you allowed to keep teaching?". There are many many very good teachers. There are also some very bad teachers who stop caring about the kids. Tenure currently enables teachers to "coast" and lose enthusiasm to teach and change lives.
- Iftheshoefits 12y ago
  Teachers who lose enthusiasm don't lose it because one day they wake up and think, "Man, I'm tenured now; fk all y'all I got mine." They lose it because of the vicious, dysfunctional attitudes taken toward teachers. That attitude being the one in which "we" expect teachers to be babysitters, guardians, mentors, and a variety of other things while at the same time facing a relentless assault on their competence, integrity, and wallets (lower pay, less support for classroom materials, etc.). I put "we" in quotes because, clearly, I don't consider myself part of that group. Teachers, tenured or not, are as much victims as the students in this mess. They're all victims of--and this isn't going to be a popular opinion here, I bet--the very real, very destructive, anti-intellectual, anti-government, and anti-education strains of conservative politics that have increased sway in matters of the governance of education. This isn't a Democrat vs. Republican thing, either; as far as I'm concerned party affiliation is irrelevant (or, if you like, "both sides do it"). It is ideology that matters here. The destructive ideology I just described is the one most responsible for the problems we see in public schools, and that ideology is deeply entrenched in one party and becoming increasingly more entrenched in the other, to the point where the lines blur.
  - jack-r-abbit 12y ago
    Yes, "we" treat our teachers pretty poorly. And they often succumb to the assault on them. But, it doesn't really matter if they lose enthusiasm over night or over a 10 year period. If they have lost their enthusiasm and are no longer performing their job to the satisfaction of their employer, there should not be a long complicated process to dismiss them.
adrr 12y ago
Tenure prevents teachers from getting dismissed for teaching ideas that may not acceptable with the majority opinion. With creationism being pushed in schools, it seems we moving backwards from the progressive made after the scopes trial.
- Alupis 12y ago
  I think it's the school administration's job to protect teachers from casual termination... not a contract that makes it impossible to get rid of the worst teachers.
- eastbayjake 12y ago
  At least at the K-12 level, teachers don't have a right to teach their students whatever they feel is appropriate. There are state and national standards -- backed by assessments -- that mandate what teachers should be teaching and measure whether those teachers are doing a good job. Teachers are employees like any other employee. At my job I don't get to work on whatever I want whenever I disagree with the majority opinion about how my time should be spent, and most companies would be terrible if employees had "tenure" where they could work on whatever they wanted -- including "working on this sandwich before an afternoon nap." (And if that sounds like a straw man, Google around for videos like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE5VkcwKwP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE5VkcwKwP0)
  - adrr 12y ago
    Thats the point i am trying to make. When Kansas removed evolution out of curriculum, teachers still taught it because they couldn't get fired. Thats what tenure protects, that our education system is not affected by majority opinion and changes political climate. Now that Kansas has removed tenure, the next time the education board bans evolution which seems to happen every 5 years, teachers will have to comply or get fired.
    - eastbayjake 12y ago
      And the point I'm trying to make is that curriculum choices at the K-12 level are a democratic decision, not a matter of personal conscience by educators. You don't get paid by the government to teach whatever you like, you get paid to teach what the government pays you to teach, and you're evaluated based on how well students know the material the government asks you to teach them. Removing evolution from the curriculum is a political problem that voters need to solve. It's not something you can fix through teacher autonomy. The real issue is getting politicians and administrators to ask teachers to teach the right things, and it's their fault -- not teachers -- when the curriculum is bad.
joeclark77 12y ago
In theory, university tenure is supposed to protect the freedom to research unpopular topics, not the freedom to be unproductive, however, I think it does confer that as a side benefit at least as you say "in the shortest term". Tenure for non-research faculty might make sense if it protects the right to teach unpopular ideas. It never made sense in the public schools, of course, and has always just been a way to transfer money from taxpayers' wallets to the Democrat party's coffers via a helpfully corrupt public sector union.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  > tenure is supposed to protect the freedom to research unpopular topics, not the freedom to be unproductive, however, I think [tenure] does confer [low productivity] as a side benefit at least as you say "in the shortest term". Perverse incentives are intense in the research community and they're getting worse as the supply/demand imbalance in the academic labor market continues to grow. My experience is that non-tenured professors tend to dramatically overproduce flashy media-bait ("scientific debt," if you will). Tenure is the only mechanism we have to balance that out, which means it's becoming more and more important every day. > It never made sense in the public schools, of course, and has always just been a way to transfer money from taxpayers' wallets to the Democrat party's coffers via a helpfully corrupt public sector union. I find teachers far less objectionable as money-funnling mechanisms than the defense and dirty-energy industries.
- ahomescu1 12y ago
  > Tenure for non-research faculty might make sense if it protects the right to teach unpopular ideas. As in my other comment, there's a tradeoff here. Tenure could be used to teach Evolution, or it could be used to teach Nazism.
dubya 12y ago
Here in Tennessee the legislature's been fighting hard against tenure for years. At my kid's school an alarming number of teachers are leaving after this year, reportedly due to bad evaluations (not public information, unfortunately) with the gung-ho principal and no recourse. The ones leaving are generally well thought of by the parents. It seems that "team player" is weighted a lot higher than teaching ability here. I don't know that tenure is really the answer, but currently public school teachers are much more at the whim of administrators than college instructors are. It feels like they're trying to drive the teachers away so they can declare the whole public education thing a failure and kill it.

plg 12y ago

I guess one answer is the following: that "academic freedom" (which is one of the motivations for tenure, i.e. it protects one's academic freedom) applies not only to research but to teaching activities as well... but again, you're right, in that perhaps this makes sense in a university environment (in which curriculums can easily vary in many ways, and still be valid) but not so much in elementary schools, primary schools, high schools, etc, in which a curriculum is more restricted in its scope, and pre-defined using standards, etc.

opendais 12y ago

It is because of bullshit like this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-207079/Evolution-banned-US-schools.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-207079/Evolution-ban... "The word "evolution" will be removed from school books in the deep south of the United States under a new proposal." How much do you want to bet violating such a ban would lead to immediate dismissal without tenure protections? This is a school administrator that tried to get such a ban passed. EDIT: Since there seems to be some confusion, I've italicized the word immediate since people seem to think it was irrelevant.

dlss 12y ago
I think the courts are a better solution for that problem. Having a couple "crazy science teachers" with tenure shouldn't even count as a solution IMO - especially if that causes people to be more careful about who they give tenure to... EDIT: I said "better solution" not "perfect solution". I would love if you speculate about what a perfect solution is though!
- opendais 12y ago
  School administrators, not teachers, are the elected crazies.
- joeclark77 12y ago
  The courts? Have a judge pick the textbook? I can't think of anything that could possibly go wrong. School choice is the solution. Let parents hold the schools accountable, because they're the only ones (apparently) who put the kids' education ahead of political pet causes.
  - pavel_lishin 12y ago
    School choice may not be a viable option for lower income families, especially in non-urban settings.
    - refurb 12y ago
      It would be under a voucher system, but the teacher's union doesn't like that idea.
      - pavel_lishin 12y ago
        It's been awhile (high school) since I've read about voucher system; how do they work nowadays? Is there a way to cover transportation cost and time?
      - opendais 12y ago
        A voucher system that properly enabled children in poor neighborhoods (by covering the related costs) would be a good idea.
      - ironchef 12y ago
        It's not just the union as charter schools are (in general) just as mixed of a bag as public schools. There was a Stanford study back in 2009 that spanned 16 states and showed around 20 percent of charters outperformed and 35 percent of charters underperformed their peer public schools. Actually this reminds me they were supposed to have another round of outcomes last year or so. I'll have to go and see again how things have changed. (Offhand, it wouldn't surprise me if it's relatively close overall).
w1ntermute 12y ago
Sounds like the solution to that is to make it illegal to ban these topics (and then firmly enforce that law), rather than giving the teachers tenure.
- opendais 12y ago
  I think you've never experienced unofficial pressure in the workplace before when you need to put food on the table. ;) Tenure is much, much more effective than trying to make a law like that work reliably. Every time some new topic came up that was politically charged, you'd need to amend it. What happens when the people you consider to be the "wrong people" are in charge? They get their way.
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    If it's unofficial, then there's not much to be worried about. Do your job and you'll be fine. I honestly don't think tenure is more effective than actual legal enforcement, namely because tenure isn't really effective for that purpose at all, especially when we're considering that the older teachers - the ones who benefit from tenure - are the ones who are probably in support of such pressure, which is more likely directed at the younger teachers, relatively fresh from college, who want their students to learn about the proper science they learned about in school but are afraid to do so when their paychecks are on the line.
- Bud 12y ago
  That's not even in the possible range of solutions. Remember that lawmakers and law enforcers in red states are actively hostile towards teaching science, never mind teaching anything at all about the body, such as sex education. It's not going to be made illegal, and such laws will not and would not be enforced in the areas in which this is a problem to begin with, i.e., Republican areas.
  - w1ntermute 12y ago
    > Remember that lawmakers and law enforcers in red states are actively hostile towards teaching science, never mind teaching anything at all about the body, such as sex education. Then do it at the federal level. Fuck the troglodytes in the red states.
chamblin 12y ago
Isn't it just as, if not more, likely that a teacher would i.e. refuse to teach evolution (or even just be generally incompetent) and irremovable because of tenure? How does that improve anything?
- opendais 12y ago
  Ah, but that is a violation of the curriculum and clear cause for removal. Tenure isn't some magical invulnerability to being fired. It simply slows the process to a crawl and forces the collection of a mountain of evidence to fire someone for cause. If someone intentionally, and repeatedly, violates the curriculum you can fire a tenured teacher. You can't acquire that mountain of evidence in the 12 months between getting a ban on evolution passed and having it repealed in federal court.
  - joeclark77 12y ago
    You just contradicted yourself. You're saying here that tenure cannot enable teachers to defy the school board.
    - opendais 12y ago
      I didn't actually. Tenure doesn't give them immunity to the school board and/or other administrators. It does last long enough that abuses of the system and/or unofficial pressure to be resolved before the teacher actually loses their job. Firing a teacher with tenure can take 12+ months. Clearer?
      - Variance 12y ago
        Joe is right, you did contradict yourself. You originally said that tenure allows teachers to violate stupid school board decisions and to teach evolution anyway. Here, you said that tenure does not allow teachers to not teach evolution if the school board mandates it. Which is it? Can the school board fire teachers for not following the curriculum? If so, then school boards can stop teachers from teaching evolution. If not, then teachers can choose to teach Creationism. Either way, tenure doesn't matter.
eastbayjake 12y ago
The freedom to teach unpopular ideas also includes the freedom to teach that water has feelings and you can change its molecular structure by yelling at it, or that vaccines cause autism, or that global warming is all a bunch of bullshit made up by the liberal media. Pick your poison.
- opendais 12y ago
  Please cite examples of this actually occurring and the teacher not being fired for 12+ months? I used the word immediate for a reason that seems to be lost on some people :/
  - eastbayjake 12y ago
    No, I'm agreeing that a science teacher who taught kids that water has feelings would be fired immediately without tenure protections -- and deserves to be fired immediately! But tenure protections would not just protect an evolution teacher in Mississippi, it would also protect Gwyneth Paltrow's right to teach kids batshit crazy things about molecular chemistry based on new age pseudoscience. It cuts both ways.
ameister14 12y ago
You make a point in a later comment "Except a Creationist school district would be a violation of Church/State separation and the trial relating to that would stop the teacher from being fired." So tenure protects teachers long enough for such a trial to occur. I understand that. But wouldn't a wrongful termination suit do the same? After a couple of these, the State would pass guidelines on hiring and firing so that they don't get sued.

roc 12y ago

Because school administrators may be blocked from outright banning the teaching of evolution/sex education/unpopular-but-actual history/etc, but could simply threaten/actually fire teachers until the entire staff was agreeable to their desired curriculum.

AnthonyMouse 12y ago
The obvious solution there is to not provide administrators with tenure either.
- roc 12y ago
  The problem isn't rogue administrators, it's an abusive majority deciding en masse to harm/under-serve a minority. You don't get an administrator seeking to ban the teaching of evolution without a majority of voters in the district (or at least political support) who agree with that. So the ability for an administrator to be fired doesn't enter into it. Even if one were to go "too far", they're just going to be replaced by another who shares the same general values, but perhaps with a more tactful presentation.
  - Variance 12y ago
    On the flipside, doesn't tenure allow teachers to defy a progressive administration and teach Creationism just as easily? Tenure doesn't help any particular agenda, such as science and evolution; rather it enables all agendas, and teachers can be just as bad as they can be good, like all people. The solution is to make teachers accountable to a curriculum and ensure that the curriculum is teaching evolution, via the courts if necessary.
    - opendais 12y ago
      Yes. And then they eventually would get fired for it. This isn't about protecting a progressive viewpoint against a conservative one. It is about protecting teachers from being forced to service Political Viewpoint X or lose their job immediately.

Alupis 12y ago

I think we've all been there... had some teacher for some class in some grade that made the students wonder "how on earth are you allowed to keep teaching?". There are many many very good teachers. There are also some very bad teachers who stop caring about the kids. Tenure currently enables teachers to "coast" and lose enthusiasm to teach and change lives.

Iftheshoefits 12y ago
Teachers who lose enthusiasm don't lose it because one day they wake up and think, "Man, I'm tenured now; fk all y'all I got mine." They lose it because of the vicious, dysfunctional attitudes taken toward teachers. That attitude being the one in which "we" expect teachers to be babysitters, guardians, mentors, and a variety of other things while at the same time facing a relentless assault on their competence, integrity, and wallets (lower pay, less support for classroom materials, etc.). I put "we" in quotes because, clearly, I don't consider myself part of that group. Teachers, tenured or not, are as much victims as the students in this mess. They're all victims of--and this isn't going to be a popular opinion here, I bet--the very real, very destructive, anti-intellectual, anti-government, and anti-education strains of conservative politics that have increased sway in matters of the governance of education. This isn't a Democrat vs. Republican thing, either; as far as I'm concerned party affiliation is irrelevant (or, if you like, "both sides do it"). It is ideology that matters here. The destructive ideology I just described is the one most responsible for the problems we see in public schools, and that ideology is deeply entrenched in one party and becoming increasingly more entrenched in the other, to the point where the lines blur.
- jack-r-abbit 12y ago
  Yes, "we" treat our teachers pretty poorly. And they often succumb to the assault on them. But, it doesn't really matter if they lose enthusiasm over night or over a 10 year period. If they have lost their enthusiasm and are no longer performing their job to the satisfaction of their employer, there should not be a long complicated process to dismiss them.

adrr 12y ago

Tenure prevents teachers from getting dismissed for teaching ideas that may not acceptable with the majority opinion. With creationism being pushed in schools, it seems we moving backwards from the progressive made after the scopes trial.

Alupis 12y ago
I think it's the school administration's job to protect teachers from casual termination... not a contract that makes it impossible to get rid of the worst teachers.
eastbayjake 12y ago
At least at the K-12 level, teachers don't have a right to teach their students whatever they feel is appropriate. There are state and national standards -- backed by assessments -- that mandate what teachers should be teaching and measure whether those teachers are doing a good job. Teachers are employees like any other employee. At my job I don't get to work on whatever I want whenever I disagree with the majority opinion about how my time should be spent, and most companies would be terrible if employees had "tenure" where they could work on whatever they wanted -- including "working on this sandwich before an afternoon nap." (And if that sounds like a straw man, Google around for videos like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE5VkcwKwP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE5VkcwKwP0)
- adrr 12y ago
  Thats the point i am trying to make. When Kansas removed evolution out of curriculum, teachers still taught it because they couldn't get fired. Thats what tenure protects, that our education system is not affected by majority opinion and changes political climate. Now that Kansas has removed tenure, the next time the education board bans evolution which seems to happen every 5 years, teachers will have to comply or get fired.
  - eastbayjake 12y ago
    And the point I'm trying to make is that curriculum choices at the K-12 level are a democratic decision, not a matter of personal conscience by educators. You don't get paid by the government to teach whatever you like, you get paid to teach what the government pays you to teach, and you're evaluated based on how well students know the material the government asks you to teach them. Removing evolution from the curriculum is a political problem that voters need to solve. It's not something you can fix through teacher autonomy. The real issue is getting politicians and administrators to ask teachers to teach the right things, and it's their fault -- not teachers -- when the curriculum is bad.

joeclark77 12y ago

In theory, university tenure is supposed to protect the freedom to research unpopular topics, not the freedom to be unproductive, however, I think it does confer that as a side benefit at least as you say "in the shortest term". Tenure for non-research faculty might make sense if it protects the right to teach unpopular ideas. It never made sense in the public schools, of course, and has always just been a way to transfer money from taxpayers' wallets to the Democrat party's coffers via a helpfully corrupt public sector union.

jjoonathan 12y ago
> tenure is supposed to protect the freedom to research unpopular topics, not the freedom to be unproductive, however, I think [tenure] does confer [low productivity] as a side benefit at least as you say "in the shortest term". Perverse incentives are intense in the research community and they're getting worse as the supply/demand imbalance in the academic labor market continues to grow. My experience is that non-tenured professors tend to dramatically overproduce flashy media-bait ("scientific debt," if you will). Tenure is the only mechanism we have to balance that out, which means it's becoming more and more important every day. > It never made sense in the public schools, of course, and has always just been a way to transfer money from taxpayers' wallets to the Democrat party's coffers via a helpfully corrupt public sector union. I find teachers far less objectionable as money-funnling mechanisms than the defense and dirty-energy industries.
ahomescu1 12y ago
> Tenure for non-research faculty might make sense if it protects the right to teach unpopular ideas. As in my other comment, there's a tradeoff here. Tenure could be used to teach Evolution, or it could be used to teach Nazism.

dubya 12y ago

Here in Tennessee the legislature's been fighting hard against tenure for years. At my kid's school an alarming number of teachers are leaving after this year, reportedly due to bad evaluations (not public information, unfortunately) with the gung-ho principal and no recourse. The ones leaving are generally well thought of by the parents. It seems that "team player" is weighted a lot higher than teaching ability here. I don't know that tenure is really the answer, but currently public school teachers are much more at the whim of administrators than college instructors are. It feels like they're trying to drive the teachers away so they can declare the whole public education thing a failure and kill it.