

Parents: Your Children Need Professors With Tenure - jakevoytko
http://chronicle.com/article/Parents-Your-Children-Need/124776/

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wccrawford
"Tenure doesn't guarantee that college teachers will be courageous. But it
protects those who are."

This is the only argument given in the whole article. That teachers should be
allowed to be outrageous and disrespectful because that somehow makes them
better teachers.

There's a fine line to teaching kids to think critically and just being
outrageous. Teachers without fear of crossing that line can do harm, too.

The whole argument is that teachers -can- be fired for things. Not that they
-will- be. Good schools don't fire teachers for teaching children to think. If
a school is inclined to fire teachers for that, tenure is not going to solve
the problem. Is a teacher going to lay low for 7 years and then suddenly start
teaching children to think? No. They'll have been doing it all along.

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jameskilton
And this idea that "the 'deadwood' either retired or died years ago" is very
false. I've met so many professors who were basically useless but couldn't be
fired because they were tenured.

Ignoring the vitriol that Fox News loves to vomit to its loyal sheep, the
teaching profession for some reason has been allowed to act completely cut off
from the market as a whole. There are so many very good teachers who simply
can't get a job because of the tenure lock-in. If a teacher isn't doing his /
her job, they should be fired and replaced! It works for the rest of the
economy why shouldn't it work for the teaching of our children?

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zdw
I'd love to see data that proves that administrative bloat is the money drain
on education institutions.

Not that I doubt it - most of the workplaces I've seen are one or two fat cats
sitting on top collecting big paychecks while a bunch of people doing actual
work get a small fraction of what the top earner makes.

I also tend to think that most of the repetitive administrative tasks can be
replaced with small, well written scripts...

~~~
hga
There's been quite a bit written on this; try these two Google searches for a
start:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=higher+education+bubble+admin...](http://www.google.com/search?q=higher+education+bubble+administrative+bloat)

[http://www.google.com/search?q=higher+education+bubble+admin...](http://www.google.com/search?q=higher+education+bubble+administrative+costs)

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jeffreymcmanus
This reads like a refutation of Mark Taylor's "Crisis in Higher Education," a
new book that holds tenure and the organization of academic departments
largely responsible for the declining quality of American universities.

The Fox News angle that the writer leads off with is a giant red herring. The
problems with tenure have little to do with professors' politics (since
employees already have laws protecting them based on their political beliefs).
It has more to do with paying professors millions of dollars in salary and
benefits for decades after their most productive years have ended.

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Unseelie
there's something off about suggesting tenure is about teaching, or that
universities are about students. Tenure is about, more than teaching style,
research, and primarily, actual teaching is left to grad students and
teacher's aides.

