Tenure is under attack in conservative states. Republicans want to take a career that is already difficult to enter, demands extreme flexibility in where you can live, and doesn’t pay particularly well, and they want to make it even more unattractive, and they are finding that increased uncertainty means their university positions are harder to fill.
But I’m not going to try to defend tenure here. Instead, I was floored by this one comment:
Tenured university professors are the only people in our society that have the guarantee of a job,Texas Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who presides over the Senate, said upon passage of the bill.These professors claim ‘academic freedom’ and hide behind their tenure to continue blatantly advancing their agenda of societal division.
That’s not their agenda, so that’s a lie. More shocking, though, is the implicit notion that no one should have a guarantee of a job. We live in a society where everyone is totally dependent on a reliable source of income for food, housing, and health care, but you are not promised the means to obtain that income. They want your life to be precarious, because then they can control you. That threat of potentially losing the job you need to live is a powerful tool of manipulation, it’s the knife at your throat they can use to force you to accept lower pay, or terrible working conditions, or long hours.
Why shouldn’t truck drivers and welders and fruit pickers and make-up artists and poets and electricians and house movers be guaranteed a job? These are all positions that are in demand (oh, sorry, except for poets — but that just says there ought to be a way for people to live while doing art), so why can’t we, as a nation, agree that this pool of ability ought to be reasonably maintained by paying the people willing to do it? Let them have the power to demand the right to live because they’re willing to do the work.
I know, this is what unions are for. Republicans hate unions, too. Republicans want your life precarious so they can extract maximal profit from you.
This is a little bit personal. When I was growing up, my father was a mechanic, a skilled job that I couldn’t do, you probably couldn’t do, and that required a lot of hard labor to do. Employers played games with him all of his life, though. Boeing was the dominant employer in the region, and they’d constantly fine-tune their work force, letting people go on short notice, and then later re-hire them, only to fire them a little later. Life under that regimen was like being a yo-yo, and it wasn’t easy having to scramble to find a new job every 6 months to a year, and maybe accepting a lesser job that didn’t suit your abilities because you’ve got kids to feed. It kept the workers hungry and willing to compromise on pay, though!
That’s what Republicans want for everyone. Professors should all be forced into adjunct positions with semester by semester contracts; they should be doing academic piecework, cobbling together a curriculum and doing research in spaces they have to periodically take down and reassemble. That’s what they want for everyone, if we’re all living hand-to-mouth and at the mercy of our employers, that’s great for profit-taking. In the short term, anyway. It might compromise quality in the long run, but by then the managers will have extracted the wealth that pays for their mansions and boats and expensive cars, and that’s what matters.
But … but … communism!
Wellllll. . . I think tenure should be modified a bit. There are people who end up in sinecures from which they can’t be removed, who are unproductive or even worse offensive and damaging. In fact PZ from time to time is wont to point this out. I think it’s reasonable to expect tenured faculty to produce a certain number of publications, maintain a good reputation for pedagogy, successfully mentor some number of dissertations, not violate personal conduct policy, subject to review every, say, ten years. Or maybe five. In some disciplines an amount of grant funding would also be expected. I suppose this could be abused and someone could end up getting fired because the administration doesn’t like their opinions or political activism but the rules could be carefully written, faculty should be able to have a say in who reviews them, and there are other possible safeguards.
But the impossibility of firing people who really ought to be fired is a problem that comes up here all the time. There is a middle ground.
For GOPer politicians, the essence of raw power is he ability to pick up the phone, call a boss, and get someone that annoys them fired.
Tenure prevents that. So clearly unacceptable to the fascists.
Yes.
This isn’t true.
Federal, State, and local government workers all have job protections of some sort as civil servants. Same for the military. And unions. And right wingnut hacks.
This is one huge lie and just stupid.
The vast majority of professors aren’t “advancing their agenda of social division.” They are teaching and researching biology, industrial engineering, computer programming, accounting, medicine, law, veterinarian science and so on.
All the expertise that we need to keep our Hi Tech society functioning.
I can’t help but notice that the point-one-percenters all seem to have a guaranteed income. Shouldn’t they have to demonstrate their worth to society every so often?
Until prefessional Republicans can come up with such laws that don’t apply only to folks who work for a living, then I have to think that they’re all just horrible people. (I’m not a big fan of the Clintons, but I did think that Hillary’s notion of a “basket of deplorables” was particularly apt.)
Let’s start with the basic claim: “Tenured professors can’t be fired”. Complete bullshit. I saw at least two tenured members of our professoriate fired. And to be clear, we also had a very strong faculty union so it’s not like they were bulldozed by the admin. They were fired because they deserved to be fired (for reasons I will not get into).
When people grouse that tenured profs can’t be fired, what they really mean is tenured profs can’t be fired for saying things I don’t want them to say.
Call me a Cultural Marxist or whatever, but if you set up/maintain a system that demands everyone have a job in order to live, it’s you’re responsibility to make sure that everyone has a job. That system didn’t need to exist, so if you’re going to insist on it, you have a moral responsibility to make sure it runs smoothly. Otherwise, you are responsible for any and all deaths that occur as a result of your system.
Universities also have way of making tenured professors lives miserable until they leave. Or functionally leave.
They cut your hours, cut your pay, you don’t get grad students, and downsize your office to a a desk and chair.
I’ve seen it several times.
It has nothing to do with “advancing their agenda of societal division”.
One guy who was a good scientist who did important research at one time just started going downhill mentally for some reason.
He just got really erratic, occasionally not showing up to teach his classes without warning, attending departmental meetings on a random basis, and generally was unable to devise a schedule and follow it.
He had tenure but eventually that was all he had and a small office.
They didn’t have him teach any classes because of his problems of just not showing up to teach them too often.
FWIW, this isn’t Jordan Peterson but it sounds a lot like him.
Peterson wasn’t at U. of Toronto for years once he got famous and his behavior got more and more erratic and destructive.
He had tenure but I’m sure U. of Toronto wasn’t making life easy for him either. IIRC, they didn’t let him recruit any more grad students.
Good idea, I wouldn’t trust Peterson with a cactus houseplant.
@raven #9:
He’d probably put it on an all-meat diet.
And they want that precariousness to last your whole entire life. Until your dying day.
My father was a union carpenter and made enough money to raise a family of five. He retired at 62 with a union pension and Social Security and few apparent worries.
Me? Joining a union was never an option, the one job I ever had that enabled me to save money was sent to Taiwan in 2008, and now my retirement is dependent upon that Social Security that Republicans have been trying to cut or destroy as long as I can remember. If my current rental situation was to go away, I could be in some trouble. Republicans in Missouri (I think it was) proposed a bill that would, if passed here, make my current rental situation illegal, as I’m not related to the guy I rent my space from.
If Republicans had their way, I would have to keep working right up to the end, despite the difficulty of getting hired for anything at my age (and older), despite health issues, despite pandemics that they refuse to take action to mitigate, and without affordable housing. They would like me to do this without access to health care and without a social safety net.
The hilarious part is they think I should vote for this.
The fact that this also messes with higher education is, I’m sure, an added bonus for them.
When can we replace our lawmakers and representatives with AIs?
Another wrinkle is that the oligarchy seem to be going after every fact-based profession, so teachers and scientists are right in the middle of it.
Ummmmm… Isn’t “asshole ideologues with repugnant positions hiding behind academic freedom” was YOUR schtick?!
EDIT: Isn’t “asshole ideologues with repugnant positions hiding behind academic freedom”
wasYOUR schtick?!That’s just one of the reasons why they liked Tronald Dump so much.
That only makes sense if EVERY Republican was some sort of CEO or upper-class shit. I assure you, they are not. For every Elon or Koch Bro, there are literally millions of middle-to-lower class morons who will happily vote for the right.
I’d say it’s more like rank & file Republicans want “their” lives to be as cheap as possible. They are convinced that the combination of taxes and regulations are going to impoverish them, so making sure they pay as little as possible to the government is considered a plus.
If people get hurt from those the resultant cuts? Well, “they can get a job like everyone else” or “they should have thought of that before they became poor.”
@12: “The hilarious part is they think I should vote for this”.
Yes, that’s the crux of the matter.
In a far future, people will wonder how these masterful manipulators convinced poor people to vote in favour of the rich, so much against their own obvious, vital, immediate & long-term interests.
I say “masterful”, but I’d say even a mid-level monkey could easily see through such lies, which inevitably makes me wonder a bit about those voters…
Turkeys voting for Christmas.
Well, it dovetails nicely with another battle that’s an annual affair, retaining slavery in the 13th amendment.
Get those professors down with the rest of the riff raff, so we can arrest and convict them of vagrancy, then be allowed to enslave them. Added bonus, destroying education, so that the dummies will do whatever we want them to do – well, except when someone hijacks their rage and they storm the capitol…
Apparently, the powers that be have decided, a more perfect union is an unstable union.
Because that worked out ever so well for Louis XVI.
Back in the early 1980s when I was a young Silicon Valley engineer, I remember my manager commenting that he’d read that Boeing engineers were unionizing. That seemed ridiculous to him. But this was in a time when jobs were plentiful in Silicon Valley, and if you didn’t like your job/employer, it wasn’t hard to find something better.
I got out of the game after my fifth large-group layoff from companies that either relocated out of our uber-expensive valley or couldn’t compete in the subfield of my expertise. Cared for parents at the end of their lives, then went back to school for a geology MS. But even before I finished my thesis, I started struggling with health issues, and wasn’t able to work. I am covered by my husband’s health insurance, which he gets through his job.
My husband is still a firmware engineer, a few months from retirement age, and is worried that his employer will lay him off in some anticipated corporate restructuring. He’d prefer to work for another year, until I’m eligible for Medicare. Regardless of what Valley companies proclaim, it would be impossible for him to find another engineering job; age discrimination is very real here. My point is that between the madness of US health insurance and the fragility of employment in this country, a vast majority are either screwed or have serious potential for it at any given time.
Ahem. Supreme Court justices.
I note ex-Presidents get $226,300 per year for life — not that it’s technically a job, but the money sure is there — a figure which is indexed to the salary of a Cabinet secretary (Executive Level I).
Pretty cushy.
Universal Basic Income
Tenure be damned. John Kelly (https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Kelley/), one of my teachers on Continental Classroom, was fired for refusing to sign a loyalty oath in the wake of McCarthy’s HUAC hearings.
The University of California’s Committee on Privilege and Tenure decided that he really didn’t need to be teaching, because there was always the possibility that he might be a socialist, even a closet atheist, or worse yet, not a team player, although that was never explicit. This is in spite of the fact that he had been cleared by the FBI several times for work on sensitive government issues.
They gave him a second chance to sign or else. Even though he had a family to support, he accepted the ‘or else’, and wound up desperate for a job. I don’t know that I wouldn’t have buckled under in those circumstances.
After being drummed out of California, two years later, their Supreme Court declared the loyalty oat unconstitutional. Gee, thanks guys..
My very first university had something even better. If you were suspected of ‘Moral Turpitude’ you were gone, Although stated offenses were things having been a felon or suspected of being queer, that policy covered a multitude of sins, and it was up to the university to decide whether your sin qualified.
Moral of the story, don’t depend on your tenure to save your ass, Just remember that it’s a privilege to be underpaid and live under constant threat that you too can have your tenure yanked by some enlightened administrator.
they can dumb down education and complain about the libs and commy unions all they want the only thing they will accomplish is to make it easier for the rest of the world to compete in the only game they seem to like “The Market” China and Europe are not going to complain one bit. They act like the U.S. being ranked in the top tier of countries is “god given” and not the gift of history, hard work and democracy
John Morales @ 21, that POTUS pension is entirely due to Harry Truman being penniless after he left office. His business had to be closed when he was in D.C., he had very little income and every other former POTUS was already independently wealthy and Truman wouldn’t accept charity. Due to embarrassment over that entire mess, legislation was crafted for the POTUS pension.
Of course, that can lead one down the rabbit hole of POTUS net worth…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_United_States_by_net_worth
@24 unclefroggy
They act like the U.S. being ranked in the top tier of countries is “god given” and not the gift of history, hard work and democracy
That’s literally what many of them believe: it’s “god given”. That’s the core of the “American Exceptionalism” BS, and if you don’t agree with them on that, you’re evil and hate both god and America. Also, they do not like it if you point out that America is (unfortunately) “exceptional” in a lot of ways when compared to peer nations, like high cost of healthcare and education, high infant and maternal mortality rates, etc.
You missed land theft, genocide, slavery, aggressive war, abundant natural resources, and geostrategic good fortune!
jimf, you forgot that “he wants to hurt god”…
KG, your own argument is undermined by the reality that Dog placed us in a geostrategic good fortune location via his holy rape, murder, theft and mayhem upon the original occupants.
It’s precisely what Jesus would do, in their minds.
And I wish I was making that up, but they do justify it all in just such a way.
Cognitive dissonance pales in their glaring unenlightened light.
@27
well yes! for brevity all that was included in history. I think it is the effect of democracy on that history that has led us to this position today it could have been very different. It seems to me that the “conservative ideal” is primarily based on the desire for no more change, unfortunately change is unavoidable it is a function of time and fundamental to existence to try to freeze things the way they are or restrict the changing times is bound to fail
@ unclefrogy
I was thinking that abolishing tenure should increase the exit of many promising young faculty to other universities in other countries.
@30
and probably followed by students in time then businesses and development