The Atlantic How College Became a Ruthless Competition ...
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Anonymous
No one said you could. It is a meritocracy in the beginning, and then tenure locks into place mostly white, older men and makes them immune from competition. Why do you think colleges have made such little progress in diversifying their faculty? Interestingly enough, the Boston Globe just posted an editorial on this very issue today: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/09/opinion/academic-tenure-is-desperate-need-reform/?outputType=amp A limit would also hasten the excruciatingly slow efforts to diversify university faculties. According to data provided by Harvard, for example, in 2007, there were only nine tenured professors who were women representing “underrepresented minorities” (a term that lumps together people who self-identify as Latino, Black, Native American, Native Hawaiian, or other Pacific Islander) at the school. By comparison, there were 665 white men in those positions that year. Fourteen years later, the number of women from underrepresented minority communities increased to 33 and the number of white men decreased to 620. While that’s certainly an improvement, it’s hardly an achievement to brag about. ******* In the end, the tenure system as it currently stands is serving smaller and smaller portions of faculty with each passing year. It’s a flawed and unfair system, one that increasingly fails to deliver the academic freedom on campus that it was designed to guarantee. Academia looks increasingly like a caste system of the lucky few who’ve hit the tenure jackpot, and the far larger group toiling away with little protection and for meager paychecks. Schools and their faculty, as well as the public and democracy, would be better served under a reformed system that brings more scholars onto the tenure track while making tenure itself less of an unaccountable and opaque process. Universities would be more equitable, and more intellectually diverse, if they did. https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/08/01/professors-still-more-likely-students-be-white |
Anonymous
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For better or for worse, tenure is going away.
More and more schools are moving to contracts instead. Which means that faculty cannot be honest in their communications to, and about, leadership or the quality of education being offered. That can hurt students. |
Anonymous
Tenure provides this in theory, but not practice. It’s also ridiculous to pretend that publication and peer review is not political. |