Reply to Texas proposal to eliminate tenure at universities: will destroy research in Texas.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Tenure is a bad idea. This divide between tenured professors who can get away with anything except "buggering the bursa" and the precariat of adjuncts who are treated like crap is a disaster.[/quote]
Why would a top professor in their field deciding between offers that have a tenure track and offers that are strictly at will ever choose the at will option?[/quote]
For more money. Tenure has obvious costs; it also has a price. Texas will need to pay more to get the same caliber of professors while not offering tenure than they needed to pay while also offering tenure. Tough to tell how much more, and whether [b]the benefits of doing away with tenure (being able to trim the deadwood, primarily)[/b] outweigh the costs, but it'll be interesting to see. (Or maybe they won't increase salaries at all and everyone with options will go elsewhere...)[/quote]
This is how these proposals are often presented—it’s a budget management thing!—but that’s not how they work in practice. Weakening tenure protections results in targeting of academics with non-mainstream/controversial ideas, the ones who challenge university leadership, and those who take risks in their research or do research in more obscure areas. It is used to reduce academic freedom, which stifles inquiry and discovery. That’s a huge cost.[/quote]
The proposal is best defended as a quality control measure, not a budget management thing: the savings from being able to trim the deadwood is wiped out by having to pay everyone more to accept the lack of tenure; but that's fine if you're actually able to keep your best performers and jettison your worst.[/quote]

I get what you’re saying, but it’s theoretical, not practical. Weakening tenure is never used to “keep your best performers and jettison your worst.” [/quote]

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