Tenure in American Academia was originally for protecting teachers and public intellectuals in universities; the transformation of tenure into a perk for researchers - increasingly for senior researchers - is largely a post-Seventies phenomenon. Even so, since tenure creates expectations about how faculty should be treated and affects regulations affecting faculty, and since more farsighted tenured faculty know that what threatens non-tenured faculty ultimately threatens everyone, tenure provides some protection for non-tenured and non-tenure-track faculty as well.
Which is exactly why many politicians think tenure is a problem, or at least a target for election season performance art.
Meanwhile, the Board of Trustees of Florida's second oldest university continue their campaign to make their institution into America's leading academic soap opera.
The USF Chapter of the United Faculty of Florida will meet tomorrow Friday at 12 noon on USF Tampa in EDU 261; it will also be hybrid on Zoom. There will be sandwiches, fruit, drinks, and sweets starting at 11:30. On the agenda: Post tenure review and the upcoming Board of Governors meetings, Getting Out The Vote, and more. And here are the minutes for the previous meeting.
Any employee in the Bargaining Unit may attend, but to Zoom in you must have an invitation: contact the Chapter Secretary to get one.
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Abolition of academic tenure would seem to be a populist position, for most Americans seem to accept the notion that an employer may fire employees who disagree on political, social, economic, philosophical, scientific or technological issues. (Why most Americans accept this notion is an interesting question, but it may be related to the tendency of regarding employers as manorial lords out of medieval Europe.) On the other hand, YouGovAmerica reports that most Americas oppose laws regulating what college faculty can discuss in class while only a fifth support such laws.
It seems that the American public is inclined to support the freedom of academic speech and expression.
On a similar note, Pew reports that Americans value America's role as a leader in science but are divided over the role of scientists in public policy debates, with two thirds of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents saying that scientists should take an active role while two thirds of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents saying that they should not. Altogether, trust in scientists remains on par with trust in the military, and substantially higher than trust in business leaders, elected officials, police officers, and religious leaders.
Nevertheless, politicians - who depend on popular support for their job security - and the administrators that they hire have been whittling away at academic freedom for some time, and not just in Florida, a sign that attenuating or even eliminating academic freedom resonates with many voters. And that brings us to tenure, part of the armory of academic freedom. In recent news…
It used to be that state legislatures would grumble about academic tenure but not do anything about it because abolishing or attenuating tenure would put their own institutions at a competitive disadvantage. (After all, Pew reported that Americans are anxious about America's competitiveness in science and technology.) No more, and there is growing concern that competitive disadvantage may be coming.
The fallout continues the selection of Senator Ben Sasse as the sole finalist in the search for president of the University of Florida. Their faculty senate voted that they had no confidence in the process - although they were careful to stress that they were not commenting Sasse himself. Meanwhile, UF students protested against Sasse himself, and the UF administration responded by announcing that it would resume enforcing an old ban against indoors demonstrations, an announcement that induced a complaint by Pen America that the ban amounted to prior restraint.
Then on Tuesday, after an amicable interview with the UF Board of Trustees, featuring Sasse making reassurances and UF Chair Mori Hossieni defending and praising the search process, and after a sequence of speakers decried the search process and questioned Sasse's credentials and fitness to serve (none of whom brought up the loyalty oaths that Midland University demanded faculty sign during Sasse's presidency there), the Board unanimously voted to hire Sasse as president. The final step is the SUS Board of Governors meeting on the day after the election, where we understand that they will meet in the safety of USF Tampa's medical complex downtown.
With an air of introducing a cold dash of reality, Forbes asked what do university presidents do, anyway? (Answer: raise money from alumni, community leaders, and politicians, which may involve a different skills set then the largely academic post of, say, provost.) But people in the university community have certain expectations, and when a board appoints a president with no community support, that president is on thin ice, indeed.
For a more detailed take of Senator Sasse's tenure at Midland, see The Alligator's account.
The next chapter meeting will be tomorrow Friday, November 4, at 12 noon, on USF Tampa in EDU 261. At 11:30, there will be sandwiches, fruit, drinks and sweets. It will be hybrid on Zoom, and for the Zoom link, contact the Chapter Secretary. All UFF USF employees are welcome.
All UFF members are invited to attend. Non-members are also invited to come and check us out. To get the link to Zoom, contact the Chapter Secretary. Come and join the movement.Membership: Everyone in the UFF USF System Bargaining unit is eligible for UFF membership: to join, simply fill out and send in the membership form.
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