Tenure

Don’t known if this belongs better here or in General but here is my question: What is your opinion on the concept of tenure? Supporters says it is necessary for academic freedom. Critics say it encourages professors to be come unmotivated and lazy. Here is a Wiki link for some more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenure Personally, I side with the academic freedom perspective. I have had at least one professor who seemed to meet the lazy tenured professor profile perfectly (Let me put it this way he was a math professor and it took him multiple attempts to properly calculate our grades.) but I believe guys like him are a minority.

I don’t have much to say on this topic but I was curious about other people’s opinions.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

One thing people need to realize is that tenure isn't just handed out; there's a long and tortuous road to becoming tenured, and many if not most aspiring PhD-holders never make it.

Tenure doesn't make a professor unfireable, either; it just makes the process very tortuous. What it does do is make the academic world less like a business, and the teachers less like assets to be hired and fired at whim.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I'm for tenure except for the whole "difficulty to get fired" thing. I like it that it allows teachers to not be so structured and gives them a chance to say, "You know, instead of studying the structure of government in this stuffy room, let's go outside and talk about government in general." I don't know of any teachers that become lazy at my college, but I do know of teachers that become EVIL.

Everyone tries to avoid taking Latin in my college b/c the professor that teaches it has tenure. He will keep the class up to half an hour pass the time on the clock and has said, "If your grade starts slacking after midterms, you will definitely NOT get anything above a C in my class. If your grade goes up after midterms, I will raise your grade above a C regardless of first half's performance." No one has pulled off raising their grades after midterms.

There's a poltical science teacher who also has tenure who is even worse. He will purposely pick the smallest room he can find to make sure all the students sit close to him. He will give his speech, "You will not look at any clocks or watches within my class or else I will keep you even longer and dock your grade. You will all raise your hand at least once per class session or else your grade will be docked. You will read every chapter and have at least five questions from every chapter to ask in class." If he knows you didn't read the chapter, he will ask you all the questions he can and then he will say, "Oh, wait. YOU didn't read the chapter. How about if we get someone that HAS read the chapter to answer." Thank goodness I'm a Commie major.

Tenure is fine, but I really wish that there were limits with my school's tenure.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I am completely against tenure. Don't get me wrong, I believe that professors who work hard and deserve it should get benefits, but from personal experience, all of my profs who were tenured absolutely and outrightly suck.

One of my stat profs made it a point for every class to rant on politics and how much he hates democrats (he's a living dinosaur). Then he makes us buy one of his books because he assigns problems from it. Not only does the prof suck, the book was also shoddy. There were numerical errors that we pointed to him constantly (!). He was so confident on his book, he even said on the first day of class, "For every error you find, I'll give you bonus points." Where are my bonus points?

This and more complaints from friends who had profs in tenure has led me to believe that tenure does in fact make profs worse. Not in terms of laziness, but in terms of not caring for their students. They only care for their research, and that is their downfall.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Agh! It sounds like tenure has some glaringly obvious bad points! I hope I don't run into any professors that have their head bloated up with their status like that. As far as I know, none of my profs had been tenured yet. Then again, you figure that profs will make you buy their versions of the book or keep lecturing in excess of the alotted time with or without tenure.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Summonmaster

Agh! It sounds like tenure has some glaringly obvious bad points! I hope I don't run into any professors that have their head bloated up with their status like that. As far as I know, none of my profs had been tenured yet. Then again, you figure that profs will make you buy their versions of the book or keep lecturing in excess of the alotted time with or without tenure.

Some do. One of my friends had a teacher was was crazy about honey bee's. She was teaching a general education course and required that all students buy a book about how honey bees shaped America (written by her). She doesn't have tenure yet, but from what I hear she's crazy enough without it.

I don't know about the policies at other colleges, but I think for my college you have to wait ten years before you qualify for tenure. There may be a few professors that use tenure to the student's advantage, but most of the professors at my college tend to use the priviledge to torture the students--especially professors that do not have a Doctorate.

The professors at my college receive lousy pay, so I'm glad that they receive more benefits for making it to tenure. However, I'm trying to ask students ahead of time about every class and every professor. I like ratemyprofessor.com (I just wish it would list whether or not someone is tenure).

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

To be honest, I haven't really been paying attention to tenure status much on my professors. It's not that I'm lazy or don't care, it's just that I didn't really think it mattered too much (not to mention I'm not sure how to check it).

The thing I try to check most from the class is, "Is this class going to be interesting to me?" I don't care if they show an opposing and biased view, so long as they can make it interesting and make me want to go to class to learn. If the class is boring as heck, and I want to fall asleep everytime I go, then I'm not going to care if the professor is tenured or not.

While I generally don't care if they have an obvious bias (I had one professor who was obviously anti-war and anti-Bush, but rather than rant at us about it, he showed us anti-war experimental films, and films that focused largely on poverty. Some of those were very, very difficult to watch, as they were really depressing, such as people in S. America who went up to the mountains to get ice that they only sold for about $4 US dollars a week, and some were just plain boring to watch, like someone lighting a candle, and then filming the candle burning down for like 20 minutes lol), as long as it's interesting, I'll pay attention.

I just hope that they're doing serious research and trying to get us to think for ourselves, rather than just give us facts to spew back out during tests.

And for me, trying to give more than just one point of view. I really hate it when I only hear one side of the story. For example, virtually all Westerners and non-Communist countries have been taught that "Communism = Evil". But if it was so bad, why did it survive so long? While the professor was kind of boring at times, and kept going off on anecdotes rather than what was on the syllabus, he did give us communism from a former Communist's point of view (telling us of how he watched Nazi soldiers march by his house, and all the fighting going on near him during WW2). And reading through the assigned books, I discovered a lot about communism that I never learned about from high school, such as the US and other countries "invaded" Russia in the 1920's (US high school history books don't make any mention of this, but every Soviet student had this drilled into their heads early on, probably to make them hate the US more), and how President Woodrow Wilson, the famous guy who helped form the League of Nations (which the US ironically never joined), and helped end World War 1, was racist, and refused to meet with some guy named Ho Chi Minh, who wanted a capitalist system and independence/self-determination for Vietnam (and this Ho Chi Minh dude would then embrace Communism, and would get the US involved in a conflict known as the Vietnam War later on in history).

I was kind of mad that I didn't get to learn any of this stuff, nor was I given the opportunity to learn any of this in high school (read Lies my Teacher told me by James W. Loewen, for some more interesting stuff that US high school history books don't talk much about. For instance, racism in the US is downplayed a lot, and then some people in the US wonder why African Americans act they way they do, but don't study the history and suffering many of their ancestors had to endure, and according to one student, "Abraham Lincoln was born in the log cabin he built with his own two hands". Think about that for a second if you don't get it lol ).

And I'm glad that professors are given tenure to look at stuff from other points of view. For example, it's really interesting to see how the Crusades didn't really have much historical impact in the Middle East until the early 20th century. The Ottoman Empire largely forgot about it until some Turkish men went to universities in Europe in the 19th century and saw the Crusades from the European's perspective, and related Crusading to Imperialism (remember, the British and French had large Empires across the globe at this point), hence the problem we have today with this issue (the British and French taking up remnants of the Middle East and then giving part of it to the Jews later on, after WW2 and the Holocaust). Now journalists and the media in general are blowing it way out of proportion, how Islamic terrorists are linking stuff going on today to stuff that happened in the middle ages. While I'm not trying to say I approve of the stuff these extremists do, such as blowing up innocent people, some of the classes I've taken in college by professors have taught me to understand the past, and analyze it to see what people did back then, and how it affects us today. And I have to say, the stuff they showed us really makes the situation a little clearer (although it's a helluva bloody mess, and it's not easy to comprehend what's going on).

As long as the professors are doing honest research, and are presenting it to us relatively objectively (rather than just a biased, one-sided opinion), I'm for tenure. Of course, if they're "abusing" it, by presenting just one sided opinions, and forcing students to get books that have little to do with the course, then yes, I'm all for booting them cause they're getting lazy.

FELIPE NO