I've been a little too busy to participate, but His Holiness and Eric Weinstein on Twitter have gotten into an interesting exchange about the structure of academia, and the appropriate number of Ph.D.'s in science. As usual, I suspect I'm not fully understanding the majesty of whatever Eric is arguing in favor of, but it's provocative.
At about the same time, the Dean Dad has been on something of an anti-tenure bender, starting here, continuing here, and culminating in a blistering rant about Michael Berube. Dean Dad is in favor of replacing tenure with infinitely renewable five-year contracts, and makes a case that such a scheme would actually be better at protecting "academic freedom." Personally, I'm less enthusiastic about the idea of bringing contract lawyers into the game, but whatever floats your boat.
I'm sufficiently distracted that I don't have any really Deep Thoughts to add to either of these conversations, but it occurs to me that they ought to be made aware of each other. So: Dean Dad, @EricRWeinstein. @EricRWeinstein, Dean Dad. Have fun.
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You probably don't realize that there is no such thing as "tenure", because what you have is actually a contract granting you continuing employment subject to various conditions that can result in it's being revoked (like a drop in endowment for you or in state funding for me) and various conditions under which it cannot be revoked. In some cases, it can be revoked faster than almost any newly tenured Assoc Prof raised on the myth of tenure can possibly imagine. In others, you may never know why a particular part of a unit was selected for elimination due to financial reasons.
Your tenure is protected by contract law. To the extent that your tenure offers academic freedom, you owe that freedom to contract law. That is why contingent faculty and grad TAs have little academic freedom. They don't have to be fired for cause, just not rehired.
The flaw in DD's argument is that one can think of few situations where the number of faculty protected by 5-year rolling contracts would be much larger than the number currently on the tenure track. Thus his proposal does almost nothing to protect contingent faculty.
Posted by: CCPhysicist | November 25, 2009 3:29 PM