Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Missing the point, I think
Poorly written article about a probably quixotic crusade against tenure.
Allowing for the author's obvious lack of understanding, it appears that James Wetherbe is suing his employer Texas Tech to eliminate tenure. Wetherbe decided to avoid the tenure track early on, practicing what he preaches.
He seems to be focusing on the 'deadwood' hypothesis: Tenure leads to lazy incompetent profs.
This conflates three separate problems.
Profs put very little energy into teaching because the univs require them to put all their energy into research and managing grad students. Tenure as such DOESN'T lead to this priority. You could just as easily have a tenure system based on excellent teaching.
What DOES enforce the priority on research is Federal grant money that always includes 30 to 40 percent 'overhead' for administration. This STRONGLY motivates the administrators to seek maximum grants. The best way to get max money is to hire and promote profs solely for their grant-getting ability. You could just as easily do this without tenure.
Tenure itself causes an entirely different set of distortions. Because the only way to stay on the tenure track is by serving your thesis advisor, and then by pleasing senior profs, tenure enforces orthodoxy. It leads to hard-working and strictly orthodox profs who were selected for their loyalty to Holy Consensus in each discipline.
If the orthodox profs were actually lazy, as the 'deadwood' notion claims, we'd be better off.
¶ 7:33 AM 
