to my fellow academics in Florida, which has just crippled the tenure system

[cab67]

De Santis just signed legislation in Florida that makes it easier to fire tenured faculty at the state’s public colleges and universities. I’ve pasted a link to a news article about it below.

To my friends at public universities in Florida - please accept my sympathy. I'm sure I speak for a great many academics here. To have such an ignorant loudmouth for a governor is bad enough, but this legislation (which may not survive a court challenge, as I explain below) is a disgusting insult. Your state government may not respect you, but your colleagues do.

I offer a sincere willingness to help in whatever way I can. I know getting another academic position can be difficult, especially for those of us in more senior positions. My wife is at a university in a neighboring state. That means I commute 3 to 4.5 hours, depending on traffic and construction, twice each week. If I wasn’t a fifty-something full prof, I might stand a chance at getting a position in her area. Alas, I’m a fifty-something full prof and, thus, not competitive in open searches against younger PhDs who can promise a far longer period of productivity. But I’m willing to bet there will be universities out there delighted to cannibalize the Florida public university system for talent, including mine.

One possible bright side - as implied above, there's a good chance some of this bill will be tossed out by the courts. The law can be applied to new hires, but it probably violates existing faculty contracts. Not an expert on contract law here, and I could be completely misunderstanding the situation, but if I was in Florida, I'd be reaching out to an attorney.

But far more importantly, it reveals yet again how tenure is misunderstood. It can be described as a "lifetime appointment," but only in the way judge appointments are "lifetime appointments." Faculty with tenure are not in bulletproof positions. We can be fired for cause, just like everyone else.

It bothers me that Republicans use this as a wedge issue to divide labor organizations from the Democrats with whom they’d normally align. Why should professors get lifetime job security when we can lose our jobs any time the economy goes south or some numbskull manager makes a bad business decision? That this derives from a greatly oversimplified understanding of the tenure system hasn’t been easy to correct.

(Which brings up a related question – where the hell was the business community in Florida when this bill came up? Bills like this come up in my own state all the time. They rarely get out of committee, and the one time it did, businesses across the state mobilized to defeat it. They know the value of higher education when it comes to innovation, and they want educated employees. They want the public higher education system to be strong, and they know that killing tenure would weaken it. Surely businesses in Florida understand this as well as those in the Upper Midwest.)

We often hear that tenure allows freedom to follow what may be unpopular research or pedagogy. It does, but it goes beyond that. What it allows is *consistent* freedom to engage in academic endeavors. If we had to redirect our efforts every time the university's leadership changes, we wouldn't accomplish anything. Can you imagine what would happen if university presidents threatened the jobs of anyone not expressing their personal views on climate science? Human sexuality? Public health? History? Or if they took a dim view of research that didn’t have obvious immediate benefits to anyone in particular? That’s what the tenure system prevents.

Appointed judges are a great analogy. They're given lifetime appointments so they don't all get fired and replaced with ideologues every time the White House or governor's residence changes hands. That would create legal chaos, with previous decisions overturned every few years. We see value in these lifetime appointments because it advances the interest of consistent justice.

And for the upteenth time - no, we professors aren't trying to indoctrinate young adults into leftist ways of thinking. (Most of us aren’t, at any rate.)

Some of this "leftist" thinking isn't a matter of opinion. It's physical reality. When I teach about evolution or climate change, I'm not expressing a biased opinion - I'm providing factual information. Those who teach about sexuality may be telling us things that run counter to certain religious beliefs, but they're not telling us these things to advance some sort of "woke" culture (whatever the f-word that means); they're telling us these things because a substantial amount of research is revealing them.

Seriously - if a scientific discovery contradicts your opinion, the problem is with the opinion. Facts can't change to accommodate them. Scientific facts are scientific facts, and we're not going to pretend there's a legitimate fact-based counterargument where it doesn't exist just to create a false sense of "balance."

I've heard the same anecdotes as the rest of you - some conservative student somewhere feels oppressed by the progressive environment at their institution. Opportunities were denied, term papers were graded poorly, opinions were suppressed- stuff like that. Ever wonder why these claims appear in the news media? Partly, it's because cases in which right-leaning students really were mistreated are rare. They're newsworthy when they happen because they're not the norm.
In the vast majority of such purported cases, it's not that conservative students are being bullied or censored. It's that they're encountering diverse communities and people with different political views for the first time in their lives. If their opinions are to the very far right (Q-type stuff), they'll be a minority not because universities shun such students, but because those holding such extreme views are the minority.

Anyway – I just want my colleagues in Florida to know you haven’t been forgotten.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/education/2022/04/19/desantis-signs-bill-limiting-tenure-at-florida-public-universities/

[Walleye]

1. Scientific facts.Maps and territories.

When I was a freshman in college lo these many years ago I read ”Language in Thought and Action”. By SI Hayakawa. There were some very useful lessons in there. One of them was, if you have a map, and you get to the territory and find they are different, you change the map, not try to change the territory. It seems so obvious but so many people have never gotten that concept. I thank the college for requiring us to read that book. I wish everybody did

[thatdemguy]

2. It also depends a lot on the state

My wife went to University of Maryland, there was a professor that slapped a student. The professor did not get fired, just removed from teaching duties for 2 years. She got paid for the 2 years, and then went back to teaching, they just waited for the student to leave the school. The excuse the school gave was tenure as why they did not fire her. This was also back in the early 2k's, so current times it might have been different.

The reason for the slap was the b word from a student.

[cab67]

3. Not only would that be unlikely today...

...I'm honestly surprised that it happened any time within the past 25 or 30 years. An assault would get a professor fired, or at least suspended, almost anywhere.

I'd want more details to really understand what happened here. For example - had this professor acted like this to other students in the past? If not, and if the professor had been there for a long time, it might have been perceived as an isolated incident and not an ongoing problem. I'm not justifying the decision - just trying to understand it.

There could have been other sanctions. The professor might have kept getting paid, but was this person's pay docked, or denied a raise? Were extra administrative duties added to the job? Was law enforcement notified? Did the student sue the university?

I'm genuinely curious to know more about this. Are there news articles archived somewhere about it?

[thatdemguy]

5. I dont know, to most of the answers

Her sister was there when it happened, as in going to Maryland. The wife did not have the professor, just heard about it from her sister, and knew the professor was still there. She does not remember her name. So yes I would assume it was isolated and a one time thing.

[LisaL]

4. Florida will have a difficult time competing

with other states for talented faculty. Of course Republicans likely view that as a plus.

[lindysalsagal]

6. Florida is already a lost state.

Hopeless. Unless they stop electing GQP candidates.