Ward Churchill’s jackassery has been overshadowed recently, but the report on his behavior is now out at the Blogger News Network. The Instapundit comments that “the bottom line is that he’s in trouble for research fraud, etc., but not for his ‘little Eichmanns’ statement.”
Which is, IMHO, as it should be. Academic tenure should protect all speech, however controversial, however idiotic, however offensive. The real question should be how he got tenure in the first damned place.
Clint Lovell
The only bright side to the whole Congressional circus surrounding Terri Shiavo is Ward Churchill.
Anytime I think our party is way out of touch, I look at Ward Churchill and pray nobody fires him.
We should give this guy his own talk radio show segment on Rush Limbaugh so that people can see that our crazies aren’t nearly as screwed up as their crazies…
At this point in the debacle that has become our political party, it is our only hope as common sense and sense of duty (remember we elected them to actually govern?) seem to be in very short supply.
Give this guy a soapbox and let him rant on!
Birkel
John,
Isn’t the real question whether tenure actually provides the benefits its proponents claim?
Assume: Tenure offers benefits by allowing people to openly disucss academic issues without fear of retribution. Wouldn’t the research of those institutions that provided tenure be better? Or the teaching? Or some outcome be better? But I cannot tell you which metric is enhanced by the current tenure system except that nuts like Churchill can make crazy talk without fear of retribution.
Can we measure the benefits of tenure? If nearly every university offers tenure how can we be sure that it is a better system?
Wouldn’t it be better for some universities to have tenure while others did not? After all, then we would be able to answer the empirical question of whether tenure provides benefits to the university community: students, professors and consumers of research.
Why won’t universities compete in the marketplace of ideas?
jdm
I agree completely with Birkel. I don’t understand the actual (as opposed to the theoretical) benefits of tenure. The only times tenure seems to be important is with people like Churchill. Are there cases where tenure has saved the career of someone less wrong and less a jackass?
Birkel
jdm,
It should make you extremely nervous that you agree with me. :)
I’m just sayin’…
benton
Tenure is a force for both good and bad, as are most such rules. Its only when the no bid contracts that go to companies linked to the provost’s brother in law start happening that we wish that we had more regulation and less flexibility in procurement. And much the same goes for hiring and firing professors.
But tenure isn’t candy. There are times when it is given to those who shouldn’t get it. John Cole is right on about this. And in second and third rank institutions it can obviously go to people who are not first rank scholars.
It is essential tool, however, to compete in the marketplace of dollars, if not of ideas. I’m in the socalled real world now but have moved back and forth between the two. And I wouldn’t go back unless it was a tenured position. I’d take a pay cut, have to rollowver the pension, etc. And the tenure benefit would be essential to reeling me in. (Not that there are really that many people beating down the door right now, but…). As long as some other institution might make the offer for a promising scholar, it is something that an instituion is going to use. Any institution that gives it up unilaterally would be left with a depleted pool to draw from.
The problem with Ward Churchill as some sort of counterpart to what the GOP is doing re Schiavo is that he is a cooky third rate professor who doesn’t have a job at a top institution and who speaks only for himself. And he hasn’t been elected to anything. By anyone.
If he is what is keeping you cleaved to the so called conservative establishment, I suspect you are knee deep in illusion. I’m not sure whehter to advise you to take the red pill or the blue one. Because he doesn’t have power. And he certainly doesn’t speak for the left, or even for the left of the Amerindy community or any such thing. You can hang Hillary Clinton on me (my mom voted for her), but I don’t get how you can hang Churchill on anyone but himself. And as John Cole say, the people who gave him tenure do have some ‘splaining.
The sad part is that the Schiavo case was supposed to be another of life’s little conservative lessons, just the way Churchill was. The problem is that Churchill certainly had a rhetorical smackdown coming. But this is a train wreck.
MarineLiberal1775
Evening. Just want everyone to know there are Marines that are liberals. This liberal Marine has set up a blog at http://civilcoldwar.blogspot.com/.The blog is now offically in print. Take care. Semper Fidelis
jdm
Birkel,
I am a conservative by reputation, not by declaration. I agree with whom I agree; regardless of their labels.
I noticed no one has answered my question either about tenure either.
benton
JDM –
I don’t know that you can quantify the answer to your question. YOu’d need to find a bunch of deans who were all set to sack controversial but meaninful scholars for various political purposes who were kind of like the villains in Scooby Doo cartoons.
“I would have succeeded if it weren’t for those damned kids and the tenure system.”
Tenure keeps most of this sort of stuff from getting out of the gate. We all know the rules.
In my own experience, tenure probably protected the departments I worked in from veering wildly from one academic fad to another. Instead, the fads sort of piled on top of eachother. Which, even if it might not sound so great, was better than having the whole depatment shift from the social science version of the lambada to the macarena etc.
Also, if Churchill has done serious academic malfeasance, tenure shouldn’t prevent him from getting sacked. I once was on a discipline committee that revoked somebody’s Ph.d. for plagiarism. It led to a career change in a hurry, tenure or no tenure.
THere may be those who think it would be wrong to do that to Ward Churchill if the allegations pan out, since its just usning the acceptable legalistic path to pursue a political agenda against him. I’m certainly not one of those people.
Geoff Matthews
I agree that tenure should be available for the hard sciences (ie, biology, physics, chemistry), for business college (that is what runs the country), and heck, even for factually based social science. But did Churchill do any real research? Or did he just b*tch and complain about the U.S.? Did he do any real research, much less research that needed to be protected?
But, again, this would lead to the process of actually granting tenure, and not tenure itself.
Birkel
jdm,
I’m conservative too. It was a joke.
Benton,
How do you know there are benefits? To what are you comparing the tenure system? On what metric are you judging the benefits?
I refuse to take you at your word that there are benefits. Prove it. Treat me like I’m from Missouri. Show me the econometric study that compares the longitudinal benefits of tenure versus no tenure. I don’t accept much of anything without proof. Show me yours.
Kimmitt
But did Churchill do any real research? Or did he just b*tch and complain about the U.S.?
The two are not entirely incompatible, you know.
Show me the econometric study that compares the longitudinal benefits of tenure versus no tenure.
Nobody’s bothered, because the benefits of tenure are so self-evident that it hasn’t really been question and because there is no competing non-tenured research structure. We’re talking about an institution which about a thousand years old, as old as universities themselves. When you ask, “why do we have tenure,” what you’re really asking is, “why do we have universities?”
benton
Birkel
I wasn’t giving you my word that there were benefits. I was saying that your question might well be unoperationalizable given that this isn’t a lab. You’re universe of non tenure institutions is small. Also, I’m really interested in how you would quantify university outcomes.
jdm
Thanks for your answer(s), benton. In lieu of any real data or studies about tenure, I’ll remain a skeptic. Perhaps someone in the academic community could investigate this? Or would that be like… well, you know ;-)
And thank you too, Kimmitt. I count on you as the local rep for the Real New Conservatives (as opposed to the Neo (ie, Jew) Conservatives) to always try and bring us that 1968 perspective. Those were the days, eh? Power to the people!
Kimmitt
Wouldn’t know; I was born in ’76. Thanks for the random accusation of anti-Semitism, though.
jdm
There was no random accusation of anti-semitism; in fact, there was no accusation at all. Just an attempt to differentiate between all the various new conservatives.
Birkel
Kimmitt,
You are wrong about the history of tenure; it is a rather new tradition.
I will never believe the “(but) the benefits of tenure are so self-evident…”
That’s the same argument that people make about global warming, 2nd hand smoke and affirmative action, to name a few. You’ll need something more than that to convince me.
How to measure teaching:
1) papers published in top-tier journals
2) papers published in not top-tier journals
3) student learning
4) $$ raised for the university
5) a whole bunch more that we could brainstorm, I suppose
And the great thing is every university could choose its own matrix for evaluating profs. Or we could stay with the one we have now and cross are fingers that it’s really the best system. Your call.