No tenure, no food: Why a Lafayette professor is on a hunger strike

[cobrat]

At what other job would the employees all band together and decide that they were granting permanent jobs to each other, and their employer would have to accept this plan? There has to be a process where the the employers are involved, where they have a say in who is hired, promoted, retained. Tenure wasn’t invented to give mediocre teachers permanent employment, but to guarantee professors the right to publish their ideas, to present radical ideas without fear of repercussion.

Actually, Professors aren’t employees of the university in the same sense as an employee in a given corporation.

They are closer in many ways to equity partners in biglaw firms, accounting firms, co-owners of a startup, or becoming a member of a corporate board/CEO…cept their equity is mainly in the form of their established scholarship, ability to get grants, and academic reputation within their field/subfield within academia.

I will grant you that this was much more the case decades ago as changing trends in many universities/colleges with non-academic admins gaining more power in relation to the faculty over the last few decades are eroding all that.