Should tenure for college professors be abolished?

[sakky]

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Just curious, sakky: was it common for MIT or Harvard freshmen to receive the permission of the instructor to enroll in the course on sports management that you mention? Did that include students who were not varsity team members?</p>

<p>Usually “permission of instructor” is a code-phrase for “students the instructor has selected from the set of interested students.” This might not be the case in some places. In the schools with which I am familiar, however, there are typically many more students who want to enroll in the “permission of the instructor” courses than there are spots in the courses.

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<p>Well, I’ll tell you this, I have never once heard of anybody who wanted to take the course who Morey rejected; indeed, my understanding is that Morey was openly hoping for more enrollees. I believe that there may have even been a Wellesley girl taking the course through the MIT-Wellesley Xreg program. Granted, perhaps she wasn’t a freshman, but she would still have been an undergraduate. </p>

<p>Nor is this a course that would seem to be particularly appealing to athletes. The course revolved around Moneyball-style ‘sports analytics’ to attempt to mathematically and statistically optimize the performance of sports teams, whether we’re talking about regular-season performance, playoff performance (which is only imperfectly correlated with regular-season performance), or marketing revenues. The course therefore tended to attract MBA students, or in some cases, PhD students in business or economics, who are interested in careers in quantitative sports management - essentially to be the next Billy Beane, Theo Epstein, or, yes, Daryl Morey or Jessica Gelman. Indeed, I know many MBA students - being the social butterflies that they are - viewed the course primarily as a means to establish a network with Morey and Gelman.</p>