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Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

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Re: Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

#51

Post by bsder »

mkl95 wrote: post #26
satysin wrote: post #4

So the Texas Senate just passed a bill that makes it more likely that Texas faculty hires will be from a smaller and no doubt lower quality pool of candidates? Why take a job without the possibility of tenure vs anywhere else in the US that has the option available to you?

If you don't plan on staying in academia forever, tenure vs no tenure shouldn't really matter.

Tenure matters if you happen to be teaching American history and have a bunch of people who want you fired because you had the temerity to talk about slavery.

Tenure matters if you happen to be teaching English literature and have a bunch of people who want you fired because you have the temerity to point out that Chaucer's characters have the symptoms of syphilis.

Tenure matters if you happen to be teaching biology and have a bunch of people who want you fired because you had the temerity to teach about DNA and evolution.

Shall I continue?

Yes, there is enough oversupply of PhDs that Texas will still fill the roles. They'll just have to fill them over and over as people will leave the first chance they get.

Re: Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

#52

Post by wyager »

themitigating wrote: post #3

This is the republicans punishing groups of people they don't like.

We've been in a Schmittian friend/enemy political environment for decades now. We've long since abandoned politics-as-societal-optimization-mechanism; it's now just competition for resources. The republicans were just slow to get with the program and are now playing catch-up.

Re: Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

#53

Post by tombert »

edrxty wrote: post #37
satysin wrote: post #4

So the Texas Senate just passed a bill that makes it more likely that Texas faculty hires will be from a smaller and no doubt lower quality pool of candidates? Why take a job without the possibility of tenure vs anywhere else in the US that has the option available to you?

Getting rid of tenure is fine but they'll need to pay much more to stay competitive. The calculous is fairly simple. Tenure track and then have an easy work life but less money, or go to industry and make lots of money but work more. Nothing wrong with either but if you get rid of the upsides to academia expect to replace them with something. That's just how market economies work. The issue isn't stem so much as the…

I find the likelihood of paying professors appropriately to be very unlikely; it's not like non-tenure-track professorships are making bank.

I mean, it's not apples to apples, but I do part-time adjunct stuff in NYC, and the extra income is nice enough but even if I extrapolated it to full time, I'd barely have enough to pay my mortgage.

Re: Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

#54

Post by y-curious »

orange_joe wrote: post #9

I’m skeptical that tenure is good for students, I knew so many teachers that just didn’t much care for their work and probably would have been fired if not for tenure. I understand the arguments in favor of tenure, particularly when it comes to recruitment, but given the bloated pipeline into academia, I’m not sure they hold.

Much like the lifetime appointment of Supreme Court judges, tenured professorship is a great idea that gets warped in practice.

Re: Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

#55

Post by wlesieutre »

edrxty wrote: post #37
satysin wrote: post #4

So the Texas Senate just passed a bill that makes it more likely that Texas faculty hires will be from a smaller and no doubt lower quality pool of candidates? Why take a job without the possibility of tenure vs anywhere else in the US that has the option available to you?

Getting rid of tenure is fine but they'll need to pay much more to stay competitive. The calculous is fairly simple. Tenure track and then have an easy work life but less money, or go to industry and make lots of money but work more. Nothing wrong with either but if you get rid of the upsides to academia expect to replace them with something. That's just how market economies work. The issue isn't stem so much as the…

> Tenure track and then have an easy work life

That doesn't match the experience of anyone I know in academia , when you want an easy work life you quit and move to the private sector

Re: Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

#57

Post by notch898c »

quantified wrote: post #2

Not the law yet, but as Scott Aaronson (I'm positive along with others) has pointed out, this would make their universities vastly less attractive to various incoming faculty. Whether that would be as impactful in STEM as in the humanities or human-interest areas like law remains to be seen.

I would think a top performer would like least the tenure system, as they're in demand but their job outlook stunted by (perhaps numerical minority) crusty elements that can't be supplanted.

Re: Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

#58

Post by kjksf »

ModernMech wrote: post #34
all2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if we started an institution that automated most of the admin, hired and based admissions on pure skill/ability/talent? It seems to me that something so simple couldn't possibly work...

> It seems to me that something so simple couldn't possibly work... Well, what kind of knowledge do you have of university internals? Most people here on HN who want to get rid of university admin are on the outside looking in, and find it very hard to understand what all the admin do. In my experience, when I start to explain that a university is more like a town than a school, and "admin" are in fact the people who…

Here's the problem with your "admins are so absolutely necessary" argument.

Per https://mndaily.com/193678/uncategorized/statistics-show-inc... between 1999 and 2010 admin jobs increased 75% across universities.

Per https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/11/10/reluctance-on-the-... over the last 20 years, the number of managerial and professional staff that Yale employs has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body.

So were universities in 2000 providing unacceptable level of admin service or was the level of service just fine and they got bloated because they could, not because they needed to?

Re: Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

#59

Post by ModernMech »

endtime wrote: post #33
armchairhacker wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More generally we need better protections for faculty with controversial views who can still teach and research to not get “cancelled”; better labor protections and more jobs so that faculty can advocate for themselves and receive less work (vs. getting disciplined or fired) when they are too old to effectively teach and research; better grants and more jobs so that faculty have better pay; better grants and more job…

> faculty can advocate for themselves and receive less work (vs. getting disciplined or fired) when they are too old to effectively teach and research Why is this desirable (to anyone other than elderly faculty)?

One of the promises for highly educated people (PhDs) who devote their most lucrative years to unprofitable research, is that they will able to do the job when they are very old. Otherwise, the retirement plan is insufficient. I can make several times what I do on the market, so if I'm going to be replaced as soon as it's convenient for the university, then we're going to have a very different relationship that's more about money.
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