Parents: Your Children Need Professors With Tenure

"Tenure doesn't guarantee that college teachers will be courageous. But it protects those who are."

This is the only argument given in the whole article. That teachers should be allowed to be outrageous and disrespectful because that somehow makes them better teachers.

There's a fine line to teaching kids to think critically and just being outrageous. Teachers without fear of crossing that line can do harm, too.

The whole argument is that teachers -can- be fired for things. Not that they -will- be. Good schools don't fire teachers for teaching children to think. If a school is inclined to fire teachers for that, tenure is not going to solve the problem. Is a teacher going to lay low for 7 years and then suddenly start teaching children to think? No. They'll have been doing it all along.

I'd love to see data that proves that administrative bloat is the money drain on education institutions.

Not that I doubt it - most of the workplaces I've seen are one or two fat cats sitting on top collecting big paychecks while a bunch of people doing actual work get a small fraction of what the top earner makes.

I also tend to think that most of the repetitive administrative tasks can be replaced with small, well written scripts...

This reads like a refutation of Mark Taylor's "Crisis in Higher Education," a new book that holds tenure and the organization of academic departments largely responsible for the declining quality of American universities.

The Fox News angle that the writer leads off with is a giant red herring. The problems with tenure have little to do with professors' politics (since employees already have laws protecting them based on their political beliefs). It has more to do with paying professors millions of dollars in salary and benefits for decades after their most productive years have ended.

there's something off about suggesting tenure is about teaching, or that universities are about students. Tenure is about, more than teaching style, research, and primarily, actual teaching is left to grad students and teacher's aides.