Why take a job without the possibility of tenure vs anywhere else in the US that has the option available to you?
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 stuff where there isn't a highly paying industry sector. Those PhDs will have to go out of state for the same QOL as there will be no other competition to increase pay.
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
A friend remarked one benefit of moving to industry (aside higher pay and more job security(1)) was the reduced hours - no longer always continuing to work after leaving the office.
(1) job security after tenure isn't magical compared to industry around here; before tenure, job security is more or less a guaranteed "haha nope."
So on average, industry has far better job security.
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.
It just doesn't pay well enough to survive. I mostly enjoy teaching, but honestly I don't think that I will be doing it again next semester.
It's tough to say if I'm a "good" lecturer obviously, especially I think it's borderline impossible to fail a teaching evaluation here, but I do know that it's trivial for me to find work that pays more than twice as much in the private sector, without a ton of extra work.
They are all retired engineers and project managers from a local technology firm. They got bored with retirement and like to come around and supervise projects in the capstone. We pay them a couple grand a semester for it, it's not a lot of work. They like it, our students like it, the faculty like it. Everyone wins, what's the problem? How are they being "exploited"?
There’s no way Texas state govt can stomach paying competitive salaries for non-tenured professors. They can’t even stomach investing in critical infrastructure.
You have no clue what you are talking about.
Going from academia into industry, the work is much less stressful, and the pay is much higher.
"Easy work life" and being a research professor are mutually exclusive. Your work never ends.
>The issue isn't stem so much as the stuff where there isn't a highly paying industry sector. Those PhDs will have to go out of state f
Again, you have no idea how this market works. The absolute, vast majority of PhD holders and grad students come out of state to begin with.
They will simply avoid Texas, which is simpler than going out of state.
Most faculty works much longer hours than the private sector. It's not easy by any means.
People become professors for exactly the same reason why some people become doctors and others real estate agents - they enjoy it or their personality matches the profession.
Money is not everything.
There's truth in that, for better or worse.
Similarly, professors are kind of absurdly underpaid, at least in STEM. Generally if you're qualified to be a professor in STEM, you're qualified for a nice yuppie job paying twice as much; one of the very few appealing things that professorships have is tenure.
2. Liberal states seem to be going extreme in other directions. Some examples are how “equity” policies (in general, not a bad idea) are implemented. Gifted programs, ap programs, accelerated programs and the like are being cut because the participants don’t have the proper racial ratios (Asians and Whites tend to be statistically over-represented). Equity is not an unreasonable policy to pursue, but doing it by holding back others is regressive, imho. Holding back high achievers also addresses the problem at the wrong level — that is, the origins of academic inequality typically happen at a much earlier age.
Interestingly, in most states (blue, red, or purple), teachers are almost forced to teach to the bottom 25-30% of each class, since schools are evaluated by how many people meet the minimum standards rather than by overall or high level achievement.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Parental_Rights_in_E...
The law is pretty broad and moreover the legal costs default to the defendant. Even if my wife didn't do something that was officially illegal, we'd be stuck counter-suing to reclaim legal costs.
[1] https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/florida-education-board-ap...
The closest reference I can find for the legal stuff is here: https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1557/BillText/er/...
Everything in that text talks about the parent taking legal action against the school district, not the teacher [3] - same as when citizens sue "the cops", they are usually suing the city that runs that police department, not the individual police officer. So if a teacher is following the rules laid down by their employer (which one assumes would be in accordance with state law), they would presumably be provided counsel by their employer in order to ensure that the employer can actually mount a legal defense? So it sounds no different to being a state employee in a lot of places. Or am I still missing something?
[1] "The rule change would ban lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity through 12th grade unless required by existing state standards or as part of reproductive health instruction that students can choose not to take"
[2] "Educators have said they don’t expect a major change in lesson plans given that teachers adhere to state education curriculums"
[3] "If a concern is not resolved by the school district, a 129 parent may: ... (I) [elided] (II) Bring an action against the school district to obtain a declaratory judgment that the school district procedure or practice violates this paragraph and seek injunctive relief. A court may award damages and shall award reasonable attorney fees and court costs to a parent who receives declaratory or injunctive relief. "
Edit:
I would also like to point out that even if you were right on the technicalities, you understand why this would be an immensely unappealing thing for a prospective teacher. It would be much easier to simply move to a state that doesn’t have a vague, poorly defined, conspiratorial law that is likely to make our lives unpleasant.
Does how it is experienced depend on which “tribe” the teacher is more aligned with? I imagine a teacher who feels closer to the “blue tribe” is going to experience this as an attack on them and their profession, while a “red tribe” teacher is more likely to feel that the target is someone other than them, and may even agree with the law (or at least the intention behind it).
I know US teachers (and public school especially) tend to skew more “blue” than “red”, but I think the latter group are likely a larger percentage of them than many would think, especially in “red states”.
I don’t think a majority of parents would do that (conservative or otherwise), but all it really takes is one to make our lives frustrating.
It’ll be interesting to see if the pay rate generally goes up for teachers in florida if they end up with many other teachers making that same decision
Wait, so it’s okay to teach about sexuality in the class where it’s most likely to be a relevant topic of discussion?
https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/florida-education-board-ap...
It’s poorly worded, likely to be abused, and also not just K-3 anymore like people keep incorrectly asserting. Even if I did think that there was some grooming conspiracy, I wouldn’t want to teach in Florida because I don’t want to be sued by some parent who has a relatively risk-free way to get free money by claiming I mentioned some LGBT agenda.
Also, you understand that “move to a blue city” only gets you so far right? This will (and to some extent already has) lead to a shortage of decent teachers in Florida, because a lot of teachers who can move to a more hospitable state have (or will).
people who like what's going on in florida will move to florida, its a win-win
Most parents are probably fine (liberal or conservative), but it only takes one dishonest parent to make a teacher's life very unpleasant. I suspect a lot of teachers see the writing on the wall and are getting the hell out of Florida.
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.
In my personal experience I've seen or heard of more professors espousing their personal views as fact than most online and academic discourse would have otherwise led me to believe possible.
I think removing tenure is a net loss for research because professors now have to worry about politically motivated reprisal for their research, whereas I believe it to be a net gain for student education since professors can then be held accountable for failing their basic responsibility of teaching factual information to the best of their knowledge based on the available research in their field of study.
Outside of chain emails and the movie "God's Not Dead", has this really happened? Anecdata, but when I took an intro to philosophy course my professor was pretty open to religious people talking about their justification for stuff. For that matter, I took a "religious ethics" class, which spent a not-insignificant time talking about Christian ethics (in addition to a lot of other popular religions). It was actually a pretty interesting class.
This was at a public school, evidently.
As often as the OPs scenarios have happened, which you were strangely quiet on questioning the validity of. Just an oversight, I'm sure.
I chose those scenarios specifically because I know the teachers and professors who had gadflies coming after them.
My own father used to have to deal with things as a high school English and history teacher due to a local Catholic priest. Tiny-ass town, practically all Caucasian population, rural as hell. And even he had to deal with these kinds of idiots. Tenure meant he could effectively tell them to pound sand.
I can't imagine the number of nitwits that college professors have to fend off. I guess we're about to find out.
If I’m getting complaints like that from parents in a pretty un-controversial thing like programming, I suspect people teaching evolution or history have it way worse.
[1] They seemed to think it was some smoking gun that I had another job, in addition to teaching, and thought that the chairperson should be informed. The chairperson called me into their office and asked what it was about, I showed them the previous email correspondence, and they laughed, since I had already been pretty straightforward about my current work.
Considering that CRT is a legal and historical theory, not a biology theory, I think that's a fair concern. Similarly, tenured European history professors should be called on the carpet for requiring reading and homework on perturbation theory in quantum electrodynamics.
Your first point is not really coherent. Do you mean to say that some professor should be fired for overemphasizing slavery's role in American history? Or underemphasizing?
An actual example that's come up: tenure hurts if a law professor is critical of a dominant industry in your state, and you want to fire her for saying so in a professional capacity[0].
I can't speak to the impact on STEM, but this will 100% hurt Texas' ability to operate law schools, and it will likely also impact its ability to provide basic general-studies curriculum as is generally considered necessary for a bachelor's degree.
CRT is also not “political pop science propaganda” so I’m not convinced you can recognize it either. It’s a legal theory. About law.
I'm happy we drilled down and got to what really happened, which as far as I can tell was something along the lines of, "my professor said something about race once and it hurt my feelings." In Florida (and probably in Texas, too, or soon enough I imagine), I think that's a felony now!
I'm not an academic, I'm just a regular guy who happens to have had bad experiences with professors abusing their positions of authority. I don't have sources to cite, and this belief holds such a small peripheral place in my world view that I don't have the level of detail available to deal with this level of... whatever the hell this was.
Wut? Aren't you explicitly talking about an academic context? Wouldn't that matter a heck of a lot what class your brother was getting taught? Like, hypothetically I can disagree with feminism but I'm just being stupid if I go to a feminism 101 class and get mad the professor is teaching feminist theories.
Teaching only faculty have even less incentive and time to stay on top of research progress. 10 years out of their PhD, the teaching only faculty is hopelessly out of touch of the state of the art in any super active field.
Full time teaching faculty teach 3 courses every semester, for it to make financial sense to pay them for full time salaried role. Trying to teach a course well takes at least 12-15 hours of work every week, if not more. That's already more than 40 hours per week. Add a few hours of service requirements to this as well.
Where is the time or the mental energy to learn new stuff? At best they will supervise an undergraduate thesis or two every year, where perhaps the students will teach them some new stuff.
It's only the gifted, who are able to keep up. The average faculty member just falls further and further behind.