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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.