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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I'm tired of responding to folks caught up on the wrong shit, so here's what I should have said in the first place:

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.

How often do your scenarios occur in real life?

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Oops, you meant to reply to the parent comment. It's a mistake on your part, you may want to clarify.

No, I was responding to a comment that now starts out, "I'm tired ...."

In the real world of academia, CRT is a legal theory, not a biological one.

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The false positive rate for students reporting “my professor is teaching critical race theory!!!” is outlandishly high.

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.

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> I don’t care what CRT is academically

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.

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I think using an example of {x} where x is an academic subject matter, and the complaint was that it was used in an academic setting, and is used as an example of a bad behavior involving academic institutions, it's worth inquiring if that example is valid! If I presented a mathematical proof in a math paper in a math journal, my proof being incorrect is kind of a big deal.

Why bother removing it? You're not under the impression that misrepresenting your brother's anecdote matters.

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 removed it because I'm tired of responding about the individual anecdotes without anyone actually acknowledging the root argument. I don't want to write a three page essay on how I verify information that affects my general outlook of the world, and then dismiss and forget the details surrounding the verification of information as immaterial to the view I now hold.

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.

> actively retaliate against students who try to stand up for their faith.

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.

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>Outside of chain emails and the movie "God's Not Dead", has this really happened?

As often as the OPs scenarios have happened, which you were strangely quiet on questioning the validity of. Just an oversight, I'm sure.

Ok, so are you saying that “never” is the answer to both?

Yes

You would be wrong.

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.

I teach CS, so I haven’t had any threats or disputes with local churches or anything. However, I have had to deal with angry parents screaming at me because they just don’t understand why their kid is failing. One of them even pulled up my LinkedIn and tried to tattle on me to the chairperson [1].

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.

>Tenure hurts if you happen to be teaching biology and have a bunch of people who want you fired because you teach politically motivated Critical Race theory.

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.

0. https://www.hcn.org/issues/173/5582

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The replacement for tenure track faculty is teaching only faculty, which is already happening across the world.

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.

Wouldn’t the incentive be to stay relevant?

Always, ask what is the economics of things.

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.

As a full time teaching professor with a 3/3-course load, I can say there’s definitely time — the summer, when I’m off from the beginning of May to the end of August; and the winter, when I’m off from the beginning of December to the end of January.

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