Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

https://www.chronicle.com/article/ban-on-tenure-for-new-faculty-hires-passes-texas-senate

by gautamcgoel • 3 years ago

154 312 3 years ago

quantified2• 3 years ago

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.

whitemary2• 3 years ago

this would make their universities vastly less attractive to various incoming faculty

...but given the flood state of the academic labor market, still rather attractive.

michaelhoffman• 3 years ago

I doubt they will have much problem finding people who are qualified to teach.

But it's going to make it more difficult to continue hiring people who are seen as some of the best in the world in in-demand areas.

nextos5• 3 years ago

IMHO, right now, tenure is the only edge Academia has in many areas of STEM compared to industrial labs.

Other countries have suppressed tenure in the past, Denmark comes to mind, and this scared tons of great faculty.

tiedieconderoga• 3 years ago

Even with tenure, you would need to be extremely passionate about education or research to go into academia in fields like software or mech/chem/EE. The opportunity cost is easily 6 figures/yr, for your entire career.

The hours are long, the pay is laughable, the kids are not alright, you must publish or perish...maybe these universities are intentionally selecting for professors who will have a high tolerance for abuse.

bryanrasmussen2• 3 years ago

Other countries have suppressed tenure in the past, Denmark comes to mind

I could be wrong but I don't think it's correct

https://employment.ku.dk/tenure-track/tenure-track-at-ucph/

any links on that?

alsodumb• 3 years ago

In Engineering (especially robotics and ML/AI), it’s definitely not the tenure that’s making people apply for assistant professor roles. Almost everyone I met did it only because they want the freedom to pick the research direction and work on challenging problems. A few genuinely like teaching, but that’s about it.

haweemwho4• 3 years ago

IMHO, right now, tenure is the only edge Academia has in many areas of STEM compared to industrial labs.

This.

Even with tenure in place, I'd never go to academia. So much politics, worry about grants, immobility in what to do research in, low compensation compared to industry jobs, so much frustration, frustrated and bitter colleagues... It's terrible. I love working with colleagues that all have the best interest of the workplace in mind. I find that in industry a lot. In academia it's really rare.

caddemon4• 3 years ago

The main edge is freedom in research topic (at least to the extent of what granting agencies are willing to fund), and freedom in publishing your ideas and results as you see fit.

Tenure is a ridiculous gamble right now. Getting a tenure track position at a major research university in most fields if you do everything right is something like a 10% chance after multiple years of dreadfully paid and generally poorly treated postdoc. Then it's only 50/50 or so whether you get fired after ~5 years. You don't know if you will be tenured until you're pushing 40, and in bio you'd be lucky to know by then.

The EV of going for tenure these days is fucking awful. Besides, almost anyone capable of getting tenure in a STEM department at UT is super employable in the corresponding industry and definitely does not need tenure to protect their job like a random grade school teacher. The only place it's helpful is if you start really questioning people or pushing buttons, but that just goes back to intellectual freedom being the real perk, not the job security.

Might be different in something like ML where DeepMind and OpenAI can systematically take talent, but seriously the job market to get tenure track professorship currently is brutally competitive, to the point it is straining the whole academic system.

notch898c• 3 years ago

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.

tedivm• 3 years ago

The few people I know with tenure are just happy to be out of the academic grind, as it's absolutely brutal. Being tenured also doesn't lock you into a specific university- one of my professors had tenure but took a job elsewhere on a tenure track.

PuppyTailWags4• 3 years ago

I would disagree but only, specifically, academia's already broken system. Tenure takes the heat off an academic such that they can deeply, deeply study a system. Academia's still stuck in lines-of-code style measuring sticks of performance so the rush to tenure is often pumping out salami slices worth of papers to secure future funds.

aqme28• 3 years ago

Really? The whole grind in academia for new hires is to get a job on the tenure track.

fmajid• 3 years ago

And even tenured UT or A&M professors will seek to move out to tenured positions elsewhere because no one wants to go down with a sinking ship. This is a singularly bad idea as Texas had successfully transitioned from being a resource extraction economy to a technology and medical one.

themitigating2• 3 years ago

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

RhodesianHunter3• 3 years ago

Specifically people who can say what they want because they have no fear of losing their jobs.

Pretty rich coming from the party of "free speech".

drstewart4• 3 years ago

Specifically people who can say what they want because they have no fear of losing their jobs.

Ah, like the Supreme Court. Good thing we don't see anyone suddenly wanting to do away with lifetime appointments there, otherwise there might be some hypocrisy floating around.

PartiallyTyped2• 3 years ago

Indeed, the state shouldn't be able to silence free-speech regardless of how one feels for the content [1, 2]. One should use reason and logic to counter arguments instead of force [3].

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/desantis-f...

[2] https://time.com/6258304/florida-bill-ban-dei-crt-universiti...

[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

wyager2• 3 years ago

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.

themitigating2• 3 years ago

This comment is like a level below whataboutism. You're basically saying "the other side also did something similar" but you didn't provide examples

satysin• 3 years ago

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?

mkl95• 3 years ago

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

bsder2• 3 years ago

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.

BuyMyBitcoins2• 3 years ago

From what I understand the tenure system was already in decline and it was already understood that getting tenure was effectively out of reach for the younger generations of professors.

tombert13• 3 years ago

Not college, but my wife is wrapping up her teaching certification soon. We have both considered moving to Florida (we both have family that live there), but there is no chance in hell that we are moving to Florida and teaching; the infamous "Don't Say Gay" bill is so broad and idiotic (and she would be teaching biology), that Florida is a complete non-starter for us since neither of us really have any desire to be sued because some parent feels she might be teaching some "woke" agenda. I have no idea if my wife would be a good teacher, but I do know that if I were a teacher and I had options to teach elsewhere, I would not teach in Florida.

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.

nme01• 3 years ago

I’m not from US but I’m curious what is the situation in other states? Are there situations like that occurring elsewhere (even if the bias is in the opposite political direction e.g. in California or somewhere) or is Florida a “lonely island” here with regard to free speech limitations on universities?

ghufran_syed3• 3 years ago

Can you help me understand what aspect of teaching biology in grades k through 3 would be against the provisions of the law in Florida? I studied biology to age 16 in England (“o-levels”) and don’t recall anything even up to that age that would be covered under this law?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Parental_Rights_in_E...

stainablesteel4• 3 years ago

you should definitely move to a state that suits your political background, its fair to say you might not like florida. but that "don't say gay bill" is really just a "don't teach sex ed til 4th grade" bill. i'm understanding of people who don't like it nonetheless but there's other place for you to go, there's plenty of blue states and big cities that support left-wing agendas over right-wing ones, just go there instead, no?

RhodesianHunter3• 3 years ago

Creating becomes an issue they can always pay more to compensate for the lack of possible tenure.

edrxty• 3 years ago

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 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.

tombert13• 3 years ago

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.

wlesieutre2• 3 years ago

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

thebooktocome5• 3 years ago

I made more two years into my industry job than any of the tenured professors at my Tier 2 mathematics department (comparable to A&M).

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.

abdullahkhalids3• 3 years ago

Tenure track and then have an easy work life

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.

romwell6• 3 years ago

The calculous[sic] 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.

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.

aborsy2• 3 years ago

Honestly, it may not be a bad thing. Tenure was meant to protect the academic freedom, and pursuit of the long-term scientific research. Today, most academics chase money, grants, trends, citations and status.

It’s a job like any other, and doesn’t need protection, at cost to those outside the ivory tower (unless perhaps for a very small subset).

rhaway847732• 3 years ago

Even assuming you’re right, that’s only true until the next step the Texas legislature takes, because any benefit will be contrary to their goals, which is to hurt higher education.

tristor• 3 years ago

The change in academia is largely correlated with the fall-off of tenured positions in favor of adjunct faculty and the explosion of administration. I don't think it indicates that there is no need for tenure, but rather that tenure provided a bulwark against the very outcomes we now are seeing.

all22• 3 years ago

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...

ModernMech19• 3 years ago

The new trend now is not adjunct faculty, but well-paid lecturers with 5-year contracts instead of tenure.

cal5k2• 3 years ago

Heavy government involvement in student loans created a perverse incentive to bloat costs (administration) and increase tuitions.

Classic bureaucratization, really... when the buyer and the seller of something (e.g. a university degree) are disconnected by way of, say, a flood of cheap student loans, the incentive structure for the bureaucracy is to increase its own budget, staff, and therefore power.

It's no wonder that administration has exploded along with tuitions.

Lack of tenured positions really has very little to do with it.

aborsy2• 3 years ago

In some sense, everyone is adjunct. People who work in industry have fixed-term renewable contracts. If job security is to be offered, extend it to other professions as well, as French do (with their CDI contracts).

The main point is, professors don’t need life-time protection in many fields where research is increasingly focused on obtaining results in short term, and has become money driven. The gap between the type of research in academia and industry is not that much in many areas.

Perhaps a 5-years contract model would work better: a performance review every 5 years. Professors get some job security if they want to pursue problems sometime ahead of the industry. The duration could depend on the field.

ModernMech19• 3 years ago

Doesn't matter really, what it does is make Texas public schools second rate. They will fail to attract top qualified candidates, and that's all there is to it. They are cutting off their noses to spite their faces.

cal5k2• 3 years ago

It also only applies to public universities - private institutions can still do whatever they want.

burkaman• 3 years ago

Are you suggesting that making the job less secure will make academics less interested in money, grands, trends, citations, and status? They'll be more content to just focus on the science and ignore money and fame, knowing that they can't get tenure and can be fired at any time?

majormajor6• 3 years ago

What's somewhat interesting is that this is a move being made by people who simultaneously claim to want more freedom of expression in general.

It's obvious to see how there could be non-Republican-friendly results of faculty being easier to fire for, say, a controversial twitter post.

So what's the thinking here? Seems like it could be...

* pure political theater, without really focusing on long-term affects

* the result of deciding to not even fight a battle for control of administration for public universities in the state (except in that case... if you think the administrators won't share your views, making it easier for them to fire professors seems foolish)

* similar to the above, but maybe a more outright battle on public education in general; possibly the first of many moves in the hope that right-wing private universities will emerge as replacements?)

Centigonal• 3 years ago

I think nearly everyone who says "I want more freedom of expression" leaves out the quiet part, which is "...for people who think like I do."

There are many, many examples of supposed "free speech advocates" trying to silence dissenting voices or criticism.

Under that assumption, it makes perfect sense that Texas conservatives, believing colleges are liberal bastions that spread ideas they disagree with, would see anything that reduces the power of college faculty as a win.

sonofaplum• 3 years ago

It's all three, but did want to point out that your claim that

It's obvious to see how there could be non-Republican-friendly results of faculty being easier to fire for, say, a controversial twitter post.

contains within it the idea that not being fired for a controversial twitter post or even free speech generally are either concepts that help Republicans or concepts that Republicans believe in, neither of which are true. Not for present day Republicans, historical Republicans, idealized conservatives or any shade of right wing thought except for a tiny insignificant rump of libertarians.

armchairhacker• 3 years ago

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 jobs so that faculty can only research (these types of faculty suck at teaching), or only teach and not be considered “lesser”; etc. With all these tenure isn’t necessary.

But this is Texas, with US labor protection and a culture which openly hates education and dissent, so in this specific case it’s definitively bad.

endtime• 3 years ago

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)?

PartiallyTyped2• 3 years ago

I definitely agree. The state __shouldn't__ under any circumstances have the power to police the content taught at universities. What sort of bastion of knowledge and free speech can universities be if they live in fear of getting angering a governor?

BuyMyBitcoins2• 3 years ago

”a culture which openly hates education and dissent, so in this specific case it’s definitively bad.”

This is a completely untrue and biased stereotype. No one in Texas “openly hates education”.

As for the dissent aspect, I don’t even know where to begin with that one.

nequo• 3 years ago

Eliminating tenure only increases the pressure to chase grants.

Tenure is what affords academics the time to pursue research that pays off in 10 years instead of 2.

tejtm• 3 years ago

Tenure effectively migrated to administration which being even further from the students makes it less "school" more value extraction corporation.

ericmay• 3 years ago

On the other hand costs may rise because you may not be able to attract good professors if there isn't tenure to offset lower than industry wages. Or you may just get lots of turnover or low-quality professors.

VLM• 3 years ago

What is academic freedom in 2023?

curt15• 3 years ago

Today, most academics chase money, grants, trends, citations and status.

Grants, trends, citations, and status...but money really? I come from mathematics and the notion of getting rich in academia is laughable. Maybe that's why so many math and physics people go to finance.

Kevin_S2• 3 years ago

But removing tenure will only increase the incentives of chasing those things.

And I don't understand how others in this thread are saying academic freedom isn't necessary anymore/doesn't matter. The entire purpose of the republican party attacking tenure is so they can explicitly attack academic freedom.

uberman5• 3 years ago

Are you aware that most non tenured positions require you to reapply every year for your job? Every 3 years if you are lucky. This in not a simple annual review like a normal job, this is you are fired at the end of your 1 year contract and now let's talk about the possibility of a new one year contract.

This in my opinion is really what tenure is about, getting out of the yearly firing that adjuncts and lecturers face.

ModernMech19• 3 years ago

Typical contracts are 3-5 years, which is more job security than you'll find at most any job, which are at-will in America (meaning you can be fired at any time for any reason). With the layoffs in the tech sector now in the 100's of thousands, it's nice to know I have a guaranteed position for the next 2 years.

romwell6• 3 years ago

Tenure was meant to protect the academic freedom, and pursuit of the long-term scientific research. Today, most academics chase money, grants, trends, citations and status.

These two statements are written as if there's an implication; there isn't one.

It’s a job like any other, and doesn’t need protection, at cost to those outside the ivory tower (unless perhaps for a very small subset).

Bold claim! Let's see if it's more than just, like, your opinion.

(Again, it isn't).

dwighttk• 3 years ago

how many tenure track positions are hiring these days? I have the impression that they are pretty rare anyway.

ceejayoz• 3 years ago

Substantially more than "zero".

some-guy• 3 years ago

My wife just got one straight out of her PhD, but it's not super common unless you're 1) very cutthroat competitive and 2) willing to move far (in our case, 5 hours from the Bay Area).

rhaway847732• 3 years ago

It’s not just about tenure though. It’s the fact that the people who have the power to control everything about the public universities in Texas have shown that they will damage them, specifically by targeting faculty.

Even if I’m a non-tenure track faculty member I would probably require a Texas university to offer a significant premium over a competing offer from a CA university, for example, before I decide to establish my career there.

ModernMech19• 3 years ago

Our CS department has been hiring for TT roles continuously since at least when I joined in 2010.

orange_joe• 3 years ago

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.

tgv• 3 years ago

If you want to become a good researcher, go to university to learn from good researchers. If you want to become good in some other task, go to a school.

y-curious• 3 years ago

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

mgbmtl• 3 years ago

Prof jobs might be researched-focused, teaching-focused, or a mix of both.

Some universities really pushed research, in order to go for grants and donations. It also helps attract grad students. They usually make less enjoyable undergrad experiences.

Then again, having profs that only teach, not research, can become very disconnected after a while. You may as well have a grad student repeat from the book.

I know a few tenured profs (and my partner is one). I think most of awesome ones are those not pressured to run after grants constantly, and those that brag about them are red flags.

kevinmchugh2• 3 years ago

At the university level, good teaching is a value only some institutions hold. They'll all say they care, but research schools are paying way more attention to grants, publications, parents, etc than to student evals. There are universities that prioritize teaching over research and, unsurprisingly, they tend to have better teaching professors. I went to a school that didn't emphasize research and never had a TA teach a class, for instance

stametseater3• 3 years ago

Considering the number of near-poverty retail workers trying to pay off college debt, I think it's a good idea for the government to focus more on improving the quality of teaching, even if that comes at the cost of diminished research output. As it stands, the system saddles undergrads with tons of debt and not much to show for it, with socially disastrous results.

If a university wants to focus on research and doesn't care about undergrad teaching quality, let them drop the pretense of offering undergrad education at all.

bluGill• 3 years ago

How much research do we need? Sure there are advances to make in physics, but do we really need another paper explaining why Richard III wasn't completely evil, or whatever similar activity English professors research? How much more research into the real nature of the Greeks do we need? Don't get me wrong, both are interesting subjects, and the thinking that goes into those papers is worth teaching/knowing. However the real reason to support most college programs is teaching to think (a topic hard to define!), not having the professors do research.

If you are a medical researcher there is a lot of useful research to do. Most subjects are of questionable value. It is unknown if knowing more about how quarks work will ever be useful.

giantg26• 3 years ago

Same here. I didn't have any TA taught classes because none of the professors I had were researchers.

ok_dad2• 3 years ago

Tenured researchers shouldn't be teaching, IMO. They can be doing research full-time, and leave teaching to those who care to teach. I, personally, dislike research, but I would love to become a CompSci professor and teach the next generation of software developers and technologists. The problem is, I do NOT want to do research. Give me a Master's in CS with some sort of "teaching extension" on it and I'll go teach and the researchers can go do important work researching!

Edit: for the upper division courses, researchers certainly should have some involvement, I agree with several of you on that point!

moab2• 3 years ago

You don't know what you're talking about. Research and teaching at the upper-division level can and should be two sides of the same coin.

noisenotsignal• 3 years ago

My university had lecturers that were precisely this (masters in CS, focused on teaching intro undergrad courses).

However, I think there is still a lot of benefit from having researchers teach upper level courses. Firsthand experience in research brings an additional dimension that can be appreciated by students who are beyond the introductory level.

There are also tenured professors who are good at both research and teaching!

usrusr2• 3 years ago

I believe that this is yet another case of middle ground being the best: leave the bulk of teaching to specialists, but keep the research professors doing courses close to their actual field. Don't underestimate how educative teaching can be for the teacher. But this is certainly no big insight. Or are there places that do not, at least to some amount, do it like this?

haweemwho4• 3 years ago

Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...

UncleMeat4• 3 years ago

The big problem is that the teaching faculty are paid like absolute garbage and have no job security or continuity between semesters. They are widely abused by universities and often are paid at or below wages you'd get working the cash register at Target.

e40• 3 years ago

Agreed. It was a path to teaching 1 or 2 classes a year and doing whatever they wanted. I was at UC Berkeley in the 80's, if it matters.

usrusr2• 3 years ago

Has that claim ever been made? Tenure is done not because of good average outcomes, it's done because of an assumption that it occasionally results in some positive outlier with enormous upside that would not have happened without.

kashunstva• 3 years ago

I’m skeptical that tenure is good for students,

I’m more skeptical of the motives that animate these decision makers. After all, these are the same people who ban books, insist on revisionist history in Texas school textbooks, and engage in all manner of opposition to free inquiry. Perhaps by some stroke of luck, it will be a net positive for students in Texas institutions of higher learning, but of all the ways of promoting the academic and economic well-being of students this would be among the most tangential.

professorthread3• 3 years ago

Right. I'm surprised at the comments here that seem to be missing the bigger picture. If ultra-conservative proto-Gilead Texas is going after tenure, then that must mean the values we associate with a progressive good society are being incubated in academia, protected by tenure. Hence, tenure is good.

Someone1234• 3 years ago

If tenure goes away, then you have to pay more to compensate. If you're getting rid of tenure while keeping wages low, you'll still have bad teachers but for that reason instead.

A lot of people want to have their cake and eat it too: No tenure AND low wages. It won't work out.

fn-mote• 3 years ago

A lot of people want to have their cake and eat it too: No tenure AND low wages. It won't work out.

Sure you can. That's what the current system of adjuncts is like.

The problem is that you lose the people who are the most competent. Those who know what they are doing, have valuable skills, etc.

palijer• 3 years ago

How important is teacher performance for students though?

What are we even measuring when something is good/bad for students? Obviously anything akin to directly abusing students would be bad for students, but I imagine we're talking about the quality of the education they get based on the quality of their professor's teaching ability.

If we are just talking about learning qualities, isn't the selection of students in higher level academic programs already heavily curated and biased towards students who have proven they are good at learning? Shouldn't this cohort of proven learners be resistant to any fluctuations in the teaching quality of professors?

Forgive me if my question shows a higher level misunderstanding, but I stumbled into my career in tech without any post-secondary education - so I don't have firsthand experience with any real academic settings.

professorthread3• 3 years ago

The heuristic often repeated by folks in the profession is that you've got a top 5% of students who match your description of students who've proven they're good at learning, a bottom 5% who is entirely unprepared for university life and who knows how they got admitted, and the rest whose understanding of the subject matter is influenced by the performance of the teacher.

Post-COVID, lots of us (and you can find articles about this by conducting a simple search) have noticed that the top 5% hasn't changed, but the bottom 5% seems to have gotten significantly larger--10%, sometimes 15% of students in introductory level courses seem unprepared for university. I've seen functional illiteracy in some of my students at my good R1, for the first time ever. Our university is also on a huge enrollment drive, and are constantly hinting that faculty need to grade more easily to keep students happy.

robwwilliams5• 3 years ago

Skepticism re teaching is fine, but tenure at this point is not given or denied based mainly on teaching but rather on research. Yes, UT Austin and TAM teach a lot, but tenure is driven very strongly by research performance and promise.

svc0• 3 years ago

The major benefit of tenure is as a protection for pursuing the truth when researching controversial academic subjects. It protects the behavioral genetics research which takes place at UT Austin from left wing attacks and the positions some professors have taken on Texas A&M's annual drag show from right wing attacks.

As a student in the Texas system, I've raised questions which my professors refused to talk about fearing political backlash. Tenure is an important institution. I think you can only go so far to incentivize good teaching through termination.

spaceman_2020• 3 years ago

I'm not sure if the core duty of a professor at a research institution should even be teaching vs research...

HarryHirsch2• 3 years ago

You can't believe how stale an introductory course can get when the teaching staff is left to its own devices and research staff looks the other way. And that's at a name brand top-10 university.

Man, I wouldn't hire out of here.

Cyph0n2• 3 years ago

Here is how I look at it.

Major universities have two functions: (1) teaching and (2) research. Teaching is further split between (1a) undergrad (basic) and (1b) graduate (advanced).

You could definitely sustain (1a) without the incentive (or carrot) of tenure. This is how most community colleges work.

(1b) and (2) currently rely on the existence of tenure. Teaching advanced courses (1b) requires research experience. Finding people willing to spend their lives in research (2) requires some kind of incentive, especially in STEM fields.

As others have mentioned, to eliminate tenure, you need to provide an equivalent incentive. If you don’t, you’ll end up with a race to the bottom and a very probable exodus of academics to either other states or - even worse - other countries.

romwell6• 3 years ago

You could definitely sustain (1a) without the incentive (or carrot) of tenure. This is how most community colleges work.

Spoiler: this is how most universities work.

They have teaching jobs that are either filled with adjuncts, or are contract-based; or pay such small salaries that tenure is the only thing that would attract anyone to work them.

subpixel• 3 years ago

I was accepted to a UT Austin graduate program. After being accepted, I flew on my own dime to meet with the director and associate director, and several professors, because I couldn't imagine dedicating several years of my life and career path based on some paperwork alone.

The director was unfamiliar with my published work, which had gotten some acclaim and been featured _alongside his own_ at two industry events that summer. At one of them, I had introduced myself! It was a tense, 'look kid, why are you here?' meeting, that made it clear he had no idea who was coming to study in his tiny department and didn't care.

The associate director didn't show up to her office for our meeting, she was out of town. This was before the era of calendar-RSVPs, but she had confirmed via email a little more than a week prior.

That department may have been more of a mess than others, I never spent time in academia after all. But both of those folks had tenure, and I think it contributed to the zero shits they had to give.

professorthread3• 3 years ago

Some tenured professors slack on teaching, or were never that great at teaching to begin with. But tenure as an institution improves teaching quality. What professors teach is subject no less to academic freedom and the protections tenure provides than what professors research. Faculty subject to short-term contracts tend to have their contract renewal dependent on student evaluation scores, which study after study show are poorly correlated (and often anti-correlated) with student learning outcomes. Good teachers aren't necessarily popular; easy graders are popular. Conveying difficult subject matter that may be controversial or technically difficult to grok is crucial to learning outcomes. This is exactly what gets cut out when you lose academic freedom, become a cog of administrators who are out to maximize enrollments not learning outcomes, and have your job performance hinge upon student evaluations.

cafard• 3 years ago

Tenure is like the jury system, in that it has a political and an administrative aspect. The administrative aspects have drawbacks (patent cases in certain jurisdictions, bad teachers unfireable). But I don't think that the legislature has the improvement of undergraduate teaching in mind.

UncleMeat4• 3 years ago

This isn't a property of tenure. This is a property of schools not caring about teaching. Tenured faculty can still be fired for shitty performance. Eliminating tenure will not change the systems that encourage research output over other kinds of work.

karaterobot2• 3 years ago

Public-college boards would be able to create “an alternate system of tiered employment status for faculty members” that’s not tenure, the legislation states. But that system would require faculty members to go through an annual performance evaluation.

That sounds closer to how most jobs work.

Honestly, I've never understood the purpose of tenure; it seems like an archaic tradition. If it's to give professors freedom to do research without fear of reprisal, it's not working, at least not optimally: there are plenty of ways to punish tenured researchers.

The professors I know personally have no expectation of ever getting tenure. Imagine that: Ph.D. in your field, work 30 years, never even seriously entertain the possibility of getting the brass ring. Something's broken there.

The best professor I had at university was in his sixties when I took his courses, and he never got tenure despite being really good at his job. The people who get tenure seem to be people who bring a lot of attention or a lot of money to the university. Both of those are only a professor's "job" if you look at universities as cynical money-making machines (a disenchantment I have slowly come around to).

I guess what I'm saying is, I have no problems with Texas throwing a grenade into this situation. I am somewhat skeptical of the likelihood of them replacing it with a better system in practice, though.

Still, some better solution must be found if we expect higher education to continue as an institution into the future. If this bill passes, I wish them good luck, and will be looking at this as an interesting experiment.

KerrAvon• 3 years ago

The problem is, as others have said, this severely degrades Texas's desirability as a career destination for academics as long as only Texas is doing this and other states are not.

Put another way, these are the people Texas doesn't want in the state:

- LGBT+ - women - academics

Are they trying to have a student population composed of just cis crypto bros and assorted incels? Because this is how you get there.

karaterobot2• 3 years ago

Given that universities already select which professors get tenure, how would removing tenure help or hurt any groups, relative to the present system?

bdcravens• 3 years ago

In terms of bills that are coming out of the Texas legislature these days, this is pretty mild.

SomaticPirate• 3 years ago

If there are trying to reduce entitlement spending, maybe they should start with their own state pension system. Maybe start with state representatives and move from a guarantee benefits system to a 401k or similar system where benefits aren’t guaranteed.

Willish42• 3 years ago

Getting stronger academics in Texas universities has been an uphill battle for quite awhile. I don't think this will make things any better, and I struggle to see any genuine argument for why this isn't the politically-motivated intent.

telotortium• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/ECOij - the page wasn't loading for me for some reason.

tasty_freeze• 3 years ago

Some are arguing that the tenure system is broken. Maybe. If this change was done in good faith to make the system stronger, it is worth considering. But there is little evidence that that is what is going on. Conservatives have been beating the drum for decades that colleges brainwash their kids into being liberals, and so they want control to fire any academic that doesn't confirm to their views.

edit: I'm speaking as a 19 year resident of Austin, Texas who has watched countless other power grabs, including Governor Perry installing biblical literalists to oversee Texas school books that deny evolution and rewriting history -- too much Jefferson and not a mention of Phyllis Schlafley (not joking). The same legislature has pushed a law requiring every K-12 schoolroom to display the Ten Commandments.

ShadowBanThis01• 3 years ago

I'd like to be open-minded and optimistic about this, but Texas is a noted enemy of education.

squokko2• 3 years ago

Going to be tough for UT, which regularly hires people who are among the best in the world, and was essentially at the Berkeley/UCLA/UMich level of public university. They will still be able to hire, of course, but they won't be able to get Nobel Prize-level people without offering tenure.

csa2• 3 years ago

but they won't be able to get Nobel Prize-level people without offering tenure

I’m fairly certain that most Nobel Prize-level people are not worried about tenure. They will be gainfully employed as long as they want to be.

If they are looking for a delayed retirement, they can just move to a tenured spot when they reach a certain age.

squokko2• 3 years ago

I'm talking about the people who seem like they could win a Nobel Prize someday when they're just finishing their PhD, not the people who already have one.

CWuestefeld• 3 years ago

Clarifying a bad headline: it's not that tenure can't be offered (only) to new faculty. It's that henceforth nobody would be given tenure, even if they were already employees. Existing employees who are already tenured would be grandfathered.

And obviously only for public institutions.

medler• 3 years ago

It's that henceforth nobody would be given tenure, even if they were already employees.

If I’m understanding you correctly, I think this is not true? “The legislation would apply only to faculty members hired by Texas colleges after January 1, 2024. Professors who have tenure, have applied for tenure, or are on the tenure track would not be affected.”

malshe2• 3 years ago

That's my understanding too. I was surprised to see the headline because we have a couple of assistant profs in my department going up for tenure next year and I was told that if this law passes they won't be able to do that anymore.

Edit: Looks like it applies only to new hires. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/04/20/texas-senate-tenure-...

fzeroracer• 3 years ago

Texas has been rapid firing bills and actions that destroy local communities ability to self-govern as well as actions like these to try and spite what they view as the opposition. It's not going to end well for Texas (and is the reason why I left the state in the first place), but none of the ghouls in charge care because they'll be dead and / or get their payday before the problems come to roost. Much like Ken Paxton being a criminal that hasn't been put behind bars yet.

ajford• 3 years ago

So as a Texan I'm on the fence here.

I wasn't directly involved (as a student and TA), but spent a fair while in academia, and was rather close personal friends with a number of adjunct professors, tenure-track profs, post-docs, and grad students. I was looking at staying in academics so I had many long discussions about the state of things (at least at the time, about a decade ago).

There was a lot of concern in the field about how tenure was an incentive and a solid goal to strive for, but it left much for the administration to abuse. Between the politics and bureaucracy and constant jockeying for tenure track, it made it hard to focus on the students. Since you had to "play the game" or get cut or tossed out, that forced non-tenure profs to spend time outside of teaching. Then you had the shitty profs that just wanted that tenure protection so they could avoid teaching and just do their own personal research. And since it was so easy to cut adjuncts, they had little to no bargaining position and were often given shitty pay. So I'm all for ditching Tenure or otherwise reworking that pile of garbage.

But on the other hand, I don't trust anything coming out of the TX lege right now. Especially if it's got Dan Patrick excited. They're trying their hardest to create an authoritarian theocracy using the same playbook as DeSantis, and this seems like another step in controlling education in Texas to paint the narrative they want.

runnerup• 3 years ago

I also feel like if achieving Tenure then allowed profs to stop "playing the game" and start "focusing on the students"...that getting rid of tenure means no one can ever stop "playing the game" and will never be able to "focus on the students".

Personally I feel there are two different jobs in academia that need to be split up: Teaching students, and doing research. I feel that professors should be able to apple for jobs specifying a 60/40, 50/50, 75/25, 100/0, 0/100 split between those two roles. Don't make people research who just want to teach. And dont force students to suffer professors who don't want to teach them.

ModernMech19• 3 years ago

These roles already exist. The standard one is 25/75 teaching research split. Then there are teaching faculty who do all teaching, and research faculty who do all research. I’m kind of 50/50 in my role.

thechao• 3 years ago

There's a lot of conversation going on, but I am familiar with a number of the parties pushing this legislation. The entire point is so that the lege can force TX universities to get rid of "undesirable" faculty. Full stop: it's a means to stifle divergent opinions. I'm under the impression that there's already a list.

xmddmx• 3 years ago

Tenure is to Academia as Venture Capital is to Entreprenureship. You give resources (money, which buys time, office space, equipment, support staff...) to a bunch of promising individuals, hoping that some of them will do amazing things, but knowing most of them will not.

currymj2• 3 years ago

in the humanities there is a glut of excellent scholars who would be happy to have a non-tenured professorship which is nevertheless a real job with decent pay, benefits, and working conditions.

in applied technical fields it will be really hard to hire people as tenure and academic freedom are the only reason people deal with the BS of academia over industry.

so this will probably have the opposite effect of what the legislature wants, the pool of left-leaning humanities professors won’t change much, while STEM will be hugely weakened.

yawnxyz• 3 years ago

as far as I know, Australia doesn't have tenure either. But with the contract system they do have, it feels like a combination of "you'll be taken care of" and "...but you still have responsibilities".

That said, it seems stressful for new professors though

ano-ther• 3 years ago

Scott Aaronson who has tenure in Texas describes the effect as this:

[…] it would be the end of UT Austin and Texas A&M as leading research universities. More precisely, it would be the immediate end of our ability to recruit competitively, and the slightly slower end of our competitiveness period, as faculty with options moved elsewhere. This is so because of the economics of faculty hiring. Particularly in STEM fields like computer science, those who become professors typically forgo vastly higher salaries in industry, not to mention equity in startup companies and so on.

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7243

bjt• 3 years ago

While I think he's right, I wonder if that might still be a tradeoff worth making. Or at least, a sane person could argue that it is. Competition between universities for rankings skews a lot of what happens in higher ed. The state of Texas could rationally think "we want to spend our tax dollars subsidizing the education of Texans, but we're not super interested in spending those dollars to fund the academic rat race."

The people who want to win that rat race will go somewhere else. UT will be greatly impacted but I don't think the overall scientific output of the USA will.

nostrademons3• 3 years ago

I struggle to see how this benefits Texas, though. Education is an investment in the future; encouraging the best professors to go elsewhere is like saying you want the future to happen elsewhere. Maybe that's what Texas wants, but universities usually bring startups and high-tech jobs along with them.

It kinda reminds me of how Texas wanted to get in on the blockchain hype, so they passed legislation making it extremely friendly to Bitcoin mining, which happens to be the most competitive, low-margin, environmentally damaging part of the crypto ecosystem. Meanwhile most of the high-margin profit centers (exchanges, DeFi protocols, new blockchain technologies) remained in the Bay Area. It's like Texas is awfully fond of setting up selection filters and then selects for the mediocre.

mbreese• 3 years ago

The point of hiring faculty isn't to have a collection of impressive faculty doing cutting edge work. Otherwise, you'd get the same effect by funding corporate R&D research. I mean, yes, they can collect more federal grant resources, but that's not why a state government wants to fund it. Prestige is one factor, but it's not the only factor... because you're right, funding the rat race isn't the point.

The point is to hire faculty doing cutting edge work is that they train students. They teach others in a field. Then you get to grow the local knowledge base about a particular method or field. Hopefully, you're training citizens of the state, who then will stay locally instead of going to a different state (avoiding a brain drain). Or just as likely, you're trying to draw in students from out of state or internationally. And then (hopefully) those people will want to stay within the state, either for more research, or to start/join local companies.

It's not the primary effect of the faculty that you want... that's nice, but it's the second order network effects that a state really wants to encourage.

0xBDB• 3 years ago

As a practical matter I doubt UT and A&M will be affected at all. They're two of the richest universities in the United States thanks in large part to the Permanent University Fund (i.e., oil money). They'll 1) raise pay substantially and 2) tap their big-money donors to create professorial sinecures that amount to unofficial tenure.

If you get fired because of the legislature's antics, but still get your salary and have access to quasi-university resources (grad assistants and labs), were you really fired?

linuxftw• 3 years ago

This comment presumes that public universities are the proper venues for this type of research. They're not.

The only reason people are foregoing higher salaries to work at universities is because universities have pushed private research almost completely off the map.

And even if public research is necessary, it doesn't need to be part of the university system. Ever heard of the NSA? They do research, yet somehow they're able to exist without being a university.

(Not saying OP is disagreeing or agreeing with the statement from the article).

techsupporter• 3 years ago

This comment presumes that public universities are the proper venues for this type of research. They're not.

Why aren't they? It reads to me like you are making the same presumption, just in the other direction, without the support you see as lacking in the original quote. Please forgive me if I've missed something vital.

larkost• 3 years ago

How do you suppose that universities have pushed industry out of research? The reality is that industry has bay-and-large decided it only wants to do the development part of R&D, and leave the research to someone else. Universities have stepped in to fill that gap.

Of course this is messy, for example industry is very involved in the research in AI, but in places like medical technologies near 100% of the early development of everything from drugs to most devices is done out of Universities, and there is nothing stopping industry from trying to step in there.

yodsanklai3• 3 years ago

More precisely, it would be the immediate end of our ability to recruit competitively,

I wonder. For one thing, tenure can be replaced by higher salaries. Who knows, maybe these universities will get more bang for their bucks that way. After all, there are industrial research labs that play in the same league as the top research universities.

And there are other forces that make people want to pursue academic careers. Academics are very ego-driven, they measure their success in prizes, grants, publications, so if these universities give them the means to do that, they'll still attract top talent.

romwell6• 3 years ago

For one thing, tenure can be replaced by higher salaries.

Do you imply the universities will magically get more money somehow?

Who knows, maybe these universities will get more bang for their bucks that way.

Scott Aarsonson knows. They won't.

Also, everyone in the field does. There's a reason tenure exists.

After all, there are industrial research labs that play in the same league as the top research universities.

Same league, a microscopic fraction of the scope. The bottom line is always there, and it guides which research gets funded.

And there are other forces that make people want to pursue academic careers.

...most of which are given by tenure.

Academics are very ego-driven, they measure their success in prizes, grants, publications, so if these universities give them the means to do that, they'll still attract top talent.

As someone with a PhD in mathematics: absolutely not.

All that aside, great research takes time and persistence, and culture, and environment, and working groups. All that disappears once your core is transient.

caddemon4• 3 years ago

I don't agree with this as a state policy, but I don't know if it is as disastrous for UT as Aaronson makes it out to be.

The academic job market is an absolute fucking bloodbath. Plenty of very qualified up and coming researchers struggle to get TT positions at major research universities. If they stay in academia, many postdoc for an absurdly long time or settle for career stagnating instructor positions (even though their focus had been research), or maybe just become a researcher within someone else's lab. An actual professorship at UT even if it were not possible to be tenured would surely be preferable to those options I'd think.

I guess it comes down to how badly you think the current system is performing at selection. But the competitiveness is absolutely insane, that part is objective.

jacobr1• 3 years ago

An actual professorship at UT even if it were not possible to be tenured would surely be preferable to those options I'd think.

And also it includes a gamble that texas will reinstate tenure.

arghnoname5• 3 years ago

I got a PhD in computer science and considered going into academia, though I ultimately decided against it because there is only so much scratching and clawing that I am willing to do.

I was a decent researcher and to be honest, not having tenure at an good institution at all (as opposed to two tier TT and non-TT jobs) would have been kind of a plus. I probably would have gotten tenure, but I got so damned sick of chasing yet another brass ring. I don't have tenure at my current industry job (it does pay better, granted) and I don't worry about this at all. I do my job well enough that I don't really worry about getting fired.

What I cared about: quality of the institution (conferences, publications, collaborators, students, facilities), location, department, subarea expertise, service burden, reciprocal respect, salary that buys you a decent life, and ample opportunity to be successful. Tenure? That's nice, but the main advantage cited for it (ability to say controversial things) is long gone anyway. Profs gotta behave themselves regardless.

scarface74• 3 years ago

Is that a bad thing? I think part of the problem with modern college education is the lack of industry experience and the another part of the problem is that professors are more interested in research than teaching

onetimeusename• 3 years ago

those who become professors typically forgo vastly higher salaries in industry

I don't think this is generally true. I can think of a few cases of tenured faculty who could earn 10x their salary in private consulting but in my opinion it's generally not true. I think a good comparison would be to look at the average salary of something like Microsoft Research employees who are PhDs versus the average salary of tenured faculty of Computer Sciences at a highly ranked school like UT Austin. I suspect it won't be substantially different (based on job offers I have seen).

Although I don't know what a vastly higher salary means here, I suspect that the largest entrants in private industry for quantum computing would not pay vastly higher salaries than Scott Aaronson's ~$270K for work in that field.

arghnoname5• 3 years ago

MSR can pay well, but top flight universities (in CS at least) do actually pay pretty well.

But MSR is in some ways almost a university in and of itself. It has extremely good talent and is as competitive as many faculty departments. The appeal of MSR (to me) is from the research opportunities afforded to them. The product of MSR researchers is still mostly papers. In other words, they are still researchers and research (papers) is what they want to produce. They serve on conference committees, the works. It's easy to go from MSR to academia and back again.

The professors who give up a big salary are those who could take the skills they developed and apply it in a more industrial capacity, where their innovations are not public or published. This is worth a lot more to a company. Taking highly motivated and intelligent people and having them solve the hardest problems at the biggest companies in such a way (i.e., secretly) that gives the company a competitive advantage is going to pay quite well.

e63f67dd-065b• 3 years ago

I don't think he is correct. As with many other things, tenure is a benefit that has a cost: if you want to attract people without offering tenure, you just increase your salaries to compensate for the lack of a permanent employment guarantee. Tenure is worth quite a bit, but as the market for non-tenured research positions show it's not worth Microsoft Research salaries much, and very much within the budget of big universities since they now have the flexibility to fire people and don't have to think of each case of tenure granted as permanent cash flow going out.

The thing about academic hiring and academia in general that's interesting is that prestige is highly integrated into every aspect of the industry. It's also highly reliant on foreign labour, as they get an exemption from visa caps that both gives them the ability to hire from a vastly greater labour pool and also makes them attractive as places to work for smart foreigners. A professor position at a prestigious university is still worth a lot just for the prestige alone, tenure or not, as you get access to other prestigious colleagues, a higher quality pool of PhD students, and a sense remaining in the general academic community as a whole (although I guess we'll see if this remains true).

I'm not entirely convinced that tenure is a driving factor for faculty hires. It's true that traditionally, tenure-track positions are the "real" research jobs, and non-tenure track positions are where they hire the grunts to do some teaching at really terrible rates, but the reason that they can get away with doing that is because there are vastly more PhDs than there are positions for them, even in competitive STEM fields. This is why tenured positions have been mostly disappearing over the past decade. There's no reason this system has to remain, the tenure-track can just become the full-professor track, and nothing much has to change.

In my opinion, this will not have too much of an effect on the academic job market in Texas. The people that cared enough about politics to swear off all jobs in Texas were never really an option (oh no the gender studies department will be empty, what will the Texas politicians think about this tragic development), and the rest are still in the competitive market of academic hires.

I think, independent of this whole Texas saga, that the whole notion of academic tenure needed a rework anyways, as it never really made sense to me why specifically research positions have a permanent offer of employment. The whole notion of academic freedom is mostly a load of bullshit, if you don't write the correct things you don't get grants, and if you don't get grants you're effectively fired at big research universities anyways, tenure or not. What's left is a guarantee of employment that causes a great deal of inflexibility in the job market and on the institutions, and causes a great deal of risk aversion. The rework didn't need to come like this, but it'll be interesting to see what comes of it.

stainablesteel4• 3 years ago

tenure was supposed to allow professors to be able to speak their mind without fear of being fired

but apparently modern bureaucracy has evolved to get around this

every• 3 years ago

Hey, when you've got a political base to whip up and make crazy, consequences don't matter...

screye2• 3 years ago

While the intentions of this change are admittedly malicious, I support the move away from the traditional concept of tenure.

Tenure is about exploiting researchers through their 20s as PhDs/post-docs and 30s as assistant-professors, with tenure being a possibility at 40. In the best case scenario, these researchers hit 40, and enjoy what is really an early retirement. Reality is, many will find that nothing is good enough to get tenure at an R1 institute.

With the industry moving as fast as it is, professors become obsolete rather quickly. Just look at the huge number of new professors in crypto and NLP, whose entire labs have become obsolete overnight. Honestly, the over-production of PhDs is a big problem today. Hopefully these changes will be the much-needed slap in the face needed for a whole generation of new PhDs to look elsewhere for employment. Tenure is a winner take all system, where the small number who succeed, do it at the expense of the far-too-late disillusionment of the majority.

There are broadly 2 different types of academics. The economically productive ones and the money sinks. The money sink academics (Non-stem, non-business) are doomed to a life in academia, irrespective of tenure. They aren't employable in their profession elsewhere, effectively captives of the system. The economically productive ones will be given great 'deals' by the university anyway. These people are important, and universities will raise wages, give work-life balance deals, allow them to have their own practice and give them long contracts. Tenure is a flaky lever used liberally today, but forcing universities into offering more concrete deals is probably better for the employees overall. College basketball doesn't need to offer tenure to $$hire$$ the very best coaches .

Tenure's main benefits were that professors were unfireable. In 2023, we see professors being practically bullied into submission by students. We see professors lose creative control over their departments with administrative takeover. Professors are slaves to their funding sources, in a manner that is no different than working in industry. The only appeal of tenure is thus idea of 'early academic retirement'. But that too is a lie, because the system will have squeezed every bit out of you. You might as well be a 65-yr-old in a 40 yr old's body by the time you get tenure.

Tenure won't just go away. It will be replaced by more flexible deals. I for one, am looking forward to a change in academia, that adjusts to the death of honor based systems and the realities of a completely messed up supply-demand equation between universities and candidates.

Simulacra• 3 years ago

I think at SOME institutions this is needed. Professors who have stopped teaching and just waiting for retirement weigh down universities. Students learn from professors who have a vested interest in their learning. What incentivizes tenured profs?

Gabriel54• 3 years ago

As a TA at a certain public institution in Texas, the level of some students' incompetence by the time they reach their final year in undergraduate studies is shocking and saddening. And yet, almost no one fails, because there is pressure to pass everyone. One would literally have to do nothing in order to fail. Few professors have the time or energy to deal with these issues, so standards get lower and more students pass without knowing their subject. The only thing protecting professors from retaliation (not acquiescing to pressure from administrators / deans to pass students) is tenure. We can see clearly what will be the effect of this legislation.

neonate• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/ECOij

APhoenixRises• 3 years ago

This is a larger blow to smaller universities like UTSA and UTD that finally have budding research programs. I really wish the Texas government would stay out of people's lives. This is just another bill in the long line of bills this year intended to kill "wokeness". Our government doesn't give a single care about education. As long as they think they can get conforming, uninformed youth out of something, they'll do anything.

musicale2• 3 years ago

This might possibly provide some benefits for adjunct faculty (at the expense of tenure lottery winners):

Demolishing the tenure class system may reduce the social stigma of being an adjunct vs. tenured faculty member.

A noted elsewhere, a mythical possibility of future tenure may become slightly less usable for luring faculty into accepting lower pay.

And since everyone is now an adjunct, adjunct salaries (which are usually terrible) may have to rise overall. Although it will probably still be much lower than traditional faculty salaries, as UT may attract more adjunct applicants.

Adjunct hiring might change from a per-term model (which is terrible) to a yearly model or even longer.

The result could possibly (hopefully?) be higher social status, higher pay, and better job security - for the lucky few adjuncts who manage to get faculty jobs at UT.

pcvarmint• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/ECOij

Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

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