Texas Bill Nukes Tenure

[mleok]

What those arguing against dismalist have failed to demonstrate is that there is a need for an (equally) qualified warm body.

In many ways, a less qualified person would be a better instructor for most of the students I have.

I've heard this debate before.  I've had this debate before. 

Honestly, if you just want someone to teach cookie-cutter classes, it is conceivable that a person with a Bachelor's could teach college as long as they were given the material ahead of time and taught what they know.  We might not need any graduate degrees.

Several people, myself among them, have mentioned MA holding faculty who did a very good job at, I believe, lower division classes.  But in my experience, these are more the exception than the rule.

I wonder if you could be more specific why you say that, quasi.

I wasn't really talking about people without PhDs.  I'll do this for pure math, but I don't think it's that different in most humanities fields.  Let's break doctoral faculty into research tiers, keeping in mind it's really all a continuum and not entirely measurable on a single variable, but...

A) People who are at least long-shot candidates for the major prizes - Fields Medals and the like.

B) People who are on trajectories that have them being plenary speakers at one of the AMS Sectional conferences.  (There are roughly 32 of these a year, and you can assume they are never repeated.)

C) People who are likely to get an NSF grant at some point.  (Maybe with funding rates, this is already all in B.)

D) People who regularly publish in A journals.  (I'm thinking of the list Australia used for a while - so A is roughly the top third of journals.)

E) People who regularly publish.

F) People who maybe publish a paper from their dissertation in a write only journal and maybe another paper for tenure and another for promotion.

(I'd consider myself a D.)

A place like UT-Austin is mostly hiring B's and C's.  A place like UT-Tyler is mostly hiring E's.  In terms of benefits to the state, they might do just as well with E's for UT-Austin and F's for UT-Tyler.  (And I should emphasize that, by the end of doctorate education, talent is what mostly determines which category you end up - give all the research resources to an F person and, with rare exceptions, they still won't become a D person.)

In fact, maybe they'd do better that way.  I sort of naturally assume my students can read about an abstract theoretical idea and make sense of it with some guidance, and I sort of naturally assume that my students can, when faced with a problem, grab a variety of theoretical tools they learned about over the semester, find the ones that apply to a problem, and use them.  In fact, I think acquiring these aptitudes is the whole point of education, not whatever facts or theories they learn.  But I'm naturally gifted with these skills, and my students aren't.  Maybe my students would do better with someone who doesn't expect them to have or even acquire these aptitudes and gives them specific direction on how to do specific problems encountered in the class.  I tend to think that defeats the point.

At my public R1, our target hires in pure mathematics tend to be in the A/B range, many of our junior hires in recent years have been plenary speakers at AMS Sectional meetings, some have even been ICM invited speakers, and it's taken for granted that all our junior faculty members will regularly be funded by the NSF.

UT Austin used to be able to hire at a comparable level, but I strongly suspect it will become much less attractive with the elimination of tenure, and that they will have a much more challenging time recuiting the best candidates, and retain them.

That might not matter in the short term, but it will have a negative impact on their reputation that will last decades, even if they reverse these decisions. If they wanted to destroy the crown jewel of their University system, they should simply dissolve the university, eliminate all the existing tenured faculty, and just hire adjuncts for (below) minimum wages, that's where they are headed anyway.

If one was just concerned about teaching quality, then one should just hire faculty in the F category, why regularly publish drivel? It's a waste of electrons and trees.

[onthefringe]

Mleok speaks well to outcomes in math. In biomedical research they will likely be able to hire some outstanding people if they boost startups into the $2-2.5 million range. I would guess that a large proportion of those hires will take four or so years to spend out their startups, get their R01s and then move somewhere that offers them tenure (and a new startup) on hire.

[mleok]

Mleok speaks well to outcomes in math. In biomedical research they will likely be able to hire some outstanding people if they boost startups into the $2-2.5 million range. I would guess that a large proportion of those hires will take four or so years to spend out their startups, get their R01s and then move somewhere that offers them tenure (and a new startup) on hire.

I was a postdoc at the University of Michigan, and it had a bit of a reputation for being an incubator for faculty who then get poached. I agree that if UT Austin were to leverage their huge endowments to offer significant financial resources, they might be able to attract decent junior faculty, but the successful ones will likely get poached by universities willing to offer tenure upon hire. I moved from a tenure-track position from the Midwest to California with tenure upon hire.

[Wahoo Redux]

The Atlantic: Conservatives Hate Tenure—Unless It's for Clarence Thomas

[Mobius]

Interesting article. I can see this with senior moves. If you have a good job, what's it going to take to make a move? While there should still be plenty of people fighting for NTT gigs, these senior positions are going to be tougher to fill.

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/05/23/civitas-institute-professor-tenure/

[apl68]

The Atlantic: Conservatives Hate Tenure—Unless It's for Clarence Thomas

Quite true, no doubt.  And it's equally true that liberals hate judicial activism now that they no longer own the judiciary the way they did some years back.  Now they're all about how undemocratic the Supreme Court is, and how it should be reined in.  Had the 2016 election gone differently we'd almost certainly have a thoroughly left-leaning Court handing down all sorts of far-reaching rulings.  And the arguments for and against respecting the Court's power would be coming from opposite sides of the aisle.

[Bbmaj7b5]

Mleok has been right this entire thread. I'm not sure where Dismalist's POV is coming from, but I think it betrays a lack of familiarity with the way things work in Texas.