IHE: Chatham Brings Back Tenure

[Wahoo Redux]

Apparently life without tenure was not working as well as everyone expected. So Chatham U brought it back.

[mahagonny]

The only question that might be answered by their experiment is 'can a school operate without tenure in a world full of tenure and get have access to everything it has decided it needs.' If the answer is no which they seem to say it is, it just points again to the tyranny of tenure. It doesn't prove tenure is a good thing in there abstract. If you had an experiment where academic tenure were concurrently gone from all schools then you would find out something different.
The real problem is the 'adjunct' world and its neglected condition/status. Were 'part-time' faculty even mentioned in the article? I'll read it again. I didn't see any mention of them. Which is what I would expect. Part-time faculty are so invisible that people who write about the state of higher education have forgotten that there is something that is invisible. They think they are looking at problems, but they are the problem. They talk about faculty morale, but the thought process is always that faculty morale is a problem the school needs to fix, but adjunct morale is something the individual needs to fix (by leaving).
That they long ago gave up on something that they think they consider important is denied.

[mahagonny]

con't

Actually Flaherty does write about the adjunct world, once in a blue moon. No one wants to read it except other adjuncts.

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

It doesn't prove tenure is a good thing in there abstract.

Things do not have to be good in order to be useful.
Tenure is a long-term carrot for faculty (and a liability for a given institution) that reduces the need for near-term carrots.
There are direct quotes about it in the article. E.g. "the stability that comes with tenure will protect us from losing faculty to higher-salaried positions available to them as practitioners in the health-care sector."

[mahagonny]

It doesn't prove tenure is a good thing in there abstract.

Things do not have to be good in order to be useful.

Agree with that. It can be useful to bad people too, for example the 'social justice' cult.