[Links]
[links] Link salad wakes up, wishes it had not done so
Jim Van Pelt (and Blondie) on Reader Expectations — Good stuff, Maynard.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves — Another interesting squib from Science In My Fiction.
Jeff VanderMeer on the future of publishing
Tin House-gate — Polyphony had exactly this problem. (Via Scriveners’s Error.)
Almost the Fried Olives of His Dreams — shelly_rae with the fried olive report. Mmmm.
The Mark of a Masterpiece — The man who keeps finding famous fingerprints on uncelebrated works of art. Or maybe not. Forensics in the world of fine art. (Via danjite.)
A Call to End Teacher Tenure — I had a very unpleasant experience with overt and unrepentant abuse of tenure that nearly stopped me from graduating with my B.A., so my feelings about this kind of issue are rather mixed. (And yes, the piece is talking about primary and secondary schools, not higher education.)
Kitchen appliances that bite — More weirdness from Dark Roasted Blend.
Solar Impulse plane starts 24-hour test flight — The aim is to assess whether the plane can fly in darkness. Um… (Yes, there’s more to the story, but that cutline is ridiculously funny to me.)
Put Away the Flags — Remembering Howard Zinn on July 4th True patriotism doesn’t require a yellow ribbon on your SUV.
Palin and Mondale — Conservative commentator Daniel Larison with an odd (to me, at least) but interesting piece of comparative political analysis.
?otD: What price glory?
7/8/2010
Writing time yesterday: 1 hour, 15 minutes
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.5 (fitful)
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 4/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy, emotional turmoil)
Currently (re)reading: God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert
Posted: 5:10 am Thu July 08 2010 |
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You are reading the blog of Jay Lake, speculative fiction writer and author of hundreds of short stories, many novels, and winner of the John W. Campbell Award.
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Cora
July 9th, 2010 at 6:10 amRegarding tenure for teachers and university professors, the system is set up somewhat different where I am, but the result is pretty much the same.
I’m sorry you had a bad experience in college and I agree that there are bad apples among teachers and university professors that are protected by tenure. I had my share of brushes with bad teachers at highschool (some of the worst offenders are still teaching twenty years later). As for college/university, I have encountered a very few lazy professors, but I have never encountered an outright bad one and most of my professors as a student and later colleagues as a university lecturer were excellent academics and very fine teachers. The problematic and downright abusive people were far more commonly to be found among the administrative university staff, often protected by the same tenure system (which in Germany covers all civil servants).
But there is a very good reason that teachers and university professors have tenure and that is to protect their academic and scientific freedom and protect them from politically motivated firings. While the Freakonomics bloke cannot imagine any economic research that would be so controversial that it could get someone fired, I can. I suspect a leftwing economist would face serious problems in the very neo-liberal (in the European sense) atmosphere in the US. Besides, economics is not the only discipline out there. Imagine what some Christianist wackos would like to do to evolutionary biologists or stem cell researchers. Besides, research doesn’t even have to be political or controversial by any normal standards. I know a man who was denied tenure in the 1970s, because his area of research and his approach were deemed to be “that sort of thing communists do and we don’t want any more of those at our university”. The man is a linguist, his specialty at the time was generative grammar. So if even grammar can be controversial, then imagine what an evolutionary biologist could face.
As for teachers, there have been several cases in the US of late where teachers have been fired, usually from private schools, for such non-offenses as blogging positively about Obama’s healthcare reform, daring to give birth too soon after their marriage, not giving a good grade to a student who did not properly complete an assignment, even though that student was the kid of an important donor, etc… Tenure protects teachers from that sort of idiocy. And given that from what I’ve heard, both highschool and college students in the US act a lot more entitled to high grades or having their whims catered to than what I’m used to in Germany, that’s a very good thing. I’ve heard of a case where a college student, i.e. an adult, complained about assigned reading to a professor, because the novels she was asked to read contained sex scenes and bad language, which the student felt violated her religious beliefs. And the professor in question took the student’s reservations seriously instead of letting her know in so many words, “Tough luck, but sometimes college is about reading things which make us uncomfortable.”
As for how easily teachers can get in trouble, I teach remedial English to highschool students. The classes are offered by an external agency, so I’m outside the tenure system. I used to work at two local highschools, but then one day I was informed that one of those schools no longer wanted my services, pretty much from one day to the next, because I had caused trouble. What I’d done was report ongoing bullying and behavioural issues to the pricipal. So that’s how easily you can lose a job, if you’re not protected.
As for the Freakonomics guy saying that without tenure, teachers and professors would be free to find another school/university that will hire them, in which parallel universe is that guy living and can I move there? Because at least where I am, higher education budgets have been cut or badly distributed for ages, which means in practice that positions for full-time tenured professors are cut and their work replaced by untenured, badly paid part-time teaching assistants, lecturers and grad students. These lecturers only have limited contracts for one semester or a year at most. Usually, those contracts were extended as needed, until a law was passed stating that if a limited contract was extended more than once, the teaching assistant/grad student or whatever had a right to fulltime employment. As a result, you still didn’t get fulltime employment, instead the university made sure that they didn’t employ you for more than two semesters. I have actually had a department head tell me, “We’d like to keep you, but we can’t.”