AAUP's Definition of Tenure
Caption: AAUP Definition of Tenure

It finally came to a head on April 2, 2021. Look out!

First, some background. I will endeavor to provide just the facts of the matter:

Background

In August 2020, a junior faculty member (assistant professor. i.e. as yet untenured) at Iowa State University was reprimanded for violating their students’ First Amendment rights for excluding certain topics from their projects. Specifically, the instructor wanted to reduce the instances of “othering”, where one group identifies and labels another group.

As a result of the students’ complaints to the department and College and University, some state legislators tried to advance a bill that would remove tenure from all of the state’s public Universities. Some news outlets suggested there was an anti-conservative bias in not only this professor’s class, but [insert largest permissible scope description here].

As a result of the negative attention from the media outlets and the reality of the bills to remove tenure from Iowa’s state Universities, a number of tenured faculty members from other states joined a chorus supporting the concept of tenure.

In April of 2021, the Iowa legislators withdrew their bills that would result in removing tenure from faculty members at the state’s Universities. Crisis averted?

[Ed: A series of text messages from my mom has pointed out these issues to me, and I did my own investigation to “flesh-out” any details to present here.]

The Issue

It appears from my read of the issues that there are a number of misconceptions existing around the topics of tenure, intellectual freedom, the nature of academia, and whether there exists what I will call an “Anti-Conservative” bias within academia.

Definitions

[Ed: let me just say this. When a blog post acquires a definitions section, it’s no long as fun as it was formulated at the beginning…]

Below is an ever-growing list of topics that are improperly or incompletely understood, as they relate to this topic. Each of these is likely to spawn their own post, and be linked back here.

Tenure

  • What it is
  • What it does
  • What is doesn’t mean
  • can a person lose tenure / get fired?
  • Should there be tenure?

Academic Freedom

  • what is academic freedom
  • what is academic freedom, really?
  • professor has freedom to determine HOW the course’s outcomes are met
  • profesor does not have the freedom to decide to not meet the course’s expectations
  • professor does not have the right to restrict a student’s rights (i.e. 1st Amendment)

The nature of academia

  • Universities are a business
  • Programs need to offer courses that lead their students toward graduation
  • programs have curriculum that define how a student may progress from entrant to graduate

Anti-Conservative Bias

  • what is anti-conservative bias?
  • how can one measure it / determine whether it exists?
  • how prevalent is it?
  • how much conservativitism “should” there be?

The role the media plays in this