Sacred cow of tenure laid low?
In both shouts and murmurs, the Ward Churchill controversy has echoed through universities across the country amid the escalating clash of politics and academic freedom.
Even before the furor over the CU professor's writings - he compared some of the Sept. 11 victims to a top Nazi - some college faculty had sensed an erosion of liberty to broach provocative or unpopular views.
Churchill put a face on those concerns.
"It's like the old Dylan line - you don't need a weather vane to know which way the wind is blowing," said Robert Polhemus, English professor and chairman of the faculty senate at Stanford, paraphrasing the singer's "weather man" line. "For a generation, professors took both tenure and academic freedom for granted in a way that won't be possible in the next decade."
Read the whole thing here. The site has links to several other stories about the Churchill affair.
For a long time I have argued that the blatant and aggressively provocative irresponsibility of many academics, combined with rapid and unjustified escalation of the costs of higher education, and the scandalous incompetence of many university administrators would eventually offend public sensibilities to the point where outside interference in university affairs would become inevitable. We seem to have reached that point. We may lament it, or seek to dismiss the intruders as mere conservative ideologues, but ultimately we should recognize that we have brought this on ourselves. Universities have claimed special status and privilges in our culture on the basis of a claim that they embodied a special kind of integrity. That claim has probably been shattered beyond repair.
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