Category Archives: Tenure & Promotion

Inside Higher Ed: Do Ag profs need tenure?

A University of Arkansas vice president has announced plans to no longer hire new agriculture professors on the tenure track — a move faculty members say will make it impossible for them to attract the best talent or provide academic freedom.

The plan affects only those hired through the university system’s agriculture department. Some others, hired directly by the agriculture program at the Fayetteville campus, may still be tenure track. But those hired by the system office teach and do research at Fayetteville and for the state’s extension system, and Arkansas faculty members say that the change represents a serious erosion of faculty rights.

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Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Outspoken professor to leave Yale faculty

A professor who also is an outspoken anarchist has agreed to leave Yale University this spring, dropping an appeal over whether his termination was politically motivated.

David Graeber, one of the world’s leading social anthropologists, said he will teach two classes next semester, then take a yearlong paid sabbatical, after which he will not return.

“Normally, you get a sabbatical on the condition that you come back and teach the following year,” Graeber said. “I’m getting the sabbatical on the condition that I don’t come back and teach.”

Yale spokesman Tom Conroy said he could not immediately confirm the arrangement.

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The Register-Guard: Does right wing mean left out? At the UO, some conservative faculty members fear that their views are shortchanged

On a campus occasionally derided as the “Berkeley of the North,” University of Oregon math professor Chris Phillips is something of an anomaly: a conservative faculty member.

He describes his politics as closer to Libertarian than Republican but acknowledges that most people on campus who know his views probably lump him into the conservative category. Thanks to tenure, he doesn’t feel he has to hide his opinions and in fact has been outspoken on some issues, most recently a proposed diversity plan and its undefined standard of “cultural competency” as a factor in hiring, promotion and tenure.

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Inside Higher Ed: Casualty of anti-war activism

Alan Temes believes that being a professor doesn’t mean you give up your First Amendment rights — and that his beliefs cost him a chance at tenure.

Temes, an assistant professor of health and physical education at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, had been receiving good reviews until last year, when some of his colleagues objected to notices he posted in the hallway of an academic building, among the various other notices that line such hallways. Temes posted — and regularly updated — the death counts of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed since the United States invaded.

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Inside Higher Ed: David Horowitz’s Next Campaign

David Horowitz has a new target: the confidentiality of college tenure rules.

Horowitz inspired legislative hearings and infuriated professors nationwide with his Academic Bill of Rights, which he says is designed to protect students from being punished for their views, but which many professors say would limit their academic freedom. On Thursday, he announced a new campaign — to ask colleges to modify their rules governing the confidentiality of tenure discussions.

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Yale doesn’t review anarchist professor’s contract
By all accounts, Yale anthropology professor David Graeber is one of the brightest minds in his field. His books are taught worldwide and the London School of Economics recently asked him to give its annual Malinowski lecture, an offer reserved for the world’s most promising young anthropologists.

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Inside Higher Ed: Too much information?

“I shouldn’t be doing this. I’ll be going up for tenure soon,” wrote Daniel Drezner on September 10, 2002, in introducing his blog, which quickly built a large audience of academics and others with its observations on politics, international relations and economics.

On Saturday, Drezner recalled those words — the first on his blog — when he wrote that he had been rejected for tenure by the political science department at the University of Chicago. The university’s decision surprised not only Drezner, but many of his readers, who rushed to their own Web sites to denounce Chicago. Several noted that another academic blogger had come up for tenure at Chicago this year — and also been rejected. And these rejections have renewed a debate about whether blogging without tenure is too risky.

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