Tenure

The HBS hosts discuss the pros and cons of tenure.

There are many good ideological reasons to defend tenure in higher education, not least of which among them is that tenure is perhaps the only institutional guard that society has established to protect its researchers, scientists, and intellectuals against the pressures of the market. That’s no small thing. But we also understand that, to the non-academic public, tenure may seem like nothing more than a guarantee that haughty academics with cushy jobs can’t be fired unless, as the old adage goes, “they’re caught with a dead woman or a live boy”? 

Who doesn’t want job security?

As with all things that we discuss on this podcast, though, the question of tenure is much more complicated that it appears at first glance. Once established as a institutional protection of academic freedom, the dynamics, significance, and real-world effects of the granting and/or denial of tenure have dramatically changed as the University, the culture, and the political intervention of state legislative bodies have changed.

In this episode, we’re talking about tenure: “get out of jail free card” or the necessary codification of a social good?

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-103-tenure

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