academia

[meganursula]

I have been reading and thinking about the place that academia holds in society recently. I haven't attached many articles in this forum, but i thought some of you might find the following discussion interesting:
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/are-academics-different/#comment-60957

This article questions the existence and extent of Academic Freedom. Tied up in this discussion is the question of whether academics should be guaranteed some rights not guaranteed to, well, everyone else. It is an interesting thing to consider, and i probably also like this author's slant, as well.

Recently i have also read articles questioning how much commercialization is too much for our academic structure to bear? (Is it bad that so much funding comes from interested profit-seeking parties?) And how does the commercialization affect the relative emphases placed on engineering or the humanities? Is the decline in support for non-profitable humanities research a harbinger of the eventual decline of the academic system altogether? If it is, is that bad?

Another question i have seen posed recently is whether performing as an academic has merit in the broader society? Should one feel respected for their place in the collegiate elite? Or should one worry about their lack of contribution to the more pragmatic areas of society? One argument for academic freedom supposes that academics support the development of society in a broader sense, and should then be afforded a special amount of freedom to support their unique contributions. But a more egalitarian view recognizes that a variety of jobs are necessary in society, and that academics are no more or less important than any profession.

I have some opinions about this, as you may imagine. Suffice it to say that i think that academia is not magic, but it is respectable. I'd be interested in hearing what other folks think.

Comments

[bhudson.livejournal.com]

At tenure, profs can be fired for poor teaching or poor research. After tenure, they can be fired for gross abuses like not showing up, or sexual harassment. Absent evidence to the contrary, I believe this is sufficient. How much damage is Rancourt really doing? How many faculty members are Rancourts? Is avoiding this worth a change in policy? Not to mention it may well be that he *did* violate existing policy, in which case there's no reason to change anything.

Note that most fields of employment never perform the check that faculty perform at the tenure case. Incompetants can stick around forever, just because it's often easier to ignore them than to fire them. This occurs with staff at unversities also (many secretaries are amazingly wonderful, but some, let's just say they aren't).