One of the advantages of academic tenure is that it is allowing former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo to mount a vigorous defense of controversial policy recommendations early in the War on Terror. Without the sinecure of his law professorship at Berkeley, Yoo might have to actually wet his finger to the political wind.
Yoo’s vocal justifications stand in contrast to the muted approach of former Justice Department colleagues also under scrutiny by ethics investigators. Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge in California, led the Office of Legal Counsel while Yoo worked there. Bybee has told students and colleagues that he has regrets about how the controversial memos have been viewed and how they were prepared.
As it is, we now stand a very good chance of seeing Bush era legal policies on detention of unlawful combatants and intelligence gathering incident to the president’s war powers under Article II debated as a matter of law rather than one of emotionalism and partisan advantage.
Could be fun.
I still would like to see the oh so important Ivory Tower Guild abolished and the academic elitists made subject to market/political pressures. There are other ways that Yoo could pay for his legal bills.
Of course, members of the “Guild” will defend the need to continue the practice of tenure. Turn the clock back two hundred years and I might agree with you.
Every time I see or hear the term “academic tenure”, a picture of Ward Churchill pops into my mind and I have to take copious amounts of medicinal liquids for relief.
Ron, I hear ye, but as a member of said Ivory Tower Guild, I might sarcastically add that we are subject to market / political pressures. It’s just that the “demand” i.e. many parents & their college-bound young’uns are so easily swayed by factors other than the quality & rigor of teaching that I despair of ever seeing your goal achieved. I am tapped from time to time to take prospective students & families around campus and am underwhelmed by the questions many ask and the things to which they pay most attention. How many parents even look through the course catalog to get some feel for the breadth & depth of courses offered & institutional biases revealed therein (as opposed to looking at the buildings & landscaping)? How many actually take the time to sit in on a course? How many weigh the total educational cost to determine whether the prospective degree in question is worth that kind of investment? Who would spend equivalent amounts of money that kids routinely “borrow” on loans, and then show a similar lack of concern said students do by not even showing up for class? I despise tenure, and yet, our market seems to think an “Insert Famous Donor here Tenured Professor PhD” must be a better teacher than “Mr. Local Retired Professional with 30 years real-world experience”. Perhaps when families wise up to big-name institutions marketing themselves as “an investment that will really pay for itself in your kid’s future earnings”, we’ll see some reform, but I’m not holding my breath. Big-name institutions seldom grant tenure for “teaching excellence” so who’s kidding whom?