Teresa R. Wagner, a conservative Republican who applied for a faculty job at Iowa and was turned down, thinks so: Ms. Wagner, who graduated from the law school in 1993 and had taught at the George Mason University School of Law, was not hired. She sued, alleging discrimination because of her political beliefs. Late last [...]
Archive for the ‘Academic Labor Market’ Category
My post on Florida State’s sellout to a right-wing foundation deserves some more general, and less snarky, reflection on several aspects of the deal. Donor Influence A distinctive, possibly unique, feature of the way Americans do our collective business, noted by de Tocqueville almost two centuries ago and long predating the tax preferences for charities [...]
Florida State is among the victims of a savage budget attack from the state government; in their case $100m in the last four years. The football team is doing fine and making money, so there’s no real crisis at hand. But a university is a large and complicated enterprise, with dozens of specialized activities affecting [...]
The feds won’t acquiesce in legalizing non-medical commercial cannabis production and sale.
A successful academic career requires publishing more papers than anyone has important, valid, and new ideas. It greatly helps to own a paper-generating machine. That creates an environmental niche for tendencies of thought that enable the formulaic production of papers not incorporating significant new thought.
Firing John Yoo - the vocational distinction
Two dispatches this week from the “is our girls and women learning?” wars. Elizabeth Weil writes about the nascent movement for single-sex education in public schools, and Christina Hoff Sommers takes on efforts to socially engineer the equal representation of women in science and engineering PhD programs. (Charlotte Allen’s “Women are dumb” doesn’t make the [...]
The horrible thing about tenure isn’t accumulating deadwood; someone has to sit on university committees. The horrible thing about tenure is the tenure process, which denies academic freedom to those most capable of using it.
Brian Tamanaha at St. John’s Law School has kicked off yet another round of the never-ending debate on the desirability of tenure in academic institutions, instigated by the proposal of a number of law school deans to loosen accrediting authorities’ rules. Tamanaha’s argument rests on the unassailable claim that tenure redistributes enormous resources to the [...]
I’m working through some ideas about the operation of academic labor markets, that I hope to test if I ever get around to it. Below is a VERY rough sketch of the argument. I’d be happy to see what our readers think of this. Some of this may be half-baked, so read it in that [...]