Tenure has become the tool to protect the unimaginative, uncreative, unambitious and in general the incompetent members of the faculty. Think of hiring an employee and only finding out after two or three years that the employee had no ambition, did as little as possible to perform his or her job and took advantage of every loophole in the system. As soon as you had learned that, you would fire that employee and move on. But with tenure IF YOU HIRE THEM, YOU HAVE GOT THEM FOR LIFE. Never be naïve enough to believe that you can pass them off on another university. It will not happen.
Jim,
ReplyDeleteIt takes four to six years to earn tenure, so if you find that a faculty member is not a good employee within a few years, you terminate him or her. And if a Department Chair does his/her job, then incompetent faculty can be forced to change or leave even after tenure is granted. But what about Chairs, Deans, and VP's who fit your description and who protect each other and bad faculty so that none of them have to change? CSN doesn't even evaluate Chairs, I get evaluated yearly, but my Chair never gets evaluated. Maybe that's a big part of the problem.