Tag Archives: tenure

Guest Posts

Take America’s Cowardly Professoriate Off the Dole

6 Comments

Winfield J. Abbe, Ph.D.

Everyone should contemplate this very disturbing fact: There are certainly hundreds, and possibly thousands, of highly “educated” professors at colleges and universities all over this country. Most hold the “highest” degree, Ph.D. in diverse fields like mathematics, physics, chemistry, forensic sciences, criminal justice, law, and even art or political science or engineering or biology or biochemistry or genetics or geology or philosophy or earth sciences or journalism or investigative journalism or medicine or anthropology, and so on.

Are these the “experts” who are the examples of use of logic and the scientific method to discover and learn from analysis and observations of events and the world around us to discover “truth”? If so, why are they so silent about the official lies about the events at Sandy Hook School on Dec. 14, 2012, or the attacks on 9/11/01, and many others? How many of them have contacted professor Jim Fetzer, Ph.D regarding his startling discoveries about Sandy Hook or the Boston Bombing, or the many other false flag attacks to promote gun control? How many of these great “teachers” and “searchers for truth” have contacted him about his startling discoveries on who and why and what attacked the U.S. on 9/11/01?

The answer is almost zero! Essentially none, zero of these “courageous” experts even call or question the official narrative of these events. The silence is deafening.

Much of the money for their research support comes from the U.S. Government. Obviously they fear uttering a peep using their true names, although they have lifetime tenured jobs, because they might lose some of that good easy government money, or become persona non grata with the powers that be so their own ox’s might be gored.

What about truth? What about knowledge, truth and understanding? What about being an inspiration to kids to ask rude questions of the powers that be? Are not these thousands of Ph.D.’s little more than gutless cowards who likely would not call 911 if they observed a woman being raped on the sidewalk? What good are these worthless shameful parasites on the public dole?

Let’s end the easy money supply to these worthless cowards of America who set exactly the wrong example to our young who will be the new cowards on the block if something is not done soon to reverse this trend.

In fact, has not America already been destroyed by a bunch of brainwashed fools who can’t distinguish up from down or truth from fiction when Israelis own all the major media and continue a big propaganda lie every day 24/7? Let’s abolish these worthless parasites and the institutions who support them. Never donate one dollar to these useless hypocritical institutions that are destroying America from within by brainwashing its young college-age students and teaching them cowardice instead of instilling in them traits of courage, questioning and honor and truth.

Evidently our colleges are producing graduates who can’t discern truth from fiction. Let’s end these hollow institutions of lower learning and indoctrination today and stop their easy government funding. Put these cowardly professors on the street  where they belong.

0
Home

Watch Your Words, Professor

Leave a comment

The Case of Edward A. Ross

Editor’s Note: University professors in the United States today seldom engage in public speech that may even remotely threaten their employment. This is partly due to the fact that close to three-quarters of teaching faculty are non-tenured contract workers, and thus readily recognize their lack of tenure protections. Yet the many who have earned tenure regard it as more of a guaranteed sinecure than a guard against potential administrative retaliation for personal beliefs and/or public statements. 

In fact, the institution of tenure in American higher education is largely rooted in the controversy surrounding Stanford University’s dismissal of Professor Edward A. Ross in 1900 for his public speech. Ross was a highly-regarded economist, sociologist, and even an early mass media critic. Jane Stanford, widow of railroad magnate and university founder Leland Stanford, was disturbed by Professor Ross’ political views, evident in the popular faculty member’s enthusiastic public support of the Populist Party’s “free silver” platform of the 1890s, and his subsequent condemnation of “Chinese cheap labor.” Following these remarks Ms. Stanford successfully pressured university president David Starr Jordan to terminate Ross’ employment. 

The retaliatory firing of Ross became known as the “Ross case” and is historically recognized as a principal motivating factor in Professors John Dewey and Arthur O. Lovejoy’s founding of the American Association of University Professors that advocated for tenure across the US higher ed landscape.

As the following article from Stanford’s alumni publication (somewhat tepidly) chronicles,

At the time of her death in 1905, Mrs. Stanford was still associated with the Ross Affair. An obituary in the New York Times called it “the only serious cloud that ever lowered over Stanford University.”

By Brian Eule
Stanford
(January/February 2015)

In 1900, Jane Stanford forced out a respected faculty member. Was he a martyr to academic freedom or a racist gadfly who deserved what he got?

Department of Special Collections and University Archives (right); Image D-07548 Courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives

ON A TUESDAY AFTERNOON in November 1900, Edward Alsworth Ross gathered several student reporters in his campus office. Ross, 33 years old and a Stanford economics professor of seven years, had joined the university just two years after its opening. He was a captivating sight, 6-foot-5 and nattily dressed in a suit that favored his athletic physique.

Ross was popular with students and esteemed in his field. David Starr Jordan, the university’s first president, had recruited him not once but twice. Plucked from Jordan’s former home at Cornell, Ross was emerging as a scholarly star. Now, his time at Stanford was coming to an abrupt end.

Ross held a lengthy written statement he had prepared for the San Francisco newspapers. He handed it to the students.

“Well, boys,” he said, “I’m fired.”

ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN YEARS LATER, the reasons for Ross’s departure remain in dispute. The matter was precipitated by a series of public pronouncements Ross had made on political matters between 1896 and 1900, a practice that put him at odds with university co-founder Jane Stanford. Was he forced out because of his outspoken opinions or because he broke rules prohibiting partisan advocacy? What is not in dispute is that Mrs. Stanford insisted that Ross be sacked despite the vigorous objections of Jordan, who finally relented.

Ross’s dismissal drove a wedge between Stanford faculty and the administration and resulted in a spate of resignations by other professors. More broadly, it galvanized efforts to codify protection of academic freedom and indirectly led to the establishment of tenure. As it turned out, that hastily arranged press conference in Ross’s office was a seminal moment in the history of higher education.

LONG BEFORE HIS NAME became synonymous with academic freedom controversies, Edward Ross was an enigmatic figure. Born to a farmer and a schoolteacher in Illinois, and orphaned at age 10, he was taken in by neighbors on a nearby Iowa farm. His new family viewed him as a prodigy, praising him so extravagantly that some boys in the area thought him pampered.

More…

0
Documents, News, Videos

CBC Hit Piece on Prof. Anthony Hall: Uncensored Video

30 Comments

By James F. Tracy

The targeting of University of Lethbridge Professor Anthony Hall is now a national news story in Canada. On October 3 the Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s David Gray conducted an in-studio interview with Hall, a senior tenured faculty member at Lethbridge, concerning the recent controversy surrounding him resulting from the defamatory campaign waged by Canada’s B’nai B’rith political pressure group.

The edited interview as broadcast by CBC may be listened to here.  The uncensored version, taped by a colleague of Hall refused access to the studio, is captured in the video below.

screen-shot-2016-10-04-at-4-53-02-pm

Continue reading CBC Hit Piece on Prof. Anthony Hall: Uncensored Video →

0
Documents

“The Truth About Tenure in Higher Education”

41 Comments

National Education Association
American Federation of Teachers

[Editor’s note: The National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers are the highly politicized parent organizations (e.g. here and  here) of the United Faculty of Florida (UFF). The UFF is the same faculty union FAU Professor James Tracy belonged to at the time of his termination by FAU administrators on January 6, 2016. Tracy was of UFF-FAU chapter president in 2009-2011 when the FAU administration summarily fired five professors in the university’s College of Engineering (here and here). Perhaps coincidentally, the following essay was directly referenced in Lenny and Veronique Pozner’s inflammatory December 10 article published by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel that appears to have prompted Tracy’s firing. Today few US faculty actually challenge the status quo, and thus one could make the argument (which NEA/AFT counter below) that tenure may have merely become the guarantee of a handsome sinecure that guarantees the institutional continuity of politically innocuous schools of thought and overall ideological conformity .-JFT]

aft-hillary
NEA and AFT have enthusiastically endorsed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Image Credit: American Federation of Teachers

You may well have heard about attacks on tenure and college faculty. After all, people write books and get quoted in the press grinding this ax. The argument is not hard to believe, either; we’ve all seen people in authority, private and public, who care more about protecting themselves than serving their customers. You may have memories of a teacher who didn’t seem to keep up with his or her subject or care very much about his or her students.

But there’s a big problem with the negative polemics about tenure: They are not true. This NEA-AFT Online brochure deals with some of the myths about tenure and responds with the facts. It tells the truth about tenure — a human institution with flaws — but a practice we can be proud of and need to maintain.

Continue reading “The Truth About Tenure in Higher Education” →

0