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I don't subscribe to the notion that a tenure automatically protects what is essentially a public employee (CU is a state funded college) when they something say or write something incredibly offense.
Can Ward Churchill say such things? Yes, as defined by the First Amendment, he can. Does he have the right to say whatever he wants on the tax payer dime? IMO, no.
I can respect the idea that Churchill should be allowed to say whatever he wants to academically (as in his much publicized essay), and I am still wondering if I am being influenced by the nature of his essay and how offensive I found it.
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here we get to one of the hearts of the matter, really: conservatives tend to oppose tenure. except for themselves, and ceo-types for various corporations--then it's fine. just as the right would prefer to break the teacher's union in public education--not by direct confrontation on the question of whether there should or should not be such a union, but by fabricating a range of critiques of public education as such and moving from there to advocating private/church basement schools.
within the campaign against tenure, you only ever see isolated factoids floated about
: ward churchill writes an essay that offends the delicate sensibilities of conservatives, therefore the problem must be tenure because it provides a space for what they see as impunity. the vast amount of material generated across the university system by thousands of other folk goes unnoticed: the general question about tenure and its relation to that production go unposed.
you could aslo look at tenure as a device for sheltering academic production--its other-than-lucrative modes of writing for example--and as a way to preserve freedom of inquiry from the corrosion of political and economic pressures. debating this view would come down to what value you place on the fact of academic inquiry--whether for example, you imagine that there should be a particular space preserved for it in american society, whether you imagine that there is any necessity for a correlation between economic and cultural attributes in the fashioning of the corporate elite of tomorrow. because like it or not that is what higher education is about--the reproduction of upper cadres in the american labor pool.
within this bigger function, the question of debate is interesting--it might be an experience that enables the kind of "thinking outside the box" you read about in management literature, which is among the features of "managing change" that these folk are supposed to indulge as part of their professional activities. in a situation of great uncertainty, the ability to step outside existing political and corporate ideologies--or at least to relativize them--can be a prerequisite for survival. this stepping outside or relativization is itself a skill--it is not something that can be undertaken arbitrarily in a moment of finance-driven illumination--but perhaps it is precisely this that conservatives are uncomfortable with.
dont fool yourself: universities have adapted to this changing political situation for their own interests---there are few tenure track jobs available, but many many jobs for adjuncts. flexible labor--except that most adjuncts that i know are far more radical than their tenured compatriots. but that is harder for conservatives to oppose, really, because it does not fit into their mythos--agents exposed to market pressures, to instability in their basic mode of living, should by their "thinking" be more docile, more complaint--because they are more expendable (the "discipline of the market").
in the final analysis, the result of most conservative argument on this (and other) matters is to make everyone equally expendable. except for members of the economic elite, who they would shelter by driving the whole system of repoduction into a private, and thereby invisible, space.
it seems to me that this whole move is self-defeating.
another point: it seems that the same arguments that circulate in rightwing land about public vs. private high schools are structuring the pseudo-debate about tenure in these circles. i cant help but think that what they really want, taken to the limit, is the destruction of the public tout court, and its replacement with a privatized scenario in which class reproduction is made apolitical seeming by shoving its mechanisms back into the private sphere--where only the children of the wealthy get access to a wide-ranging education--where public universities would operate as part of a vast ideological circle jerk shaped by conservative anxieties that maybe, just maybe, their worldview is fundamentally dysfunctional---public universities would be charged with a direct reproduction of the existing order. leave the critical thinking to the economic eliltes, who deserve it.
better maybe to focus on things like ward churchill and whether his writing offends conservatives--at least by that route, it sounds like you might--in principle--have the beginnings of a case to make.