Academic Tenure Quotes & Sayings

Tenure was originally invented to protect radical professors, those who challenged the accepted order. But we don't have such people anymore at the universities, and the reason is tenure. When the time comes to grant it nowadays, the radicals get screened out. That's its principal function. It's a very good system, really - keeps academic life at a decent level of tranquility. — John Kenneth Galbraith

The obstacles facing academic economists are formidable, for tenure and professional advancement still depend to a large extent on a willingness to comply with and to work within the tenets of orthodox theory. — Paul Ormerod

University departments wanted to hire sober, rational researchers and teachers. You were allowed revelatory, apocalyptic experiences only after you had tenure. — Richard Tillotson

Nobody cares about feminist academic writing. That's careerism. These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted ... But I recognize the fact that we have this ridiculous system of tenure, that the whole thrust of academia is one that values education, in my opinion, in inverse ratio to its usefulness - and what you write in inverse relationship to its understandability. [ ... ] Academics are forced to write in language no one can understand so that they get tenure. They have to say 'discourse', not 'talk'. Knowledge that is not accessible is not helpful. — Gloria Steinem

I've often heard academics disparage non-academic writing in terms that suggest it could be a negative in the tenure process, irrespective of the quality of academic work under review. — Daniel Drezner

I love mystery novels ... I love seeing the dramas played out in academic departments, particularly English departments. I started reading these when I was going up for tenure. — Natasha Trethewey

Universities think people come up with great ideas by closing the door. The academic tenure process, where you have to publish to journals which are very narrow, stands in the way of great research. — Clayton Christensen

Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and say was characteristic of some leftist poets, Beat poets, street poets and populist poets of the 70s and 80s - all of whom I basically view as comrades, I should probably say, to this day) and on the other hand I also wanted my poetics to operate differently than those more right-wing academics - in practice - even if in their poems or statements they proclaim public leftist views or ideas - they remain academic poets, operating in elite university-supported circles, institutionalized and reading before institutional audiences, awarding grants and awards to each other, sitting on each other's grants panels, awards and tenure committees, as Philip Levine admitted in an interview in Don't Ask, 'giving prizes to friends. — Sesshu Foster

To the extent that tenure supports academic freedom, I support tenure. I want no person or system to have any power, real or apparent, to chill academic freedom. — James E. Rogers