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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33041 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Banning DEI stuff would seem easily positive to me, but banning tenure altogether is just insane, it would just make Texas incredibly less competitive as a place for promising young researchers.

What about banning tenure but also banning firing people for spurious reasons like mean tweets or not being a hyper-leftist?

In academic circles there's a real prestige that comes with the word "tenured". I think getting that distinction lets professors "relax" in a very important sense. Most really smart researchers in math and physics just want to be left alone to do their research, they want to be insulated from the practicalities of real life to just have space to think, and tenure provides that in a way that your suggestion doesn't really. You don't have to worry that you won't be able to eat if you don't publish a set number of papers or appear well on whatever citation metric, so you can do a bit more pie-in-the-sky thinking than you could without tenure. Though this is probably less true in fields that require lots and lots of grant proposals and lots of actual equipment, but for the theory-heavy fields tenure is really important.

Based on the post-PhD applied math careers I've watched, it's easy to get tenure-quality researchers without offering tenure; you just have to do what the private sector does and offer double the salary. (Less than double can also work but then they start scrutinizing the rest of your work environment very closely)

That said, I do not expect Texas to double any salaries.

Texas is, however, very likely to be able to offer public/private partnerships that offer substantial career opportunities.

Actually, considering the top Texas STEM university is university of Texas at Dallas, they can probably offer direct standard of living improvements as a benefit, but I don’t expect the state to be able to manage that.

university of Texas at Dallas

Woosh

Don't post low-effort retorts like this.

(Yes, UT Austin ranks well above UT Dallas.)

UTD's mascot is a comet, Woosh is their equivalent of "hook'em". Half my family has graduated from one or the other institution, it was not meant to be derogatory.

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