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Comment by pulisse | Hacker News Reader

> if they find anything that doesn't fit rpevious findings often either ignore it or are highly skeptical\

If they find something that doesn't fit previous findings, they publish on it and get tenure.

You have a very optimistic outlook on the response of the academic community to findings which refute long-help beliefs.

I'm a former academic, so my "optimistic outlook" is informed by direct observation of novel findings being career making. What is your pessimism based on?

Tenure is not a thing in the UK.

It might not be called tenure, but "professor for life" absolutely is a thing at British universities.

"Despite this recent erosion of tenure in the UK, it is still practiced in most universities. Permanent contracts use the word "tenure" for lecturers who are "reappointed to the retiring age". This is equivalent to a US tenure decision"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lecturer

Certainly the impression I got when I worked as a contract researcher for 6 years - if you weren't on an explicitly temporary contract (which I was) then you were probably there for life if you wanted.

Nobody talks about tenure though - there's no great divide between tenure track and non-tenure track. There's no massive achievement when you 'make tenure'. People don't talk about the number of people with tenure, or whether someone has tenure or not.

I think that's because everyone pretty much has it - so no reason to talk about it.

Generally in the UK, once you've been in a job for a few years, they need a pretty good reason to get rid of you, so it's less of a big difference from a normal permanent employment contract.

Isn’t that the same protection that you get with any permanent contract in the UK? You can still be laid-off etc but the assumption is it will continue indefinitely.

Maybe I’m mistaken but I thought American tenure was a different level of protection intended to protect freedom of inquiry.

That may happen sometimes, but there's also examples of findings that contradict popular hypotheses and the person who found it gets their career destroyed and labelled as a "crank" and a "fraud" rather than getting tenure.

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