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Comment by tsotha | Hacker News Reader

The tenure system really needs to go. The idea was to set up a system where it would be difficult to stifle dissent.

But the structure of the system guarantees over time there won't be any dissent to stifle, because tenure committees don't allow anyone who isn't like everyone else into the clubhouse.

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When I was in graduate school, I was somewhat involved in the process of hiring a few professors. Whoever we would have hired was probably going to get tenure and remain in the department for decades. Intangible personal and interpersonal aspects of the candidates were therefore about as important as the quality of their research, because nobody wants to be stuck working for 20 years with someone they don't feel comfortable with. Naturally, this has a tendency to perpetuate the gender and race imbalances in academia.

Gender and race imbalances are much less important to me than ideological imbalances. What's the point of having different sexes and skin colors if they're all part of an echo chamber?

What fields do you find having an academic "echo chamber"?

Nearly all the soft sciences, including economics.

I've seen it in theoretical physics as well. There are 'schools of thought', for example at my alma mater most of the professors doing theoretical particle physics are phenomenologists and tend to regard people doing say string theory as cranks.

This means it's very hard for those people to get hired, and there is also the effect of them not wanting to apply to a university that doesn't have a strong tradition or a strong group in their subfield.

I'm surprised that tenure has survived as long as it has. Certainly professors with tenure want to maintain the status quo, but it seems like the supplicants are still willing to drink the Kool-Aid.

A recent article titled

   Stripping a Professor of Tenure
   Over a Blog Post

didn't get any discussion on HN. The professor seemingly was stripped of tenure on the whims of his dean. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9024754

OTOH a clown like Ward Churchill probably deserved to be fired. There's a place for legitimate "dissent" but IMO Churchill didn't deserve that protection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill

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