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Concerning Academic Freedom and Tenure

Wiki Markup"\[T\]here is little consensus regarding the meaning of academic freedom although there is agreement that it is something worth protecting. The concept has been invoked in support of many contrary causes and positions. It, for example, was used to justify student activism and to repress it, to defend radical faculty and to defend their suppression, to support inquiry into admissions or promotions or tenure decisions and to deny such inquiry. It is at best a slippery notion, but clearly a notion worthy of analysis" (C. Kaplan and E. Schrecker \ [eds.\], in Regulating the Intellectuals: Perspectives on Academic Freedom in the 1980s, 1983).unmigrated-wiki-markup

"The practical fact in most places, and the unexceptional rule at Yale, is that tenure is for all normal purposes a guarantee of appointment until retirement" (Kingman Brewster as quoted in Ralph Brown and Jordan Kurland, "Academic Tenure and Academic Freedom," in William Van Alstyne \ [ed.\],Freedom and Tenure in the Academy, 1993).unmigrated-wiki-markup

"Tenure, accurately and unequivocally defined, lays no claim whatever to a guarantee of lifetime employment. Rather, tenure provides only that no person continuously retained as a full-time faculty member beyond a specified period of probationary service may thereafter be dismissed without adequate cause" (William Van Alstyne \ [ed.\], in Freedom and Tenure in the Academy, 1993)unmigrated-wiki-markup

. "Academic freedom and tenure do not exist because of a peculiar solicitude for the human beings who staff our acdemic institutions. They exist, instead, in order that society may have the benefit of honest judgment and independent criticism which otherwise might be withheld because of fear of offending a dominant social group or transient social attitude" (Fritz Machlup as quoted in Rolf Sartorius, "Tenure and Academic Freedom," in Edmund Pincoffs \ [ed.\],The Concept of Academic Freedom, 1975).

The academy, simply defined, is the community of fully critical reflection that is always only more or less .adequately realized in any so-called academic institution, i.e., college or university.

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