Attacking tenure seems to have come into fashion a year or two ago. The Daily, which should know better and could easily have consulted experts, joined in with its lead editorial on Oct. 20. The editorial is based on misconceptions.

According to the Daily, professors are hired to teach, are less rigorously reviewed than temporary instructors, are protected by tenure when they perform badly and, except for dictators, are the only people with guaranteed jobs and should be subject to firing by students.

However, different professors were hired to do different jobs. Few only teach, and some do no teaching. Most do some teaching.

Temporary instructors are often hired at the last minute to deal with emergencies like enrollment increases.

I have never seen any hiring, promotion or tenure review for regular faculty which was as lax as what a harried department chair could accept when hiring temporaries. There are formal rules for reviewing regular faculty and more flexibility when hiring temporaries.

Tenure protects against summary firing, but not against adverse salary action or work reassignment. A tenured professor whose work is bad is not safe.

Many people have varying degrees of job security. Sometimes that security is de facto and sometimes de jure. People with less tend to envy those with more. Judges, teachers and other government employees have tenure as well.

Students evaluate their teachers, and those evaluations are used in deciding which professors are promoted and tenured and what their salaries should be. But the notion that students should decide which professors to fire is not taken seriously.

It is not believed that students are competent evaluators of the noninstructional duties of professors, e.g. research. It is not even clear that students can evaluate all aspects of the teaching reliably. How can a neophyte decide whether the syllabus covered everything it should have? One has to know the field to do that.

So the Daily got all five wrong.

And where is academic freedom without tenure? It is time to recall the scandals that have wracked ISU and think about how they would have played out without tenure.

For a strong ISU we need a strong faculty. That means that we hire quality performers into the regular faculty positions, NOT that we fill up the ranks with quality temporaries.

Temporaries tend to be vulnerable vagabond teaches, who do not enjoy the tenure-based academic freedom that sustains the regular faculty.

Bryan Cain

Professor

Mathematics