Eye of Newt

Thanks to my wife for spotting this little gem...

Newt Gingrich wants to abolish tenure. This proposal is part and parcel of the conservative strategy to destroy every American institution that does not swear fealty to the Republican party. Newt blithely asserts that freedom of speech is not a problem from one of his faces and then argues that professors who are "Anti-American" should be fired with the other.

Substantively Newt has no case (as usual). The purpose of tenure is to guarantee the intellectual independence of academics. Without it, they will be under constant economic pressure to bow down to the gods of popularity. Sorry, the Academy isn't there to make people money or to appeal to our prejudices. It is there to challenge us where we live, to make us question everything we thought we knew. We have tenure because otherwise free thinkers are forced to drink hemlock.

Oh, and by the way, one of the reasons Newt doesn't like tenure is because when he was a professor at my alma mater he couldn't get it. His intellectual mediocrity was apparent even then.

So maybe academics do know something!