Arden Chatfield
Posts: 6657
Joined: Jan. 2006
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If you haven't already done so, see Ed's blog for a good discussion of this, with some very apropos remarks about just how arbitrary the awarding or not rewarding of tenure often/usually is.
Even Heddle says some sensible things:
| Quote | One comment: as Sean Carrol's experience points out, tenure always, or almost always, has a political component, and that very well may have played a part on Gonzalez's case. We may never know, because there is enough linguistic wiggle-room in any tenure decision and committee report (And believe me I know, I once served on and chaired the university faculty committee that was the stage before the provost in tenure decisions) to obfuscate political motivations by committee members. A committee member who wants to derail a candidacy need only say things like "I don't think this candidate's track record on acquiring grants is promising enough to award tenure" even when he really means "I don't like this guy" for whatever reason.
And in a sense the ID community, as it always does, will suffer for the ineptitude of its leadership. For given that they see conspiracies with greater ease than John Birchers saw commies, they have desensitized everyone to any future claim of ID discrimination. With Gonzalez, who is by leaps and bounds the best of the marquis IDers, it will be hard for them to champion his case simply because they cry wolf too often. |
Tenure is a brutal process, no one denies that. Whether it's a Grand Atheist Conspiracy, as many IDers automatically assume (and as ROB thinks is 'clear'), is a different question.
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"Rich is just mad because he thought all titties had fur on them until last week when a shorn transvestite ruined his childhood dreams by jumping out of a spider man cake and man boobing him in the face lips." - Erasmus
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