Current Events > Georgia university system's board of regents voted to effectively gut tenure

(+) Yeah! (+)

Presenting a direct threat to academic freedom, job security, and the state's ability to bring in quality talent.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/us/georgia-university-system-tenure.html (open in reader view if paywalled, but I'll post the relevant parts):

Georgias public university system will now let its colleges administrations remove a tenured professor with little to no faculty input.
The Board of Regents on Wednesday approved the new policy, which is the only one of its kind in the country, according to the American Association of University Professors. The move is being criticized by many professors, politicians and advocates for academic freedom as a threat to tenure, which is intended to protect faculty from dismissal without just cause, allowing them to develop thoughts or ideas that may be unpopular.

Georgia is a huge outlier now, because thats the whole point of tenure: it includes due process protections, said Irene Mulvey, president of the professors association, which is threatening to censure the university system. There should now be a new word for it in Georgia, because tenure will not mean tenure there.

Previously, the process for removing tenured professors included a peer review process with other faculty. Now, professors at 25 of its 26 public universities can be removed after consecutively failing two annual reviews. If a professor also fails to complete an improvement plan after the reviews, then that alone would be justification for termination. The new policy also included an additional benchmark student success in evaluating a tenured professors performance.

The faculty voice is now being heard less and less, said Matthew Boedy, a tenured associate professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia, a public university, and the president of the Georgia conference of the Association of University Professors.
He considers the decision, he said, to be a deep ideological attack on higher education, adding, Every person involved in higher education will recognize the headline that tenure died in Georgia today.

Others are concerned that the new changes will affect the states ability to both recruit and retain faculty and students at its public universities, which include Georgia Tech, one of the top public research institutions in the country.
People are not going to want to go to a place where something like this has happened, Dr. Mulvey said. So students and teachers will suffer as a result of this decision.

By Tuesday, more than 1,500 professors in the state had signed a petition against the new policy. Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic candidate for governor, also publicly voiced her disapproval of the measure in the hours before the meeting adjourned.
Academic freedom guaranteed by tenure is more than a hiring gimmick, Ms. Abrams tweeted on Wednesday. Georgia cannot compete for talent or produce innovation if we undermine our public universities.

https://twitter.com/AAUP/status/1448069177244221441

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Go ahead and spend 10 years in training positions just to have a single digit percent chance of getting a job at the end, oh and that job will no longer offer job security.

Lol, what a joke.

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Yeah it's fucking appalling. I worry about similar things happening in other states, but hopefully there's enough will and pressure to push back on this.

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Just the GOP trying to kill higher education

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Education as a business.

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https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a37953706/mask-protest-school-board-meetings/

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