Hopeful...

On Monday, April 4, I spoke with a student reporter from UCF.  I was greatly encouraged that I was able to change her opinion on the tenure bill from one of "isn't tenure bad for students" to one of "I sure hope they don't take tenure away because that would be bad for students!" in a 20 minute interview.  For those of you wondering what magic I used, there was none.  I simply defined tenure for her and gave her a concrete example of how academic thought and speech could be affected if tenure is eliminated.  Here it is (in spirit, if not necessarily word for word).

Valencia has an academic alliance with Microsoft.  I teach computer technology, but I'm not a big fan of Windows.  Of course I teach students about it because they need to be quite familiar with Windows in order to succeed in the workplace.  However, I also teach them about MacOS and Linux.  While I don't think losing tenure would stop me from teaching about all these operating systems, it probably WOULD stop me from sharing my opinions about them, because without tenure to protect my academic speech, I wouldn't feel comfortable speaking out against a product marketed by our academic partner.

And that's just the black-and-white example.  If you look into the humanities and social sciences, there are far more colorful examples, but I like to speak about what I do personally.

I had a very encouraging conversation today (4/5) that has me almost believing that HB 7193 is just about to die a quick and relatively painless death.  While I'm against death for youngsters in general, I think in this case I can make an exception.  I can't say anything more definitive for now, but stay tuned for reports in the papers about this as the bill sits in the House Education Committee.  Of course I'll link to those here as well.

I do want to mention that even if this bill goes away, it may rear its ugly head again in the future, perhaps in a reworded form.  In preparation for that, I will proceed with my white paper plan.  Faculty interested in participating should contact me directly at my yahoo address, Lisamacon@yahoo.com.  Furthermore, this blog will be kept alive so that we can prepare for the future and also, because it just might be fun to talk about academic freedom in the broad scope.