Tokyo
Victor Davis Hansen has an argument
against tenure; academics are among the least qualified for any such
lifetime reward because they accept the humility and servility
necessary to get tenure. I buy that. I have many friends who have
been adjunct professors (untenured) for twenty years. Humble perhaps, but never servile.
A better argument came along with the work of Marianne Szegedy-Maszak who published in the LATimes. Turns out an entire new field of medicine is developing. The field is the specialized study of the physiology of women.
The new field arises because women have a significantly different pathology than men. Women get diseases in different proportions than men, such as a higher frequency of rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's, myasthenia gravis, Lupus and fibromyalgia.
Women have different symptoms than men in many illnesses, for example in heart disease. Emotional distress is more likely before a stroke in women; physical exertion more common before a stroke in men.
So when Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, got roasted by the majority of his tenured faculty for suggesting that physical male-female differences should always be on the table when investigating behavioral outcomes, we can be sure that faculty tenure at Harvard has resuted in a severe restriction on intellectual thought, free investigation and good research. Summers was right; nearly the entire faculty was politically correct and empirically wrong.
Does tenure result in addled brains, or does your brain have to be addled in order to get tenure?
Since Summers apologized profusely for his reasonable statement on male-female differences in outcomes, I conclude that the Harvard faculty and Larry Summers both deserve each other and deserve to stew in their own politically correct poisonous juices.