ACADEMIC FREEDOM UP TO A POINT.

Scott Walker and Wisconsin Republicans are getting closer to eliminating tenure at the University of Wisconsin. Here's a column on the matter from David French, formerly an attorney for Christians who complained their colleges were violating their rights, now one of National Review's premier scolds:

As someone who has litigated many, many academic freedom cases, I have profoundly mixed feelings about this move. First, I know and understand that tenure is designed to guarantee freedom, to prevent political pressures from impacting scholarship. It’s designed to preserve academic independence. In fact, tenure has protected a number of outspoken conservative professors (including some of my clients), men and women who would have been fired long ago without tenure protections.

But...

At the same time, however, academic independence is a fiction. In the real world, leftist groupthink dominates academic departments, conservatives are easily weeded out before tenure – mostly through the hiring process itself – and even many (if not most) tenured dissenting professors live “in the closet” to avoid the social and professional consequences of public disagreement on key cultural or scientific issues. The result isn’t freedom but instead permanently entrenched ideological conformity.

Freedom not only isn't free, it isn't even real if it results in too many liberals. French then offers what may look to the casual observer like a defense of tenure...

Yet this same overwhelming conformity means that the immediate consequence of lifting tenure protections wouldn’t be greater diversity but even worse ideological persecution as the few conservative professors would face hostile departments stripped of the bulk of their legal protections. Ending tenure without simultaneously overhauling departments (including departments’ academic missions and hiring practices) simply won’t contribute to the cause of liberty. Yes, it might make it easier to make financially-motivated cuts, but it’s hard to see any short or medium-term increase in true academic freedom.

...but his GOP buddies are probably reading that and saying, "You know, he's right -- we ought to stuff the faculties with wingnuts, then make it easy to fire the ones we don't like!" Whether that was French's intention I leave to you, but read his closing before you decide:

Finally, there are downsides to tenure beyond its effect on liberty. Place any group of people outside of the normal boundaries of accountability, and they are likely to abuse that autonomy. Tenured professors are no exception, with their ranks including a host of colleagues who simply coast on their job security. They care little for teaching, behave horribly towards students and colleagues, and even slack off their research efforts. They occupy seats that could be taken by better, more conscientious teachers and scholars, and no one can move them until they retire or die. While preserving true academic freedom is worth tolerating a limited number of deadbeats, the deadbeats become much less tolerable if academic freedom is failing.

Jeez, why do we have this stupid old "tenure" in the first place? French is insufferable even when he's on the right side -- for example, you can believe Laura Kipnis got a raw deal from Northwestern and still want to sidle away when French says nuh-uh libtards, you're the real enemies of free speech; for many of us that may be a merely instinctual reaction, but French's post today shows why that instinct is absolutely correct.