[djsumdog]

Tenure is actually valuable at the University level .. or at least it was when professors weren't afraid of controversial research. People like Churchill, post 9/11, kept their jobs and promoted ideas that, although not everyone agreed with, at least promoted discussion and made people think.

Today, let's take an controversial issue like say: climate change. There are actually quite a few secular scientists that don't agree with a lot of the man-made climate change ideas. Al Gore would have you believe differently. Many of them even get their ideas published, but they're often criticized heavily and often pushed out of Universities, even though they have tenure.

There are also documentaries like Waiting for Superman that place every fault of child development on bad teachers and teachers unions. It's a pretty bias film and doesn't even consider other factors like bad neighborhoods, bad parents or poverty and tries to squarely place all the blame on teachers unions.

[ryanwaggoner]

There are actually quite a few secular scientists that don't agree with a lot of the man-made climate change ideas

Quite a few credible experts in relevant fields of study?

I recognize that if there’s genuinely an academy-wide bias that pushes these people out or discredits them it might be hard to give examples, but could you try?

I’d really like the see the other side of an intelligent climate debate.

[djsumdog]

Dr. Judith Curry is one of them. She's a Georgia Tech professor wrote the book Climate Models for the Layman.

Here's also a somewhat more editorialized report about the recent adjustments/recalibrations to the Remote Sensing Lower Troposphere Data:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlnwhcO5NC0

I don't like some of the political/Orwellian stuff he goes into in the beginning, but the remote sensing data is interesting to me as I'm currently working on a project to get soil moisture data in Ethiopia to use it to re-calibrate satellite (remote sensing) data.

I've also talked to some farming/loan startups that talk about data variability in remote sensing data and accuracy problems. There's a lot of current climate change work that directly depends on RSS data.

[ryanwaggoner]

She seems very credible but also in agreement with consensus in many ways, but a bit less alarmingly so.

So good example but that just sounds like someone who is generally in agreement but a bit of an outlier. Doesn’t strike me as “quite a few”, but I’m not asking you to list them all. Just hoping there was a half dozen examples or a list somewhere :)

[closeparen]

Tenure in this case refers to "time in job" - teacher pay is based on how long they've been working. Raises aren't subject to performance, only the passage of time.