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by hellbannedguy 1849 days ago
Tenure

I had a professor in a chemistry lab that was proud of the amount of complaints he received against him.

He literally threw the two ring binder it at me while I was in his office. It must have been a hundred pages. He kept it on the wall like a trophy.

I talked to a Counselor at the school, and before I could complete my sentance, he said Dr. Berzergian? (I don't remember the exact spelling of his name.). The Conselor said he, and the Dr., almost got into fisticuffs over his attitude. He told me to take the course at another college.

I realized later all his "problem" students were young males.

Yes--I truly believe this was his twisted way of hitting on people.

A few years later, I was in a bar in San Francisco talking about this professor whom really gave me a bad time. By chance, he knew of the guy, and told me about him.

This was in the nineties, but oh boy if he acted this way today, and I stole that stack of complaints---well who knows?

This professor caused students to change majors, and even drop out.

2 comments

I'm sorry to be this guy, but it's "tenure"
Getting tenure means (ideally) that the system considers you have proven yourself as a competent researcher and therefore accepts to release a bit of pressure on publishing to allow you to pursue more exploratory objectives. It does not mean you're allowed to behave badly and (officially) does not protect oneself from the consequences of such behaviour. Remove tenure and you remove the last bastion of real research we have left in our industrialized and quasi-corporate western research institutions.

Removing tenure would completely trash western science and in practice yield total scientific leadership to eastern powers, who still have old style academic systems with strong tenure positions and less concern for academic mistreatment and "wokeness".

Where do you draw the line for tenure? So hitting colleagues with a binder is acceptable, okay got it. How about hitting them with a baseball bat? How much tenure we need for that? Should Einstein be allowed to kill physicists because he's a genius? If we already agreed to make tenure an excuse for doing bad stuff, let's make it official and negotiate the legal borders.
> So hitting colleagues with a binder is acceptable, okay got it

> we already agreed to make tenure an excuse for doing bad stuff

Re-read my above comment. Never said that. I said removing tenure entirely is a very bad idea for the health of western science.

Removing tenure is indeed a very bad idea. However I think we're talking about using tenure as a hall pass for whatever asocial attitude some might practice. Because hitting your fellow researchers with a binder doesn't do much to advance science, that's for for sure... it's not like the tenured scientists had all the answers and by being aggressive they actually quench different - and possibly novel - ideas.
There's nothing in tenure that requires universities to force bad teachers to continue teaching.
For that matter, there's nothing in tenure that requires universities to allow bad teachers to continue teaching. Tell him to go research something, and if anyone thinks his attitude is worth dealing with for his expertice, they can approach him volutarily.
And this is what students pay thousands of dollars per year for?

Yeah, there are bad teachers and there's this.

Why this kinds of abuse is tolerated is anyone's guess. But school and college management are usually too coward to deal with those issues.

Supply and demand. Everyone wants to do cutting edge research but nobody wants to pay for it. People who know how to get it paid for hold all the cards and can therefore get away with anything.