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I love tenured professors. I find it to be a clever idea. Tenure is a very attractive part of becoming a college professor… Assuming, of course, you become tenured at Pepperdine or Miami. While I’m sure there are plenty of professors loving their job security at University of Nebraska or even Sterling College (located amidst the vibrant cornstalks of central Kansas), I just don’t feel like I’d be has happy to live out my days teaching in the middle of nowhere.

Tenure helps colleges to hold on to professors. If they can suck in a good teacher for seven or eight years, they can rest easy that they will stick around for a while. In theory it also allows a certain degree of academic freedom for the professors. A first year adjunct probably won’t feel comfortable publishing his controversial paper titled Aliens Among Us: The Martian Invader Next Door. You could get fired for writing about something like that. But after you’re tenured? Research and write about whatever you want! Professors then feel more free to take on the touchy issues such as the debate on where life begins. Tenure, of course, has a drawback where instead of encouraging creativity in some professors it could lead to laziness. In their first years they work hard to please their students and turn out some excellent research. BAfter they are tenured they can become lazy, crabby, and write about off the wall topics.

I’d love to be tenured. Of course first I would have to become a professor… Which would probably involve learning to write without as many run-on sentences and ill-placed commas. Damn.