The end of tenure in red states

While Ron DeSantis was targeting Disney for insufficient homophobia and transophobia, he was also doing this:

Every five years, he said, tenured faculty would be required to go before their university’s board of trustees, which could part ways with them. The text of the bill does not give that level of specificity but rather states a five-year review would take place to be determined by the state Board of Governors. Each state university already requires tenured professors to take part in an annual review.

We should be clear here that this is not a “reform” of the tenure process, it’s just the end of tenure. If you serve at the please of the board of trustees you don’t have tenure no matter what your title is. It is very unlikely that tenure will exist at any public universities in Republican-controlled states by the end of the decade.

Nor are Florida Republicans even pretending that this is about anything but being able to fire faculty for purely ideological reasons:

“Tenure was there to protect people so that they could do ideas that may cause them to lose their job or whatever, academic freedom — I don’t know that’s really the role it plays, quite frankly, anymore,” DeSantis said. “I think what tenure does, if anything, it’s created more of an intellectual orthodoxy. For people that have dissenting views, it becomes harder for them to be tenured in the first place and then, once you’re tenured, your productivity really declines, particularly in certain disciplines.”

House Speaker Chris Sprowls called the legislation a way to prevent “indoctrination.”

He also said it would increase transparency with a provision that would require course syllabuses to be posted online, preventing attempts by professors to “smuggle in ideology and politics.” Sprowls said it would prevent students from signing up for a class on “socialism and communism” when they thought they were signing up for “Western democracy” and classes about “what it means to be an actual American.”

“Actual American,” if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

I wonder if any of the Free Speech Warriors at the Atlantic or Cancel Culture Substack will write about this, or if they’ll stick to more pressing issues like “a student told a campus reporter that a diced Oscar Meyer frank smothered in Sysco ketchup should probably not be called ‘beef bourguignon.'”