Hi all! This is my first guest post. I am grateful to Brian Leiter for giving me this exciting opportunity. I am starting with something informational as a warm-up. I plan to post something more chewy and discussion-worthy shortly.
In his October 12th post Florida Goes Nuts, Brian noted that Florida’s ‘brain-dead’ governor Rick Scott is calling for cuts to specific disciplines, but claimed that philosophy is not among them. This is not true: Scott has specifically targeted philosophy, although anthropology is his favorite target (for instance see here).
Since cutting public university and especially liberal arts budgets is a state pastime in Florida, this is all less notable than the fact that Scott has made it clear that he intends to ‘raise questions’ about the tenure system at state universities, with an eye to perhaps eliminating it. This, I suspect, is no idle threat. He has already eliminated tenure protection for K-12 teachers and he has said that it is one of the priorities on his 2012 legislative agenda to challenge it at the university level. Plus, Florida already has a young state university (Florida Gulf Coast University) that has no tenure system, and state Republicans apparently think it’s splendid. The Director of Public Affairs at New College of Florida, which is a state school, issued a letter to the faculty yesterday, basically telling them not to panic yet. I suspect that this person never took a class that covered Grice.
I’m fond of this highly literate quotation from Scott: “If there’s a logical reason to do tenure, I’m fine. But my first reaction to things is the rest of society we don’t get these guarantees.” (See here.)
I’ve been unable to find much information about his proposed alternatives; I doubt there are any. I did find some scary gibberish from some local Republican lawmaker about replacing the tenure system with a set of salary incentives for people who ‘do well’, defined as having large classes and things like that. Florida is apparently following in the footsteps of Texas, where lawmakers are also seriously interested in eliminating tenure. I of course have little sense of how real this threat is or what its consequences would be. In the mean time, I guess that job candidates lucky enough to be considering multiple offers should keep their eye on legislative developments in Florida and Texas.
In his October 12th post Florida Goes Nuts, Brian noted that Florida’s ‘brain-dead’ governor Rick Scott is calling for cuts to specific disciplines, but claimed that philosophy is not among them. This is not true: Scott has specifically targeted philosophy, although anthropology is his favorite target (for instance see here).
Since cutting public university and especially liberal arts budgets is a state pastime in Florida, this is all less notable than the fact that Scott has made it clear that he intends to ‘raise questions’ about the tenure system at state universities, with an eye to perhaps eliminating it. This, I suspect, is no idle threat. He has already eliminated tenure protection for K-12 teachers and he has said that it is one of the priorities on his 2012 legislative agenda to challenge it at the university level. Plus, Florida already has a young state university (Florida Gulf Coast University) that has no tenure system, and state Republicans apparently think it’s splendid. The Director of Public Affairs at New College of Florida, which is a state school, issued a letter to the faculty yesterday, basically telling them not to panic yet. I suspect that this person never took a class that covered Grice.
I’m fond of this highly literate quotation from Scott: “If there’s a logical reason to do tenure, I’m fine. But my first reaction to things is the rest of society we don’t get these guarantees.” (See here.)
I’ve been unable to find much information about his proposed alternatives; I doubt there are any. I did find some scary gibberish from some local Republican lawmaker about replacing the tenure system with a set of salary incentives for people who ‘do well’, defined as having large classes and things like that. Florida is apparently following in the footsteps of Texas, where lawmakers are also seriously interested in eliminating tenure. I of course have little sense of how real this threat is or what its consequences would be. In the mean time, I guess that job candidates lucky enough to be considering multiple offers should keep their eye on legislative developments in Florida and Texas.
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