There's a real risk it will, as this report about the Texas Senate vote to abolish tenure for new hires suggests:
A little more than a year after Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick declared war on faculty tenure at the state’s public universities, the Texas Senate approved a bill Thursday that would bar schools from granting the benefit to newly hired professors.
Senate Bill 18 passed 18-11, largely along party lines, with Sens. Brian Birdwell and Kevin Sparks absent. Notably, Sen. César Blanco, D-El Paso, broke from his party to join Republicans in supporting the measure, arguing that tenure is a historical and discriminatory barrier for professors of color and pointing to racial disparities among faculty awarded tenure at Texas universities.
“I cannot and I will not defend the status quo to maintain the historic discriminatory barrier that tenure is within higher education for minorities,” he said.
Perhaps Senator Blanco will come to his senses, if he has any.
This reminds me of a story a law school Dean told me a few years ago. Students at his school were lobbying for more minority professors to be hired. The students asked (seriously), "Can't you just get rid of the older white faculty and replace them with 'diverse' faculty?" Given the normalization of "diversity" blather and the unquestioning fealty of institutions to the "value" of diversity, it is not surprising that the students think this way.
The only good news for Texas in this potential disaster is that the Texas House leadership seems skeptical about this proposal. "Friends of the university" in Texas are presumably communicating the message that this will be the end of UT Austin and Texas A&M as serious research universities.
(Thanks to David Zimmerman for the pointer.)
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