Academic freedom vs. abuse

Definitely an interesting opening perspective.  I guess I'm not sure how far I think tenure should protect any kind of employee.  How different is the idea of unionized protection from tenured protection?  If we aren't willing to uphold the one, why then do we so revere the other? 

The Two Languages of Academic Freedom

Last week we came to the section on academic freedom in my course on the law of higher education and I posed this hypothetical to the students: Suppose you were a member of a law firm or a mid-level executive in a corporation and you skipped meetings or came late, blew off assignments or altered them according to your whims, abused your colleagues and were habitually rude to clients. What would happen to you?

The chorus of answers cascaded immediately: “I’d be fired.” Now, I continued, imagine the same scenario and the same set of behaviors, but this time you’re a tenured professor in a North American university. What then?

I answered this one myself: “You’d be celebrated as a brave nonconformist, a tilter against orthodoxies, a pedagogical visionary and an exemplar of academic freedom.”