* UT President just comes out and says it: tenure is over.
Rather than debate these issues as an all-or-nothing matter, we should implement our system in a way that looks to the purposes tenure serves. In fact, we already do that. American higher education, including UT, has been using an increasing share of non-tenured faculty. In this sense, American higher education has been de-tenuring itself, that is, unleveraging itself, for the last 20 years. My point here is that we need to do this in a purposeful way that is aligned with our large-scale teaching and research goals in ever more detailed ways. We need to use tenure when it is most needed: where competition is the keenest and where research is more central to the enterprise. It is less necessary where those two features aren’t present. Again, my point here is not that I have the answer. My point is that we can’t shy away from an issue even as sacred as how we use tenure. We need to lead the way by implementing everything we do in light of the purposes we claim it promotes.
* Meanwhile: There’s still no STEM shortage.
* For-Profit Colleges as Factories of Debt.
* Isn’t everybody equal now? Can’t women be obnoxious too? Wesleyan Rules That Fraternities Must Accept Women.
* The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel tries to make sense of Wisconsin’s ever-changing voter ID rules.
* I’ve simply never understood how “divestment” was supposed to work as a tactic against climate change. The only thing that threatens to shake this conviction is the fact that Slate agrees.
* Better march harder: Worldwide Carbon Dioxide Emissions Reached Record Levels In 2013.
* Yes we can! U.S. Ramping Up Major Renewal in Nuclear Arms.
* Elsewhere in Obama doing a heckuva job: The US just started bombing Syria.
* Police shoot teenage special-needs girl within 20 seconds of arriving to ‘help.’
* What Reparations in America Could Look Like.
* I taught in one of the many social-service organizations known in the nonprofit industrial complex as “re-entry.” Re-entry’s primary goal is to induct people back into the workforce once they are released from prison or are mired in the bureaucracy of one of the state’s “community supervision” programs, which include jails, probation, parole, or ATIs (alternatives to incarceration). In practical terms, re-entry provides “services,” broadly construed, to economically disenfranchised people who are targeted by the police and as a result are under some form of surveillance by the carceral network.
* Inside Higher Ed debates whether and how you can try to address male pathologies in the classroom without reentering maleness pedagogically.
* Glengarry, Bob Ross.
* What it’s like to have a stroke at 33.
* On this week’s episode of Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver takes a look at the Miss America pageant and asks, “How the f*ck is this still happening?”
* 11/23/63 is coming to Hulu as a series. I feel like I run a link that says this at least three times a year.
* The past isn’t done with us: A Brazilian man whose parents were African slaves could be the oldest living person ever documented after receiving a birth cerficate showing he turned 126 last week, it was reported on Tuesday.
* The past isn’t done with us, part two: Star Trek 3 might reunite William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy.
* I’ve had dreams like this: Camera falls from a plane and lands in a pig farm.
* Somebody’s stealing my bit: There’s a new university course focusing on the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
* And they say America is a country no longer capable of achieving great things: Rhode Island Man Manages to Get Four DUIs in 30 Hours.
* ThinkProgress reports solar is surging. We’re saved! Krugman has more, and so does Steve Benen.
Gerry Canavan 