\n<\/p>\n
A Tennessee state lawmaker dropped his bill to end tenure, but said, \u201cWe\u2019ll maybe be back.\u201d<\/p>\n
rruntsch | iStock | Getty Images Plus<\/p>\n
Tennessee\u2019s House Higher Ed Subcommittee chair has withdrawn his bill to end tenure in public universities after saying he \u201cstumbled into a little bit of the history\u201d and \u201cgot a little deeper than I thought I would.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt got me to thinking about political lines, pendulums, they\u2019re always moving\u00a0\u2026 I kind of think that way about tenure,\u201d Republican Justin Lafferty told his subcommittee Wednesday in a brief but wide-ranging explanation for dropping the bill. <\/p>\n
According to a video of the meeting posted on the state General Assembly\u2019s website, Lafferty said he learned tenure goes back to the 1600s or 1700s, \u201ca time when there weren\u2019t that many highly educated folks,\u201d so \u201cit was very important to keep the best and the brightest.\u201d <\/p>\n
Though he didn\u2019t use the words <\/strong>\u201cacademic freedom,\u201d he echoed arguments for protecting it <\/strong>that proponents of tenure often use. Mentioning the Vietnam War era, Lafferty said, \u201cIn a controversial time, I kind of understand you want those protections in place to not lose the talent that you\u2019ve been able to acquire.\u201d <\/p>\n But he <\/strong>also suggested that he filed his bill in opposition to controversial faculty speech. He didn\u2019t mention Charlie Kirk, but he complained about faculty speech regarding someone\u2019s death and a \u201chalf a million\u201d payout. (Darren Michael, a tenured theater professor at Tennessee\u2019s Austin Peay State University, was terminated for reposting a news headline about Kirk but was later reinstated and paid $500,000.)<\/p>\n \u201cWith tenure now, the pendulum has swung so far that we can have state employees that we pay with our tax dollars\u2014\u2018mock\u2019 might not be the right word, but can certainly be very insensitive towards the death of another human being,\u201d Lafferty said. \u201cAnd as a Tennessean, I\u2019m not comfortable with the fact that that person cannot be removed from a job.\u201d<\/p>\n Lafferty withdrew his bill, but he may not be done targeting tenure. He said during the meeting that \u201cwe\u2019ll maybe be back.\u201d News Channel 5 reported that Lafferty said the bill likely didn\u2019t have a path forward this year. He didn\u2019t return Inside Higher Ed<\/em>\u2019s requests for comment Thursday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Tennessee state lawmaker dropped his bill to end tenure, but said, \u201cWe\u2019ll maybe be back.\u201d rruntsch | iStock | Getty Images Plus Tennessee\u2019s House Higher Ed Subcommittee chair has withdrawn his bill to end tenure in public universities after saying he \u201cstumbled into a little bit of the history\u201d and \u201cgot a little deeper<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44752,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[142,2573,9310,3141,8273,10914],"class_list":{"0":"post-44751","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-bill","9":"tag-drops","10":"tag-lawmaker","11":"tag-research","12":"tag-tennessee","13":"tag-tenure"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/44752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}