Tenure Quotes

“The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it eats it! It's rather like getting tenure.”
― Daniel Dennett

“I don't tell you this story today in order to encourage all of you in the class of '04 to find careers in the music business, but rather to suggest what the next decade of your lives is likely to be about, and that is, trying to ensure that you don't wake up at 32 or 35 or 40 tenured to a life that happened to you when you weren't paying strict attention, either because the money was good, or it made your parents proud, or because you were unlucky enough to discover an aptitude for the very thing that bores you to tears, or for any of the other semi-valid reasons people marshal to justify allowing the true passion of their lives to leak away. If you're lucky, you may have more than one chance to get things right, but second and third chances, like second and third marriages, can be dicey propositions, and they don't come with guarantees.... The question then is this: How does a person keep from living the wrong life?”
― Richard Russo

“Should a professor of accounting or chemistry be fired for using up class time to sound off about homelessness or the war in Iraq? Yes! There is no high moral principle that prevents it. What prevents it are tenure rules that have saddled so many colleges with so many self-indulgent prima donnas who seem to think that they are philosopher kings, when in fact they are often grossly ignorant or misinformed outside the narrow confines of their particular specialty.”
― Thomas Sowell

“The tenure of human positions, no matter how highly exalted will eventually come to an end. Only Gods tenure is eternal”
― Oche Otorkpa, The Unseen Terrorist

“God forbid that we become so brainwashed as to embrace a politician as a messiah and believe what the media portrays him or her to be. Until their tenure is up and they have done their bit, every politician is just another politician.”
― Paul Bamikole

“Tenure was originally invented to protect radical professors, those who challenged the accepted order. But we don't have such people anymore at the universities, and the reason is tenure. When the time comes to grant it nowadays, the radicals get screened out. That's its principal function. It's a very good system, really - keeps academic life at a decent level of tranquility.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, A Tenured Professor

“Secondly, there’s no question but that the speculative drive of the post-structuralisms and postmodernisms harmonized, on some deep level, with the real life financial speculations of Wall Street. At their best, the postmodernisms were the critical meditation and reflection upon those speculations (as with Jameson’s classic essay on postmodernism); at their worst, they were little more than the media-chatter of academic superstars shielded from the grim realities of economic austerity, skyrocketing tuition and rampant privatization – realities which had begun to undercut the very existence of autonomous national literary, philosophical and cultural departments, as tenured and full-time positions were slashed to make way for vast pools of contingent and adjunct academic workers.”
― Dennis Redmond, The World is Watching: Video as Multinational Aesthetics, 1968-1995

“Professional astronomers should consider their tenure atop the sacred mountain of Mauna Kea temporary, as biological science is in the process of characterizing Mauna Kea Sickness in the summit workers.”
― Steven Magee

“Great leaders choose to mentor others before their tenure comes to an end because they know that great things should not end with them.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, The Effective Leadership Prototype for a Modern Day Leader

“Effective leaders continue to influence others, even when their tenure has ended because for them, leadership is not only about the position; it is about making a good contribution.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, The Effective Leadership Prototype for a Modern Day Leader