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UNIVERSITY TENURE PLUS |
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"Tenure subverts academic freedom" by Hymie Rubenstein University tenure has become a gilded form of lifetime job security, an unjustified sinecure enjoyed by a powerful and well-organized fraction of the intellectual elite. It is neither necessary nor sufficient to the protection of academic freedom. Its absence in previous centuries did not stifle free debate on a wide range of subjects, while its current ubiquity has not stemmed the tide of political correctness that swept across the universities in the 1990s. Tenure is a pernicious institution that encourages indolence and indifference. It should be abolished and replaced by multi-year performance-based contracts. "Tenure promotes honest hiring" by Lorne Carmichael Abolishing university tenure and firing the nihilistic postmodernists who have taken over academe is an enjoyable fantasy, but wouldn’t the real scholars end up being fired by the postmodernists? Tenure may be important for encouraging free speech, but it’s also needed if professors are to hire younger colleagues who are better at their jobs than they are. Without tenure, hiring the best would mean eventually being fired yourself. There are obvious problems with the universities these days, but faculty unionization is a more likely culprit than tenure. Responses of Messieurs Rubenstein and Carmichael "Cultural dreams, policy schemes" by Robert Fulford The idea that governments could do much to alter the course of the arts is a conceit. The arts are always seething with change, invariably in unpredictable ways. Nevertheless, Canadian cultural policy-makers persist in behaving as if they alone can protect us from the American and corporate hegemons they fear so deeply. Some parts of culture, writing most notably, are doing fine with minimal protection. Other parts, the collective enterprises such as film and TV that have been the object of so much attention in recent decades, languish. We must be much humbler in our approach to cultural policy and eradicate hubris. "Canada's own intern scandal" by Neil Seeman Internships that give young people valuable experience in various walks of life help to train tomorrow’s leaders. It’s therefore worrisome that Canada suffers from an intern gap with the U.S. Most Internet sites advertising internships list significantly more than 10 times as many available internships in the U.S. as in Canada. This reflects general underdevelopment of the charitable sector in Canada, the most likely explanation for which is the overdevelopment of the public sector. If Canadians paid less in taxes, they might give more of what they had left to their fellow citizens. "Is Quebec a North American region-state?" by Jean-François Lisée The last economic cycle, from 1989-2000, brought a pronounced de- Canadianization of trade and investment flows among the Canadian provinces. Quebec’s exports to the United States are now twice as large as its exports to the rest of Canada, while investment flows both into and out of Quebec are even more U.S.-oriented. The composition of Quebec’s trade has also changed, with a much greater orientation toward high-tech. Causation is always hard to infer, but these changes are consistent with the Quebec government’s decision in the mid-1990s to treat the province as a region-state. The language policies of the last 30 years, which have led to widespread bilingualism in the managerial class, have prevented the emergence of a dampening “language effect” on trade of the sort that has been observed across OECD countries. "The world's choice: Mullahs or pirates?" by Richard Nielsen The small band of Sept. 11 terrorists and the much larger movement against globalization obviously do not use the same methods. But each is in revolt against capitalism’s need both to value human beings by their contribution to material production and to have the warlike conventions of economic competition determine human relations. We in the West are obsessed with the David vs. Goliath myth, whose theme of morally justified violence is now part of virtually all Hollywood movies. Whatever the immediate outcome in Afghanistan, unless we try to understand that West and East really are different, the many deadly slingshots Western technology provides its enemies with may doom us. "Pax Americana: We could do worse for a hegemon" by John Hare The United States’ influence in the world is due, not primarily to its military strength, but to the attractiveness of its culture. Calvinism gave Americans purpose, British Empiricism kept them from revolutionary indulgence. The freedom that resulted is appealing to so many countries and cultures, not because it is American, but because it runs with the grain of human nature. The United States can be aggressive and annoying, but the world could do a lot worse for a hegemon. "Canadian values and national security policy: Who decides?" by Sean M. Maloney Whatever the official Ottawa line may have been during the heyday of the “soft power” doctrine in the 1990s, the purpose of Canadian national security policy should not be to project Canadian values. Quite apart from the complication that Canadians probably could never agree on which values they would like to see projected, the proper purpose of policy should be to secure Canadian interests. As formally enunciated by various governments over the years, these interests have shown surprising constancy. Their restatement for the 21st century would be much closer to Louis St. Laurent’s version of them than to Lloyd Axworthy’s. "In Canada, proportional representation should be a hard sell" by J.A.A. Lovink In the July-August issue of Policy Options, a number of commentators proposed that Canada adopt one form or another of proportional representation (PR). Almost no one dealt with the complications that such an important change in the electoral system would produce in the political system at large. PR does make sense in countries where minority interests feel strongly that they must have direct representation in the legislature, but most Canadians still seem content to see the brokering of political interests within large nationwide parties. A small modification in the current electoral system—run-off elections where no one had a majority of the vote—would increase democratic legitimacy at only a small cost in political uncertainty. |
