Lions in Winter
By Dean Dad June 9, 2010 9:42 pm
This post by Tenured Radical is one of the best things I've read in a long time. It was occasioned by the semi-forced retirement of Helen Thomas, the journalist whose comments about Israel and Palestine ended her career, but the part that spoke to me was the part about the Venerable Tenured Icon who had gone badly off the rails. It's worth quoting at length:
This is, of course, a common problem in the academy. Venerable professor famous for irascible personality and eclectic remarks goes right over the edge one day and has to be forcibly retired, when in fact the signs of ineffectiveness and mental decline have been clear to close colleagues for several years: inappropriate remarks, fits of rage and/or confusion, memory lapses of gargantuan proportions. And yet, you go to the administration and say, "Hey, I think we have a problem" and administrators claim their hands are tied because of tenure, academic freedom, blah, blah, blah. I have a friend who made this lonesome trek year after year, recounting numerous horror stories that appeared in the teaching evaluations or were related by befuddled students about Famous Professor X, and was repeatedly sent
