Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick is making it a priority to get rid of tenure at public higher education institutions in Texas. It’s part of his plan to ban teaching of critical race theory, according to Houston Public Media.
Last year, Texas passed Senate Bill 3, which banned the teaching of critical race theory in grades K-12, and as Andrew Schneider, Houston Public Media’s politics and government reporter notes, critics of the bill say that critical race theory is mostly taught in law schools and isn’t necessarily even being taught in K-12 schools in the state.
Teaching critical race theory would be grounds for dissolution of an instructor’s tenure, according to Jewél Jackson, a higher education reporter at El Paso Matters, in a story on The 74, a nonprofit education news site.
Tenure exists to protect higher-ed instructors from being fired without good cause. It also protects academic freedom, the American Association of University Professors notes in an outline explaining what tenure does.
University of Texas-Austin President Jay Hartzell said in a statement that eliminating tenure would, in effect, be disastrous.
“Removing tenure would not only cripple Texas’ ability to recruit and retain great faculty members, it would also hurt Texas students, who would not be able to stay in state knowing that they will be learning from the very best in the country. It would also increase the risk of universities across the state making bad decisions for the wrong reasons. Future administrators might make annual retention decisions based on whether they or others did or didn’t like a faculty member’s current research agenda, rather than whether the quality of that research was excellent and held promise to have a positive impact on society in future years,” he wrote.
In a February statement, Patrick said the following:
“Tenured professors must not be able to hide behind the phrase ‘academic freedom,’ and then proceed to poison the minds of our next generation. I am outraged by the University of Texas at Austin’s Faculty Council’s 41-5 vote on a resolution in support of teaching critical race theory, and I am further outraged that the Faculty Council told the legislature and the UT Board of Regents that it is none of their business what they taught. Universities across Texas are being taken over by tenured, leftist professors, and it is high time that more oversight is provided.
“During the upcoming 88th Legislative Session, one of my priorities will be eliminating tenure at all public universities in Texas. To address already-tenured professors, we will change tenure reviews from every 6 years to annually. Additionally, we will define teaching Critical Race Theory in statute as a cause for a tenured professor to be dismissed.
“The Texas Senate will also take up giving Boards of Regents more authority to address issues of tenure.”
The resolution Patrick references affirms “the fundamental rights of faculty to academic freedom in its broadest sense, inclusive of research and teaching of race and gender theory.”
Read an in-depth analysis, including higher-ed reactions, here.
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