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This week, as I start focusing on my tenure file, I have been asking what the point is of being a professor in the tenure system. I reflected on this Sunday on a ride out to a community pancake breakfast.
What’s so important that the people of a democracy would offer someone the potential of long term job security and intellectual freedom (however precarious), even at times of hardship and deprivation? And what kind of promise could ever be equal to that extraordinary trust? #OutdoorMoments
One part of the job of a professor is to be a fearless steward of human knowledge and wisdom into the future- to hold in trust what humanity has learned, to preserve and advance it (even when unpopular) so the next generation can receive from us the relay of the ages into whatever futures they will face.
Because that story of collective understanding has very real power, it is always under threat, from the emperors who burned my Christian forebears and the priests who burned the Mayan archives of my ancestors to the politicians who threaten scientists today.
And yet the quest for truth persists, thanks to both visible and un-acknowledged courage of a thousand thousand thousand people over the ages, including my own many mentors.
Will I get tenure? That’s only partly up to me. But whatever the outcome of this process, I have irrevocably joined hands with the cloud of witnesses in the human search for truth. And I plan to be there to advance and protect this endeavor whatever may come. <3
@natematias Phew, thank you. For all the mess of it, I share this basic gratitude for the guild.
Maybe of interest, since you are thinking historically, here is something I wrote as I stumbled into the tenure track: https://osf.io/efkm8/