I thought tenure was supposed to protect you from getting fired over bs?
This intro was engaging and informative, which is exactly what professors should be doing during lectures.
For me the obvious take-away here is: post-secondary education is a dying institution, and is losing relevance precisely because they don't allow professors and students to have real opinions or discussions. There should be no controversy here. Eccentric professor is eccentric - how awful!
No. Tenure is supposed to protect you from getting fired for controversial but sound research or methods. Tenured faculty can and should get fired for acting like assholes. If a professor took a shit on their desk at the beginning of each class period and then left, assigning students all 0s for grades then they'd be rightly fired regardless of tenure.
Students are paying thousands of dollars per course and tenure should not prevent them from receiving an education.
The question here is whether this is eccentricity for the sake of learning or eccentricity that inhibits learning.
The only eyebrow raising thing is the suggestion he already assigned random course grades. Absolutely the rest of it doesn’t offend me one bit. I hope the admin lets him teach remote though if he’d like.
Edit-but then I went to a college where this wouldn’t have batted any eyes. Graduating with even a C average would be respectable. Any other college in the surrounding area would consider that an A average student. And in his heyday one of my math professors would hand out truck driver applications to his calculus students with their graded tests because math and engineering definitely aren’t their fields.
As a German, I am super shocked that this a even a controversy. Here a tenured prof can do basically whatever the hell they want (as long it is not criminal like holocaust denial obviously). Science does need a certain degree freedom to flourish and a bit of eccentricity can help make the classes more lively.
A prof can not swear in front of his adult students? He is forced to teach in person during a deadly pandemic and people are even angry for him complaining about it? Insanity.
As an American, I wouldn't have been able to predict that anything in that video would elicit a complaint, let alone be deemed suspension-worthy. Perhaps I'm out of touch with ... something I'd rather not be in touch with.
This intro was engaging and informative, which is exactly what professors should be doing during lectures.
For me the obvious take-away here is: post-secondary education is a dying institution, and is losing relevance precisely because they don't allow professors and students to have real opinions or discussions. There should be no controversy here. Eccentric professor is eccentric - how awful!