Its role in the defense of academic freedom was commonly acknowledged. Those pr ofessions having been beaten into new and once-unimaginable shapes, the turn of higher education will do any better than other professions have in devising a collective response that Americans in general, and their government representatives in particular , will be willing to accept. Most depressing was footage devoted to reaching assistants with a limited command of English. Tenure wove its way into and through many of the critiques of higher education that were offered in the early months of 1995. Higher education has to be restructured, Kean declared, to meet the needs of our nation's economic marketplace - and few of his listeners doubted that changes in the institution of tenure would be part of such a restructuring.
Students do it, faculty members do it, administrators do it.
A much smaller article in the same issue of the Chronicle reported on a South Carolina legislator who had just introduced a bill to eliminate tenure at the state's public colleges, including tenure previously granted. The water is already on its way down the valley, and if we're not piling up the sandbags right now, then we're probably going to be washed into a new state of being altogeth er. Comfortable W ithin the lifetime of a fairly young person, lay persons have taken over the job of telling physicians what to do. Professional administrators rather than M.D.'s now manage our hospitals. Doctors who don't knuckle under to the demands of insurance companies and their underwriters, especially when it comes to charging less for their services, soon find themselves with sharply declining incomes they fail to qualify for reimbursement.