It's easy to be so brave and courageous when you have "screw you" money due to a bunch of average econ 101 books you've written.
Sowell on the cowardice of tenured academics
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HU wouldn't have lost his job anywhere. It would be illegal at any public institution and ditto for any private institution that blessed freedom of expression in their faculty manual. Maybe at some out of the way place that doesn't mention freedom of expression in their manual. No R1 would have canned him.
You people have no idea how tenure works. Administrators do not have to pay the cost of any settlement, amd so they do not care about the repercussions of an illegal firing. The best case scenario for the fired professor is a paltry settlement of one or two years salary. No judge will award a decision forcing a university to rehire. The worst case is being out thousands of dollars in legal fees.
The institution of tenure is a weak one. You do not see a lot of professors being fired with tenure because almost all tenured professors self police to avoid controversy that would draw the attention of administrators.
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If by "speak out freely" you mean publish the academic content you want to try to publish then yes, this is what tenure is for. Not writing NYT opinion pieces, not writing junk on twitter, not random blog posts. Academic work.
You must be a grad student. Many more forms than published work are accepted as a part of an academic's contribution, including media appearances and whatnot. What you say does not make any sense.
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Lawsuits are timing consuming for admins too and there is little upside for them, whereas a fired faculty member has little to lose.
Look at the Eric R. situation at IU -- there was a huge twitter mob calling for his head. Dozens, maybe even hundreds, of IU parents and alums threatening to not enroll their kids, pull donations, and so on. IU ignored it for a week and the mob moved on to something else. That takes less time than being involved in lawsuit, with little repercussions.
Twitter mobs are paper tigers. Ask GB at Columbia. He was attacked by a huge mob, lost a civil suit, and... nothing much happened after that.
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The other flaw issue is that most faculty lawsuits are related to tenure denials, and for something like that one or two years of pay may be reasonable, especially if the university was within their rights and they are giving nuisance money to move on quickly.
OTOH, if you're fired for saying something controversial at a public university, the university is violating federal law. There isn't much data on those settlements because they pretty much never occur. Why? Probably because they're impossible to defend.
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That's because tenure doesn't protect you if the mob comes for you.
Very true, thats what happened to JP. Not the biggest fan of his but I respect the gusto it took to publish is Prof. Against Poli Correctness.
Also relevant:
https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/jord-an-pet-erson-why-i-am-no-longer-a-tenured-professor-at-the-u-of-toronto