Francis Fukuyama Quotes

Tenure is an artificial protection for a job regardless of performance.

Coaches have got to be given rank within the university so that you can't fire a coach unless you go through an academic committee, just as you would with a professor. If coaches are to have any stability and security, they need to be treated like an English professor.

Historically, professors have defended tenure as a way to protect their individualistic thought. But tenure can also be used as a club to wield against the powerless.

Tenure in any department is serious business, because it means, essentially, employment for life.

I don't believe in firing professors. They have academic freedom.

I had left teaching, which I enjoyed, because I realized I couldn't get tenure at a research university.

To the extent that tenure supports academic freedom, I support tenure. I want no person or system to have any power, real or apparent, to chill academic freedom.

Everyone acknowledges that there is a political part to tenure, but no one likes to admit it.

One of the reasons that our colleges have gotten so expensive is because of tenure.

The current siege on higher education, whether through defunding education, eliminating tenure, tying research to military needs, or imposing business models of efficiency and accountability, poses a dire threat not only to faculty and students who carry the mantle of university self-governance, but also to democracy itself.

I mean, part of me would love to be a fat tenured professor of theater someday.

By giving professors jobs for life, universities create a feeling of unanswerable power among too many. Tenured professors who are uninterested in serving the student body are less likely to respond favorably to criticism, and are more likely to feel the freedom to intimidate or harass those with opposing viewpoints.

I knew in my gut that there was something wrong with a system that couldn't fire its incompetents, and I had my share of incompetent college teachers.

Every summer, I regret that I didn't become a college teacher. Such a sweet life! With all that vacation time! You'll never get me to believe that being a tenured professor at a good college is anything but Heaven on earth.

I was on the mathematics faculty at M.I.T. from 1951 through until I resigned in the spring of 1959.

The wonderful thing about being a New York Times columnist is that it's like a Supreme Court appointment - they're stuck with you for a long time.

The rationale for tenure is still valid. But the system has turned the academy into one of the most conservative and costly institutions in the country. Yes, conservative: Economists joke that their discipline advances one funeral at a time, but many fields must wait for wholesale generational turnover before new approaches take hold.

I've been employed by the University of Helsinki, and they've been perfectly happy to keep me employed and doing Linux.

The productivity now at universities is terrible. Tenure is a terrible idea. It keeps them around forever and they don't have to work hard.

I disagree with the University’s decision but we have to let them make it. If we have politicians telling universities who they should hire, we are going to a place we don’t want to be.

No king on earth is as safe in his job as a Trade Union official. There is only one thing that can get him sacked; and that is drink. Not even that, as long as he doesn't actually fall down.

I have been accused of wanting to purge the universities of left wingers. I want to purge the universities of idiots.

Tenure protects good teachers from being fired for bad reasons.

Due process policies such as tenure are put in place to protect good teachers from being fired without cause. They aren't there to protect 'bad' teachers.

Everyone knows that a federal job is a lifetime job, and for many in Congress, it seems they have a lifetime job, too.