Roy Barnes Quotes
Tenure is an artificial protection for a job regardless of performance.
Roy Barnes, Governor of Georgia (Democrat), Criticism of teacher tenure, Interview, NBC Meet the Press, February 27, 2000
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
He was a rabid anti-teacher fanatic. Teachers on most schools sustems are entitled to due process, a reaction aginst the past times when teachers were fired for not supporting the political party in power or other things having nothing to do with education. This due process is interpreted by some to mean that teachers cannot be fired. This is an exaggeration. There is no school district in the United States where a teacher cannot be fired for directly harming children. However, under most school system rules, teachers cannot be fired because their students do not learn the curriculum. This does “screw up chldren’s lives”. Whether or not a student learns involves too many factors other than the teacher to hold teachers responsible. In most school ditricts, the teachers do not choose the curriculum, and are given the textbooks and instructional materials which they must use even if they think better ones are avaialbe. Some children have learning difficulties and others are not motivated at all. Some parents are not supportive of the school, and some children lead such stressful lives that learning is very difficult.
The University of Wisconsin had a radical faculty member who claimed that the 9-11 attack was the fault of Vice President Cheney and other absurd claims that were supportive of the Muslim Terrorists. Many called for the firing of the faculty member who had academic tenure. The University decided that college students were not going to be fooled or seduced by such absurd statements and that while in this case the statement were controversial and absurd, what would happen when a faculty statement was just controversial. The University agreed with almost all of the other great universities in America with the fact that the risk of a foolish pedant like this is very tiny in contrast to the risk of allowing officials—-academic or political---to to determine what a professor can say. This freedom has made the American University system the envy of the entire world.
Flexner’s ideas influenced American universities, and the movement towards tenure was one of the manifestations; another was that many of the best private universities have as the highest administrative authority the faculty senate not administrators. See {634252} for one political ramification of scholars governing a University. One school faculty senate might have been responsible for an American President running for office.
Roy Eugene Barnes is an American attorney and politician who served as the 80th Governor of the U.S. State of Georgia from 1999 to 2003. As of 2021, he is the most recent Democrat to hold the office of Governor of Georgia.
