Francis Fukuyama Quotes

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'm a tenured professor. But I'd get rid of tenure.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

While the women of the older generation were thankful if only they succeeded in obtaining 'a work and a duty,' however monotonous and wearing it might be, the will of the younger generation for a pleasurable labour has fortunately increased.

When I found out that I had won the MacArthur Fellowship, I had been a professor at Carnegie Mellon for a week. I probably shouldn't be saying this on TV, but I stopped worrying about tenure.

Access to high-quality education is way too limited. The United States has the world's most admirable higher education system, and yet it is very restrictive. It's so hard to get into. I never got into it as a student.

I tried to oppose the academic to the marketplace.

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.

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

America's liberal arts universities have long been safe zones for leftist thinking, protected ivory towers for the pseudo-elite who earn their livings writing papers nobody reads about gender roles in the poetry of Maya Angelou.

One thing I don't want to feel is marketplace pressure, so I'm really glad I enjoy teaching because I can rely on that for a salary. I think it would be such a different game if I had to write a book that has to sell well.

The humanities need to be defended today against the encroachments of physical science, as they once needed to be against the encroachment of theology.

The 'We Have Overcome' generation has run out of intellectual creativity but refuses to leave the political stage.

Coming out as an atheist can cost an academic his or her job in some parts of America, and many choose to keep quiet about their atheism.

Rarely do we stop and consider whether the most prestigious of institutions is always in our best interest.

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

Universities are in a position where they can think very creatively.

The old university attitude of 'publish or perish' has changed. Students and academics are realising that institutions such as Imperial College are also wealth-generators. It is very satisfying to be in a university where you have the freedom to innovate and yet know that there is a path to translate your work into industry.

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.

Government scientists need protections so that they are not forced to choose between violating their scientific ethics or losing their job.