Saturday, September 25, 2010

Academic Confusion

Just finished watching Tenure, a movie with Luke Wilson about an English prof who is striving for tenure.  Other than the idea that it is publish (at least a bit) or perish at a third rate liberal arts college, the movie set back the public's understanding of the academic world by about 50%.  Just about everything else was wrong:
  • Dean and Chair of dept announce at the dinner on the eve of spring break that they hired someone that no one else knew about.
  • The new prof starts teaching after spring break?
  • Tenure is not a zero sum process--two folks going up at the same time in the same department is treated as zero sum
  • Parties for tenure?
  • Dean decides to give the guy who teaches great but researches badly probationary tenure.  Um, that would be tenure track, not tenure.
  • Excellent researcher gets fired from Yale after not teaching well the first three years. 
  • Anthro prof looking for Sasquatch.
Definitely a movie one can miss, but was laughably bad.  Only good thing was that the prof didn't sleep with his student although she wanted him to do so.

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