What is Academic Freedom and Tenure, and Why Do They Matter (e.g., for teaching about religion!)?
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Chris Huntley
4.8 • 745 Ratings
🗓️ 13 June 2023
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Should the administrators of universities, their alumni, or their boards of trustees have any say in what teachers teach -- for example, in classes about religion? Should they be able to control the classroom in any way?
What about the argument that university professors are brainwashing their students to follow their liberal agenda, while hiding behind "academic freedom"? Does the U.S. system of tenure allow professors to say whatever they want, safe in the knowledge that they can never be fired?
What IS tenure anyway, and why does it matter? These are some of the key issues we'll be addressing in this discussion of academic freedom and tenure.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. |
| 0:07.0 | The only show, where a six-time New York Times best-selling author and world-renowned Bible scholar, |
| 0:13.0 | uncovers the many fascinating, little-known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the rise of Christianity. |
| 0:23.8 | I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin. |
| 0:28.8 | Welcome back everyone to another episode of misquoting Jesus. |
| 0:33.9 | Are university professors brainwashing their students to follow a liberal agenda while hiding behind academic freedom? Does the US system of tenure allow professors to say whatever |
| 0:39.1 | they want, safe in the knowledge that they can never be fired? And what is tenure anyway? Why does it |
| 0:44.8 | matter? Who better to ask these questions than a tenured professor who has spent decades |
| 0:49.4 | teaching in higher education, Dr. Bart Ehrman? How are you, Bart? Yeah, I'm well. This is still a future |
| 0:57.5 | us. My present me while recording this is finished my classes yesterday, and so now it's |
| 1:05.5 | grading time. So I got essays to grade and quizzes to grade, and this is not the fun part, but it's, in some ways, it's the really important part because I'm making comments on essays that students have written and to help them understand how to write better. |
| 1:21.4 | And this semester, I decided I was going to have them turn in their essays the last day of class, but I was going to make |
| 1:27.9 | suggestions for improvement, and then they'll turn them in later as a final thing. And so as a way to |
| 1:32.9 | help them learn how to write better, rather than simply getting their final product and giving |
| 1:37.7 | them the grade with no guidance about how to do it better. It's more work for me, but it's a lot, |
| 1:42.6 | it's a lot better for the students because writing is such a |
| 1:45.8 | skill they need to get. I always found as a student I found that kind of thing much more helpful |
| 1:49.9 | than either sitting an exam or handing in a paper and then just kind of, well, I'm done now. |
| 1:55.5 | You get the comment back, right? And they say, yeah, nice try, B minus. It's like, well, |
| 2:00.4 | that's good good but what do |
| 2:02.8 | what do I do to improve it for the next time but yes future Megan and future Bart are currently |
| 2:09.9 | released at time of airing roaming over the UK how's your present before your future how are you doing |
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