Tenure is still a big thing here in the U.S. and quite completely equated with "academic freedom," as it's termed.

Here, in Colorado, at the "enormous state university," University of Colorado, they're trying to drum out a professor who got his tenure by negotiation and subterfuge, has been discovered to have "exaggerated" his qualifications for his particular seat on the faculty, and, to top things off, so to speak, he wrote something not entirely unreasonable, but poorly presented, due to his "stream of consciousness" writing style, that, apparently, nobody read the entire thing, which subsequently got him into disfavor with the governor, our senators, congressmen, etc, as well as many others in the print and electronic media.

The basic premise of his writing was that some of the people in the World Trade Center (referring to the one no longer in New York) on 9/11/2001 were not entirely blameless in the causation of the event, owing to the business and business practices in which they were and had been engaged. One had to dig in order to gather that, however, and not everyone who's read it has been open-minded enought to allow for his opinion, let alone diligent enought to get through it.

Of course, they could have simply put his writing in front of a committee of the English department, and he'd have failed first year English composition, which might have been sufficient to get him dismissed. Nobody was willing to read all the way through his piece, though, and that was clear from the comments in the media when the initial furor broke. Now they'll spend megabucks (buck = $1US) getting rid of the guy, though he probably never should have been granted a high school diploma.

Yes, the days of full employment despite incompetence and stupidity are gone, thank God, but what's come in their wake is really no better.

RE