Ceci et al./Is tenure justified?: BBS Call for Commentators

Dear Dr. Qwerty, NOTE: The Online Commentary Proposal System is temporarily disabled. Please respond to this letter with email reply. Thanks. Below the proposal instructions please find the abstract, keywords, and a link to the full text of the forthcoming BBS target article: "Is tenure justified? An experimental study of faculty beliefs about tenure, promotion, and academic freedom" By Stephen J. Ceci, Wendy M. Williams, and Katrin Mueller-Johnson This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or suggested by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply via EMAIL by April 24, 2006 to: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to suggest someone to comment. If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. An electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) ======================================================================= COMMENTARY PROPOSAL INSTRUCTIONS ======================================================================= To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, it would be most helpful if you would send us an indication of the relevant expertise you would bring to bear on the paper, and what aspect of the paper you would anticipate commenting upon. Please DO NOT prepare a commentary until you receive a formal invitation, indicating that it was possible to include your name on the final list, which is constructed so as to balance areas of expertise and frequency of prior commentaries in BBS. ======================================================================= *** TARGET ARTICLE INFORMATION *** ======================================================================= TITLE: Is tenure justified? An experimental study of faculty beliefs about tenure, promotion, and academic freedom AUTHORS: Stephen J. Ceci, Wendy M. Williams, and Katrin Mueller-Johnson ABSTRACT: The behavioral sciences have come under attack for writings and speech that affront sensitivities. At such times, academic freedom and tenure are invoked to forestall efforts to censure and terminate jobs. We review the history and controversy surrounding academic freedom and tenure, and explore their meaning across different fields, at different institutions, and at different ranks. In a multifactoral experimental survey, 1,004 randomly-selected faculty from top-ranked institutions were asked how colleagues would typically respond when confronted with dilemmas concerning teaching, research, and wrong-doing. Full professors were perceived as more likely to insist on academic freedom to teach unpopular courses, research controversial topics, and whistle-blow wrong-doing than were lower-ranked professors (even associate professors with tenure). Everyone thought others were more likely to exercise academic freedom than they themselves were, and promotion to full professor was a better predictor of who would exercise academic freedom than was the awarding of tenure. Few differences emerged related either to gender or type of institution, and behavioral scientists’ beliefs were similar to scholars from other fields. No support was found for glib celebrations of tenure’s sanctification of broadly-defined academic freedoms. These findings challenge the assumption that tenure can be justified on the basis of fostering academic freedom, suggesting the need for a reexamination of the philosophical foundation and practical implications of tenure in today’s academy. KEYWORDS: Academic Freedom; Faculty Beliefs; Academia; Professoriate; Promotion; Scientific Misconduct; Tenure; Whistle-Blowing; Ethical Issues FULL TEXT: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Ceci-04182005/Referees/ Please reply via EMAIL by April 24, 2006 *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Please note: Your email address has been added to our user database for Calls for Commentators, the reason you received this email. 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