An English teacher at Forsyth Technical Community College is not going to have her contract renewed because she used a day of class in order to vent her opposition to the war to topple Saddam Hussein, according to this story.
I applaud the guts of the administration at Forsyth Tech for their willingness to hold instructors to their contracts, in this case, to teach writing. Ms. Ito knew what her job was and that it did not include the freedom to use class time to discuss irrelevant subjects at her discretion. The fact that she was attacking the war in Iraq is immaterial. Her contractual obligation was to teach students how to write, not to lecture on politics, sports, movies, or anything else.
This shows the chief benefit of not having a tenure system, namely that it allows administrators to readily discipline faculty members who don’t do what they are supposed to. Tenure is supposedly needed to protect faculty members against arbitrary dismissal without good cause, but today the vastly greater problem is that of professors who are protected by tenure and know that they can turn their classrooms into platforms for political activism with impunity.
