#tenure

#tenure

"It got me to thinking about political lines, pendulums, they're always moving ... I kind of think that way about tenure," Republican Justin Lafferty told his subcommittee Wednesday in a brief but wide-ranging explanation for dropping the bill. According to a video of the meeting posted on the state General Assembly's website, Lafferty said tenure goes back to the 1600s or 1700s, "a time when there weren't that many highly educated folks," so "it was very important to keep the best and the brightest."

Public regional universities, which educate more than 54,000 students in the state combined, "shall not grant new lifetime tenure appointments," the order states. Instead, they may hire faculty under fixed-term, renewable contracts, and the renewals are dependent on professors' performance, student outcomes, "alignment with workforce and Oklahoma economic needs" and "institutional service." Faculty members at these institutions who already have tenure may retain it.

A brain-imaging study reveals that optimistic people's brain activity patterns are alike, whereas pessimists exhibit more varied and idiosyncratic brain activities, suggesting implications for mental health.

Some pushback came because a few people did not consider certain subjects I studied to be "serious." Others were upset because I was emphasizing what seemed to them unscientific aspects. We could have captured the same physics without working nearly as hard as we did to perfect the photography, and this made people upset. They said, "You're a scientist, you're not supposed to care about things like that." But it matters to me that you appeal to as many aspects of the human endeavor as you can.