On March 8th Reginald William hosted the semester’s second Gadfly cafe, a round table which is open to conversion of student driven political and social issues. This discussion’s topic was about tenures, which have created a lot of controversy both locally and nationally for high schools and colleges.

To give more context, tenured appointment is a long-term position that can only be terminated for good reason or in extreme cases like program discontinuance or financial hardship.

William dove into the conversation of teachers or professors having more levels of protections if they had a 10 year contract regarding their academic freedom.

Among teachers and parents at the high school and college level there has been some new pressure due to some tentures teachers using controversial materials. Tenure offers some amount of security for instructors who push the boundaries in the interest of academic freedom and in order to assist students in pushing their own ideas even if high school boards decide to restrict or ban some texts.

Because tenure provides some kind of security for instructors, it has raised a lot of concerns for parents to question what is being taught in their classrooms.

During the discussion Benjamin Poirier, a student at Bakersfield College, brought up a point that there is a current issue of a curriculum change in Florida. “Since the pandemic there has been more interest in charter schools and more efforts to end teacher unions.”

There hasn’t been any elimination of tenure but it might only be a matter of time until we start seeing schools experiment on the elimination of tenure.