3/15/19
Who’s the snowflake? We tenured professors, that’s who
Rounduptags: academy, college, free speech, tenure, professors, university
Anita Bernstein is a professor at Brooklyn Law School.
If you listen to people who get their news from Jordan Peterson’s YouTube channel — and that’s not a small number, I hear — you’d think that university professors were the most constrained speakers around.
Peterson, after all, got 15 minutes of fame and then some by protesting a Canadian law that he understood to tell him which gender pronouns to use and not use. Obeying this law in his University of Toronto classroom, he said, would be “silent slavery.”
Actually, professors are the opposite of constrained. We are the most coddled, protected, sheltered speakers at work in America today.
Most working people can lose their jobs if their employers don’t like what they say. A lucky minority — including union members and some government workers — are harder to fire. Tenured professors have an even better deal with respect to our speech.
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