Talking about tenure – or should I tweet it?

Not being in the educational field, I have not really given much thought to tenure. After the State of Wisconsin weakened tenure at its state universities, quite a discussion ensued and part of it is highlighted in this article by Rebecca Schuman.

One paragraph stood out and grabbed my focus:

But academics don’t want tenure because they think they’re better or smarter than you. Academics, whether they have it or not, want some form of tenure to exist to protect the integrity of the knowledge that is produced, preserved, and disseminated.

Well, okay, doesn’t this imply tenure is to protect your job as you investigate various topics of knowledge – research, be it historical or scientific; or theories that are put forward for consideration? Or has tenure come to mean that you can do whatever you want and not be fired?

Okay, it is obvious what got my attention to the subject of tenure is the coverage of Randa Jarrar’s tweets about Barbara Bush and her comment that she can’t be fired because she has tenure. Well, it’s not about the things she said about Barbara Bush, I’m wondering about this tweet:

“If you really wanna reach me, here’s my number ok?”

But it was not her number; it was the number for Arizona State University’s suicide hotline.

Reportedly, the suicide hotline was flooded with calls, overwhelming the staffers and perhaps preventing someone who really needed help from connecting to an operator.

Jarrar knew that social media was ablaze with her tweets and that it was being covered by news sources. She knew the audience reading her message was huge, so when she published a mental health number instead of her own, was that a comment that is an opinion expressed under the guise of free speech. No, I don’t think so.

Most of us may think of the quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.”

This quote came from  Schenck v. U.S. 1919, in which the court ruled that Schenck’s pamphlet presented a “clear and present danger. Later the decision was overturned, but only because it was later decided that Schenck’s publication did not meet the “most stringent protection of free speech.”

However, that does not overturn the analogy of falsely shouting fire.

So, moving beyond the wisdom of tweeting such hateful thoughts and then boasting she couldn’t be fired because of tenure, is Jarrar asserting that she is citing the above-mentioned phrase –  to protect the integrity of the knowledge that is produced, preserved, and disseminated  – to defend posting proven false information that might have led to endangerment of another person?

I think tenure and just what it entails needs to be re-examined and re-defined.