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Shot Across the Bow

Interesting.

The University of Illinois is in many ways a classic state university system. Urbana-Champaign is a flagship, with a history of Nobel laureates and competitive admissions. The Chicago campus has been very much on the rise in the last 10 years, expanding research and graduate programs and attracting academic stars. Springfield has more of an undergraduate and liberal arts focus.

All three campuses have some distance education programs, but the university system is now getting ready to launch a whole new campus, creating an online division that could eventually rival the individual campuses in enrollment levels, operating in a very different environment. The University of Illinois Global Campus would be operated as a separate for-profit entity, have almost entirely part-time faculty members (and none with tenure), and focus on a relatively small number of degree programs.

Obviously, this plan is extremely unpopular with faculty, because tenure is the one thing faculty will fight to the death to protect, as shown by this quote in the article from an unidentified faculty member:

“Tenure is a very critical concern because it is a hallmark of the academic freedom that is needed for intellectual inquiry,� said the professor. “If people are all part-time and non-tenure track, is that a university? Is that a faculty? It’s certainly the University of Phoenix, but it’s not traditionally what has been the University of Illinois.�

If academic freedom is so important, then I think faculty across the country should be more critical of those in their ranks who abuse it. As we've seen in the cases of Ward Churchill and Kevin Barrett, some faculty consider academic freedom a license to delve into any crackpot theory or personal tirade in the classroom. With the cost of higher education going up, people are going to be much less patient with professors who waste classroom time on political issues unrelated to their academic discipline.

Keep an eye on this one - it's going to get ugly.