The rationale for tenure is still valid. But the system has turned the academy into one of the most conservative and costly institutions in the country. Yes, conservative: Economists joke that their discipline advances one funeral at a time, but many fields must wait for wholesale generational turnover before new approaches take hold.
Interpretation
The concept of tenure is justified, yet it also maintains a conservative and expensive academic system.
In this quote, Francis Fukuyama argues that while the rationale behind the tenure system in academia is still relevant, it has resulted in an institution that is slow to change and adapt. He highlights the irony that new ideas in many academic fields often only gain acceptance after the older generation of scholars passes on, thus perpetuating a conservative approach that hinders progress and innovation.
In practice
In a discussion about the challenges of modern academia, this quote could emphasize the need for reform.
If people who have to work together in an enterprise trust one another it is because they are all operating to a common set of ethical norms....such a society will be better able to innovate...since the high degree of trust will permit a wide variety of social relationships to emerge.
The desire for economic prosperity is itself not culturally determined but almost universally shared
It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master
What Asia's postwar economic miracle demonstrates is that_x000D_ capitalism is a path toward economic development that is potentially_x000D_ available to all countries. No underdeveloped country in the_x000D_ Third World is disadvantaged simply because it began the growth_x000D_ process later than Europe, nor are the established industrial powers_x000D_ capable of blocking the development of a latecomer, provided_x000D_ that country plays by the rules of economic liberalism.
It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written.
Do those serving life sentences deserve access to educational opportunities never having a future beyond bars? The answer is yes and necessitates that in-prison education serves additional goals beyond reducing recidivism.
I refuse to accept that the world is so poor, when just one week of global spending on armies is enough to bring all of our children into classrooms.
If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance. Without reviews, literature would be oddly mute in spite of all those words on all those pages of all those books. Reviewing makes of reading a participant sport, not a spectator sport.
The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self- education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.
We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.
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