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.
But with the library, it's like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there's so much to look at and read.
Think! Think and wonder. Wonder and think. How much water can 55 elephants drink?
I think kids in every minority need to see people like themselves in books; that's an acknowledgment of their existence on this planet and in this society.
The sweetest path of life leads through the avenues of learning, and whoever can open up the way for another, ought, so far, to be esteemed a benefactor to mankind.
It gives me a very keen satisfaction that, after listening to my blather all those years, former students are now seeing that I wrote a book, that I did have it in me.
I learned to read a little in my primer, to write my own name, and to cypher some in the three first rules in figures. And this was all the schooling I ever had in my life, up to this day. I should have continued longer if it hadn't been that I concluded I couldn't do any longer without a wife, and so I cut out to hunt me one.
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