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.
While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.
The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.
Any piece of knowledge which the pupil has himself acquired- any problem which he has himself solved, becomes, by virtue of the conquest, much more thoroughly his than it could else be. The preliminary activity of mind which his success implies, the concentration of thought necessary to it, and the excitement consequent on his triumph, conspire to register the facts in his memory in a way that no mere information heard from a teacher, or read in a schoolbook, can be registered.
Do you know what I think, Potter?' said Snape, very quietly. "I think that you are a liar and a cheat and that you deserve detention with me every Saturday until the end of term. What do you think, Potter?
I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children's books ask questions, and make the readers ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone's universe.
Children are the most wonderful audiences. What's struck me most is that that they watch it so silently, until the end when they shriek and shout and clap.
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