Senate Bill 18 would abolish tenure at Texas universities and is a threat to free speech and thought.
In 1974, I took a faculty position at the infant University of Texas at San Antonio. To do this, I gave up a recently tenured job at another state university for one in which I had two more years to prove myself. At that time, we were 75 faculty and administratorson Loop 410. During the next 42 years, I taught at UTSA and lived through its growth to a major Tier One Research Institution.
I earned my tenured appointment and, over the 40 subsequent years, published three books, numerous articles and pursued continuous research, while teaching a three-course load each semester for the first 30 years; and raising a child as a single mother. My salary was low for many of those years, but I loved every minute, and I never considered the work drudgery. Having tenure allowed me to expand my areas of teaching and writing well beyond the narrow specialist field of art history in which I was originally trained. It enabled me to change my approach to the visual arts as a manifestation of various cultures over time.
Many of the courses I, and others, taught sought to take ourselves and our students out of their comfort zones in exploration of our past and present world — leaving ourselves and our students to accept or reject the ideas and actions we uncovered. Tenure allowed professors and students to exercise our constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech, and to better understand, evaluate and perhaps tolerate our diverse society, not to mention new and innovative inventions.. It would abolish tenure.
The possibilities of the university evoke the vastness of the universe. Maybe we should look at our Constitution again and defend that First Amendment, not only in speaking freely but thinking independently. It’s the American way.
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