Tuesday, 29 March 2011

From The New Yorker: Wisconsin: The Cronon Affair

Wisconsin: The Cronon Affair

I was especially taken with this:

Second, the Republicans seem remarkably fragile. A professor writing a blog post gives them the shivers. It’s a good thing they chose politics, and not the kind of career where the going can really get rough. Professors, for example, teach their hearts out to surly adolescents who call them boring in course evaluations and write their hearts out for colleagues who trash their books in snarky reviews. These Wisconsin Republicans may never have survived ordeals like that. Happily, Cronon has been toughened by decades of academic life. He’ll be blogging—and teaching and writing—long after Wisconsin voters have sent these Republicans back to obscurity.

There are days when I wonder if tenure is an anachronism. The Cronon affair strongly suggests to me that it is not.

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