Three Dead in Alabama:

Forty years ago National Guardsmen ran riot in Ohio, killing three young people at Kent State University, as a nation gone mad unleashed its military against private citizens; yesterday, a faculty member of the University of Alabama, who had failed to receive tenure, murdered three of her colleagues at a biology department meeting.

There are no parallels between those events other than a nation that seeks resolution through the use of violence. Undoubtedly, some fool will use this latest episode as justification for arming both students and faculty at universities around the country.

While we're on the subject of tenure, let's stop and consider that factor for a moment: only about half of the instructors at major universities who are eligible to apply for tenure ever receive it. This is dramatically different from the public school systems where tenure exists. In most public school systems, a faculty member is tenured after six months as long as he or she doesn't do something dramatically evil, like bring a gun to school.

At universities, a faculty member has to spend six or seven years working towards tenure and then go through an approval process that takes most of a year and has many layers. Substantial numbers of achievement recognized by one's peers are required. And half of the applicants will be rejected. Think of that. You spend 20 or more years on your education, go heavily into debt, work for peanuts for half a dozen years, and then when you are somewhere between 25 and 35 years of age, there is a fifty-fifty chance that you'll find yourself unemployed and still deeply in debt.

By the way, about half of failed applicants end up filing law suits against their universities, which they almost never win.

The ivory tower gleams in the sunlight, as long as you view it from a significant distance.

(See The New York Times' story.)