I got lots of interesting feedback on yesterday's post about enforced conformity in the academic humanities. A particularly interesting missive comes from a reader who writes to note that the elephant in my post's virtual living room is the tenure system:

I think it's interesting to note that - as you've covered many times on your blog - the tenure system, designed to insulate the academy from the pressures of conformity, has devolved exactly into that state of its own volition. This begs the question, again: why bother with tenure at all? Surely the competition - measured through some combination of teaching performance, research acumen, and publishing ability - would purge the academy of the worst offenders of the current system. If we cannot agree that the university system exists to produce an educated public equipped to handle the litany of horrors and troubles that is everyday life, then whatever else we agree on after the fact is of no importance to me.

Yes, I do have tenure. Yes, I would give it up gladly if the system were reformed along more ethically responsive and responsible lines. Yes, there are plenty of people who say they would not have voted to tenure me if they had known I would become the author of a weblog as offensive to their political sensibilities as Critical Mass is--which proves my point about conformity, and which is one reason why I mistrust the tenure system so deeply and why I hold even my own tenure to be awfully cheap. I have a job for life if I want it--and that in itself is a wonderful thing. But I know all too well the terms upon which I received it: it was a prize given to me not for independence of mind or professional excellence, but for my perceived participation in a narrow and punitive monoculture; it's a prize a lot of people would like to revoke now that they see Critical Mass is one of its results. That's not the logic of a system that takes seriously the idea that tenure encourages and protects free, independent thought.