Leftists will say anything to discredit those who oppose their plans for control, and in recent years, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis has taken lots of fire for his efforts at depoliticizing the state’s higher ed system. He has been accused of, inter alia, causing a “brain drain” from the universities there.
The Martin Center has published a piece critical of that attack, and Dr. Jason Jewell, chief academic officer of the State University System of Florida, has now written another.
In response to the hand-wringing over post-tenure review, he writes:
A reasonable person might find it implausible to argue that in today’s environment of college closures and disappearing tenure lines, young, tenure-track scholars would be so concerned at the prospect of being reviewed five years after attaining tenure in the SUS, that they would be willing to turn their backs on it today. That consideration aside, at least three serious problems beset this study:
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It attempts to measure only a subset (research productivity) of what post-tenure review assesses.
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Its dataset cannot capture everything relevant to research productivity.
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It fails to account for other reasons researchers might have left the SUS.
I think we have here another of the innumerable cases where leftist academics have their conclusion in mind and then set out to prove it, no matter how feebly.