Quotes about Tenure

After Ibzan, Elon the Zebulunite judged Israel ten years.

I love being the mayor. I want to be the mayor forever.

In that second I was wounded. My mind struck a truth as an elbow can strike a table edge. A poor, uneducated servant in Africa was so secure he could ignore established White rudeness. No Black American I had ever known knew that security. Our tenure in the United States, though long and very hard-earned, was always so shaky, we had developed patience as a defense, but never as aggression.

I do think there is a value in the services of judges for long periods of time.

After the Vietnam War, a lot of us [antiwar graduate students] didn't just crawl back into our library cubicles; we stepped into academic positions. With the war over, our visibility was lost, and it seemed for awhile—to the unobservant—that we had disappeared. Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the universities has begun in earnest.2