Madam, – The idea of attempting to enlist Albert Einstein in the attack on tenure, as Alex Staveley does in his letter (January 22nd), is intellectually perverse. Twice in his lifetime – in Germany in the 1930s and in the McCarthy era in America – Einstein spoke out against politically-motivated purges of academics for the views they professed. Einstein knew that, without meaningful tenure, academic freedom – “the right to publish and teach what one holds to be true” – invariably comes under attack.
In Einstein’s time, the attack involved silencing or sacking those whose views made the government of the day uncomfortable. In contemporary Ireland, absent tenure, any academic who professed truths that contradicted the prevailing consensus, displeased the government or, even more, who professed truths that threatened corporate profits, would be faced with a choice of suppressing the offending statements or seeking employment elsewhere. In such a context, few would have the courage to speak their minds. You would think, given the tragic consequences of the national embrace of economic groupthink in the early part of this decade, that such an outcome would be one to be avoided at all costs. – Yours, etc,