The pot of gold at the end of the tenure review process is still job security, even though powerful forces are working against the continuity of tenure as a higher education fixture. The conventional justification for tenure is dramatized through the Usual Circumstances and Suspects that prey on faculty: Budgets, administrators, unhappy students, and political, religious, or otherwise inspired off-campus harpies, such as present and former writers for the Wall Street Journal.

Naomi Riley is conventionally adequate at disparaging the academic serfdom associated with assignments to introductory classes during the tenure review process. Yes, assistant professors are often sacrificed on the altar of tuition streaming to help finance smaller classes and their ranking faculty. Yes, serfdom in the service of tuition streaming is matched by subject matter serfdom, in which entry level faculty are expected to demonstrate fealty to traditional knowledge production and delivery. And yes, undergraduates are often taught by graduate students, most of whom lust after the pot of gold.

Riley ticks off a laundry list of these and other tenure-related problems, none of which are new and nearly all of which are undocumented. Charges of shallowness are conveniently moot in her case, however, because she is neither an academic nor intellectually oriented in her writing. It goes without saying that she did not undergo the rigors of tenure evaluation. Riley appears to have acquired much of her largely intuitive opinions about higher education through contact with her parents, both academics, and by going to college. Her voice is flat; her style doggedly Wall Street Journal editorial/op-ed.

As former academic guilds speciate into “businesses”, and as business models and associated cultures virally infect otherwise healthy academic hosts, we may indeed find pressing reasons to protect faculty, not only from the Usual Circumstances and Suspects, but from colleagues who have mutated from guild members into competitive, intrapreneurial corporate personnel.

Sporting her largely unexamined defense of the virtues and inevitability of an Academic Rapture based on business values and models, Riley is an ideal flack for the Elimination of Tenure. The CEOs (aka the presidents) of more and more campuses will certainly pay her and others like her increasing heed.

Bottom line (as we say), Naomi Riley should be given kudos for a Contribution by Omission: A prominent, powerful, and evolving justification for tenure lies in the protection of faculty from shape-shifted corporate colleagues. This capability is one that should be taken up as a serious –even a top-drawer– justification for the continuation of tenure.

Note: The publisher provided a copy of the book for review. Please read our review policy for more details on how we review products and services.

Socially adapting to the pace and direction of technology changes has been a mixed bag. Sometimes, consumer pressures have the effect of driving change; sometimes consumers are indifferent; and at other times they challenge or resist a particular technological innovation. In Kurzweil’s case, some consumers are challenging the potential of technologies he’s projecting for the future.

Most challenges in advance of marketable products and services indicate ignorance more than fear. Most consumers do not read speculative (read science) fiction, and those over a certain age (about 35) usually don’t flock to science fiction movies or television shows. (No, “Lost” is not science fiction!) Hanging on to the past is easier and more defensible in the absence of known alternatives.

Where the rubber hits the road is the effects of adoption lags and challenges that affect education. While Leapfrog Institutes actively promotes the use of hand held, Web-enabled devices to facilitate 24/7 learning, schools sometimes challenge Web schools and -in the US- collect students’ tech hardware at the school door. This is a remarkable example of how ignorance of alternatives produces counter-productive and even anti-intellectual outcomes.

Kurzweil has a great projective track record. His futures are already on the way. The spoils will go to those organizations and societies that act as Beta sites for new technologies, not those who compulsively challenge, shrink away, or actively resist. The bottom line: get involved in testing and assessing new technologies, even when they are projected and not yet “real”.

Soon, we hope to begin collaborative work with the Minnesota affiliate of DI, and with the national/international level as well. Is it an exaggeration to say that DI is doing what the majority of schools (and colleges) are avoiding, namely to promote imagination, creativity, invention, and innovation? We think not! Hats off to everyone associated with Destination ImagiNation!

John compiled a short video from our visit:

To date, divisions of past, present, and future have been a necessary condition for a paradigm of futures research. We assert that the futures research field must progress beyond traditional assumptions and categories of past, present and future to the recognition that 1) these concepts are largely byproducts of industrial time, and 2) Newtonian/Cartesian thinking with precepts of control, determinism, and linearity. The construction of alternative pasts, presents, and futures offers a new mode for sense-making, design, and choice in human affairs. It treats futures research as an activity that involves the re-conceptualization, redesign and reconstruction of the present into alternative presents.

The futures field is built upon traditional understandings of time and the partitioning of time into past, present, and future. However, we assert that this historical understanding of time, as partitioned into past, present, and future, has become too limited for sense making in a more complex world. The futures field must now expand into the new frontier of alternative presents, thereby permitting new sense making, knowledge creation, and decision options.

We define alternative presents as distinctive existential states of continuous novelty and emergent complexity. Comparison is the mechanism whereby one present state can be differentiated from others. Shortly we will demonstrate the use of simtime in the creation and application of alternative presents.

As previously noted, humans are time-bound. Concepts of past, present, and future events are bound together to provide continuity and a framework for sense making, knowledge production, and decision making. The process of simtime suggests a new methodology for harnessing the continuous emergence of novelty, invention, and design in the scope of human time binding.

Simtime methods address historical and anticipated states in terms of time-binding and time-transcendence. They advance the concepts of imported pasts and imported futures that are continuously invented and re-invented within alternative presents. The ongoing construction and deconstruction of imported pasts and imported presents within alternative presents provides frameworks for new formats of time association. Thus, alternative presents are treated as continuously created and emergent resources rather than single points with the passage of chronological time.

The field of futures research is defined largely through its methodologies, or philosophies of method. Scientific futurists assert that discoveries of past, present, and future relationships (e.g., cycles, bifurcations, trajectories, and discontinuities) are best determined by methodological properties rather than objective observations of phenomenological properties. From this point of view, the futures field is already concerned with the invention rather than the discovery of temporal patterns and processes in phenomenological events. A central tenet of simtime is that different depictions of presents are, indeed, artifacts of human observation, categorization, and methodological choice.

We assert that the concept of alternative presents affords the possibility to develop new soft technologies of great importance. Rapid change and complexification have mutated time to become more than an interval measure; it has become a critical resource in the generation of new sense making, knowledge construction, and decision alternatives. The conceptualization of time has migrated from a value-free phenomenon to be studied to a value-rich resource to be developed.