Last week Robert Oscar Lopez, formerly professor of English and Classics at California State University, Northridge, announced that he would no longer be teaching at the school, for the sake of his soul.
Lopez’s announcement came after years of harassment from his colleagues and LGBT activists.
Lopez talked to The Stream about his experience and why he believes tenure is spiritually dangerous for Christians. He said, “Technically speaking, tenure is not simply a gift or privilege given to individuals. It is an entire system. To become admitted you have to be subjected to intense peer inspection….adding “when you get tenure you accept the discipline and eccentricities of the whole system.
By way of example he said you can go for as long as six years not knowing how many of your peers hate you. The standards are so subjective and ever-shifting, it is fair to say that it’s run by the whims of people at the very top.
And because a certain portion of academic jobs are tenure-track while others aren’t, the system becomes incredibly inefficient, with exorbitant resources going to support tenure-track faculty who may end up being dismissed summarily, —— and virtually no support — not even subsistence-level pay — going to the adjunct faculty who are usually locally recruited and doing the bulk of teaching.
He said he was constantly being watched and documented by others, without knowing when or why they might suddenly accuse me of something.