2013-07-23
Explanation
This comic is a single panel showing two people in conversation about academic tenure. One person says, "We need a way to protect free and creative academic discourse." The other responds with the suggestion: "What if we took the oldest, wealthiest, most politically powerful people in the field and made them impossible to fire?" The caption below reads, "Tenure is weird."
The joke is a pointed critique of the academic tenure system. While tenure was originally designed to protect professors'' ability to pursue controversial or unconventional research without fear of being fired for their ideas, the comic points out the irony that in practice, it often ends up protecting those who are already at the top of the academic hierarchy -- senior professors who are typically the oldest, most well-connected, and most established figures in their departments. These are arguably the people who least need protection, since they already have the most power and influence. Meanwhile, younger, more vulnerable academics who might benefit most from such protections (adjuncts, junior faculty, graduate students) often have the least job security.
The votey shows the cartoonist (Zach Weinersmith) thinking, "And now to piss off the rest of my audience," acknowledging that this comic is likely to anger academics who are either defenders or critics of the tenure system. SMBC''s audience skews heavily toward scientists and academics, making this a particularly pointed joke for its readership.