A (beatnik-like) (lower-class) (white dude) colleague who's tenured at a pretty major public university was pretty much asked to stop participating in so many creative theses, he said, since it's expected that everyone does like 3 every 4 years or so, and he did 30, probably because (I'm assuming) he finds it intellectually invigorating and even just plain fun to be around people with a creative bent.
Basically, he was making everyone else look bad, so they wanted him to stop doing what he likes and what he's good at, even though no-one else particularly wants to do that work.
End of the story is, he's tenured, so he respectfully pushed back and said he'd do how many he saw fit.
But, still, can you imagine that at any other normal workplace, stopping someone wbo's dedicated and who's good at their job from doing what they want to do?
Like, at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, many of us in the front-of-the-house have our specific roles that we gravitate towards (helping tables, manning the counter, packing food), and those different preferences and talents are recognized and valued, and no-one would imagine just trying to disrupt or hamstring any of that.
Yet another way that tenure's "lifetime jobs" actually hurt the mission of education and research when actually put into practice, much more than one might think at first.
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