After writing three posts on tenure, Professor Fendrich told me that she couldn’t bear to think about it any more. She’s gone off to see her aromatherapy expert, followed by a visit to a local tavern specializing in extra-large martinis. I was a little surprised, I admit, when she told me to just “go ahead and post whatever you write.” I’m wondering if what I’m doing makes a plagiarist out of Professor Fendrich. Anyway, I don’t care. She’s a nice boss and I want to help her out.

I looked over her three posts on tenure and saw that there were a total of 98 comments. That’s too many for me to tackle. But I can say this: Based on my experience with tenured faculty (as opposed to untenured ones and adjuncts), I agree with Professor Fendrich about fixed-term contracts.

Instead of all her crazy fussing with three-, five- and 10-year contracts, however, I’d simplify things and have nothing but one-year contracts. I’ll never understand why professors think they’re better than the rest of us and get to have jobs where they can’t ever be fired.

Other than that general observation, I have three specific responses to recent readers’ comments.

Living Well (in Manhattan) Is the Best Revenge

Joseph F Foster (hmmm, no period after the middle initial — just like Harry S Truman, I bet): I’ll take Mountain View, Arkansas, over Manhattan, New York, any day.

Holy cow. All Professor Fendrich did was write about how one of the perks of living in New York is being able to experience first-class cabaret. Granted, it’s real expensive, and isn’t what everybody would do with the money they get by taking out a second mortgage. But the Oak Room — like MoMA, the Met, the Morgan, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the New Museum, the Frick, the Hispanic Society, the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio, and the Studio Museum in Harlem — does help make New York an interesting place to call home.

That’s all she said. She didn’t say, “I’ll take New York over Mountain View, Arkansas, any day.”

But after Mr. Foster’s comment, Professor Fendrich was curious about Mountain View, and asked me to find out whether it’d be a nice spot for her to take a short vacation. And sure enough, it is. It seems to be, actually, a kind of Cancun of the Ozarks.

In Googling a little further, I found this odd comment from a resident: “Here in Northwest Arkansas, we’ve got a lot of foreigners milling around and settling. Indeed, it seems that many folks pack up their carpetbags and leave their homes in Iowa, Kansas, New York, California and other foreign spots and wind up living here.”

Being a Yankee, Professor Fendrich could tell she wouldn’t be real welcome in Mountain View. She said if she ever goes there she’ll make it a very short vacation.

Time’s Up For Tenure

AW: Now that Prof Lauri has her professorship, tenure and being a Director of something she can also apparently afford to live in and have a studio in NY and commute to Hofstra. Then she speaks forth about tenure?

Now looky here. I’ve known Professor Fendrich for a long time and I can tell you that when she and her husband arrived in New York, baby in tow, they hardly had two quarters to rub together. It was right at the end of the time when artists could still manage to find affordable live/work space in Manhattan.

When she first moved to New York, Professor Fendrich helped patch a living together for her family by typing listings for an art magazine, installing art for an art consultant (many times in the evenings, from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m.), and teaching as an adjunct — all the while living in a dark, walk-up artist’s loft on the third floor of a crumbling building that was cold in the winter and ferociously hot in the summer. And it was located on an unglamorous street that her friends affectionately called “Rue du Rat.”

OK, so it isn’t Horatio Alger’s story. But you can bet AW wouldn’t have wanted to pay that kind of artist dues.

As to getting tenure: Well, that’s the system her university and its faculty collective-bargaining organization have agreed to. If you’re full-time, at a certain juncture, it’s tenure or out. There’s no “Thank you very much, but I’d prefer staying without tenure.”

But just because she has tenure doesn’t mean she’s got to support it. If that were the case, nobody who came up through any system in any occupation would be allowed to try to change the system, and everything would stay the same no matter how bad it got.

To top it off, AW threw in a very mean remark: And of course the “meaning of abstract painting.” Most of the people who create this stuff have no clue what they are doing until a tenured professor explains it to them.

Even I, a secretary who’s never taken an art-appreciation class in her life, can spot the attitude communicated by calling abstract painting “this stuff.” By the way, I know how to spell philistine, too. Just so you know, AW, I happen to like Professor Fendrich’s paintings very much and I don’t need any tenured professor to explain them to me.

The last thing I’d like to mention concerns this back-and-forth business between “Anti-hypocrisy advocate” and “LuckyJim.” Since “LuckyJim” seems to agree with Professor Fendrich on most things, I naturally have a slight preference for him. But he does seem like one of those smarty-pants types who’s always got to score points.

But “Anti-hypocrisy advocate” needs to get a life, period. And also a new … what did my ex-husband call it? Oh, yes. A new moniker. You know, butter melts in all of our mouths.